Songs for a daughter, gifts from strangers

OH, we were going to be so clever. We had told the girls -- Mary Katherine, 13, and Lowry, 10 -- that we were all going to Seattle for an overnight vacation. It’s a trip we try to make as a family once a year -- leaving our wooded valley in northwest Montana, where we live in a place so remote there’s no television, no radio reception.

We venture into the big city to walk through the bright Pike Place Market, stare out at the blue water of Puget Sound, visit the bookstores, go see a Mariner game and then head back home the next day with another small dose of civilization under our belts. There’s much about contemporary culture that concerns and confuses, even alarms me, and since I’ve become a father, this has become even more true.

I won’t say that Elizabeth and I are old hippies, or anything like that, though our girls suspect it of us. (Once, in a fit of pique, lamenting that we don’t live in a real town -- the nearest, an hour away, has a population of only 900 -- and that, further, we encourage the girls to eat vegetables gotten from our own garden when possible, and wild meat that we’ve been fortunate enough to gather ourselves, Mary Katherine, sputtering over some parental indignity, sought wildly for the most precise and critical assessment possible before finally blurting out, almost tearfully, “You’re both just ... just

And I’m sure that to our daughters we are bohemians. When the girls want spending money, we are as likely to disburse it based upon the applicant’s ability to recite a Mary Oliver poem as we are to offer it in exchange for splitting and stacking firewood or some other rural yeoman duty.

Country music is largely the music of choice in these parts -- “new” country, far too much of which I will have to define, from my grumpy old parent’s perspective, as unimaginative God-and-country star-spangled fluff-pop. At least two out of every three songs involve the necessity of getting drunk -- glorying, wallowing in the self-pitying ability to use alcohol to detach from the wonderful world and the adult responsibilities of doing good for someone else, or something else -- to engage, instead, in escapism. There’s no social conscience whatsoever, only the crass and greedsome Nashville grab for cash.

It is, of course, riffs and rants such as these that lead our daughters, particularly our oldest, to call us elk hippies and to despair over our inability to lead what she keeps referring to as “normal lives, like normal people,” even while not quite being able to provide any positive or specific examples of normalcy.

The incredible hypocrisy of being a parent! The tales and truths never told of our own childhoods and adolescences, much less our own young adulthoods, our ‘70s high school steady diet of musical sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. Were there really No. 1 songs with titles like “Comfortably Numb”?

So the plan was to take them to see their favorite country and western star, Keith Urban, who was scheduled to play in the magnificent old Art Deco Paramount Theatre in Seattle, and for it to be a surprise. To just sort of wander into town, and ease on inside. Why, look, there’s a concert going on tonight!

WINDOW GREETINGS

LITTLE ever goes exactly as planned. We checked into our room, went out wandering, then came back by the hotel, where, glancing down the street, Mary Katherine noticed for the first time the 10-foot-high blazon on the marquee -- KEITH URBAN TONIGHT! -- ecstasy, followed immediately by the agony of the two words just below -- SOLD OUT.

She gasped, stared and then -- rather than being overjoyed at the nearness of the thing, and the thin but vital air of possibility -- nearly burst into tears. Wait a minute, we counseled. Let’s go see what we can find out. Don’t give up. But with her guarded heart, she knew only despair. “Sold out,” she lamented. “The rotten luck! I come all the way to Seattle, and he happens to be here, and it’s friggin’ sold out .... “

“Don’t say ‘frigging,’ ” I corrected.

“I want to go home,” she wailed, and while I was tempted to pull out the secret tickets and say, “Oh, don’t cry,” it occurred to me this might be a teachable moment: that I could encourage her to never give up hope, to always play it out, and then, thus inspired, we could wander over to the ticket counter and maybe somehow “find” four tickets.

I realize now I was asking a bit much. Mary Katherine, in particular -- in her 13-yearness -- is sometimes a young woman of highs and lows, and so much new and dazzling and crushing data had just come at her in such a short time that she was now like a somnambulist -- and still, despite my encouragements, guarding her heart. It won’t work out, she kept saying.

So Elizabeth and I went to the ticket counter -- the show only hours away -- and pretended to “discover” these four secret tickets that had been held for us. And yet even at this miraculous piece of apparent luck, Mary Katherine was still reeling. It was hard for the girls, I realize now, to switch from Seattle mode to Keith Urban mode.

We went early to the show. We went around to the side of the theater to check out his big bus and to visit with the security folks, who were guarding the side entrance. There was already a clot of people gathered around the bus, and that cave of an entrance, and when we asked the guard what might be the best way to see Mr. Urban, and maybe get an autograph, we were told that he was on that very bus, resting, and that when he came off the bus it would be at a pretty good clip but that sometimes he stopped briefly to sign.

So nothing would do but for us to wait. How strange life is, and how wonderful, to not know the turns you may encounter, all the more so in becoming a parent. In the last 13 years, I have spent far less time hiking the backcountry in northwest Montana -- far less time hunting, fishing, reading, world-traveling -- after having spent almost half a lifetime in those pursuits. These last few parenting years have been spent sitting in a lawn chair on the green sidelines of a soccer game every autumn Saturday morning and coaching children’s softball, and now, standing in an alley next to a rumbling tour bus with my delighted daughters -- well, it was another of those strange and grand turns.

I understood from the album covers that Keith Urban was handsome and soulful -- and parsing, as has become my wont, each line, each run of his songs’ lyrics, it became quickly evident to me that he sang consistently about relationships, about positive relationships.

But I have to say, in the beginning, I wasn’t really listening to the songs themselves, nor the music. I was listening to the space around them -- the things they weren’t. I thought it was awesome that this guy kept racking up all these No. 1 hits, accumulating power and social capital, all the while avoiding the minefields, the cheap and easy shortcuts to No. 1. In the beginning, I didn’t realize how much the girls liked him, and so I wasn’t really thinking of downside things like, “What if he makes a misstep?” In the beginning, I was just going along for the ride: glad he was out there, and proud too of my girls for having chosen him, and his music, out of so much other.

Growing up, I had eclectic tastes, but I was never a fan of anyone in particular, and it pleased me to see that the girls were. It seemed like a grounding.

I had not started to think about what kind of person, what kind of man, this artist might be.

A UNIFYING MOMENT

ABOUT an hour before the show, he ran, literally, from the bus to that entrance cave. He grinned as he ran, and waved, and Lowry, who by this time was perched on my shoulders -- we were at the back of the throng -- took a quick blurred picture with her little disposable camera, and then he was gone.

Mary Katherine had managed somehow to insinuate herself into the front of the crowd, and after the sighting had passed and the cluster dissolved, she seemed both smug and yet elfin, younger, as if some magic had just passed by. And I in turn felt it touch me.

The thing, especially, about Mary Katherine is that at her supremely cool 13 -- 13, as they say, going on 30 -- there are suddenly precious few things that we can do together, precious few things she wants to do together, as she pursues her necessary and invigorating and terrifying independence. And for a moment, this was clearly one of those things we could do together.

It used to be everything, anything -- anything at all. Everyone tells me that it will be that way one day again -- that she will pass through the adolescence, and come back, once she has established and explored her freedom, and can return on her own terms -- but right now, in this first year of it, it’s excruciating. Still, when she turned and looked back at us after he had passed by, there was nothing but young girl joy, and conspiratorial glee among us.

The inside of the theater was welded tight with people. It was the other half of America -- not necessarily red state but somehow, just the other half, or, as Mary Katherine would

assert, the normal half. There were a lot of folks there in cowboy boots and big hats and big belt buckles, and though most of them were young women, it was surprising to see the whole gamut -- old men, old women, young urban couples, middle-aged folks like ourselves, even a few thrasher-looking dudes. And like Mary Katherine, everyone who was there had the

glow about them of being a fan. We waited in the 10-across row-and-column phalanx and inched forward to buy photos, T-shirts, etc.: the consuming frenzy I fear and seek to lecture

the girls against whenever possible. Clearly, tonight needed

to be the exception.

We ascended to our distant, expensive seats just as the lights were dimming. We squeezed in behind the balcony railing and marveled at the theater’s inner beauty, and we felt off-balance at the big-city enormity of the experience. The opening act, Katrina Elam, was loud -- we were sitting right over the Apollo 13-sized speakers -- but it was still amazing.

Then it was break time. We had forgotten to buy some small certain piece of memorabilia -- I can’t remember what -- collected it and went back.

The lights dimmed and went out, and a curtain moved rapidly to reveal him seated on a stool. He played the first quiet opening chords, then plunged into the main song out at the front of the stage. It’s a cliche, but the crowd’s response was a sound like a jet engine.

I had never experienced the cliche of a roar being, as they say, deafening. It’s as if a switch simply goes off, so that you can’t hear anything. It’s not painful; your sense of hearing is just saturated, every cell. There’s no more room for the movement of sound waves.

And yet there is still something -- this power all around you, all but levitating you. Somehow, you’re aware that there is a field, a mass, of sound out there -- that people are screaming and shouting, but you just can’t hear them, can’t hear anything. There is a stillness in you, a silence; sound disappears, vanishes. It’s the damnedest thing.

We could see that he was playing, and slowly, as the white roar lessened just enough for our hearing to return, I realized, with utter admiration, that he was playing his current chartbuster, “Days Go By.” I’ve been to a lot of concerts, but have never seen anything like that -- no holding back, no saving something in reserve, no pacing, no moderation; he was playing the song wildly, madly, perfectly, like it was the last song he would ever play, like he’d just fallen in love with it. It was a joyous thing to see.

The songs unrolled one after the other, with continued high energy, though I noticed a curious and gradual slackening in the girls’ (though not the rest of the theater’s) enthusiasm. We were so far away, so high above it all and the sound was so loud, so distorted.

There was something missing, some connection, and though the girls smiled over at us gamely whenever we sneaked a peek at them, by the fifth or sixth song they had stopped their cupped-hands shouting. They were no longer leaning out against the balcony but were sitting back, listening, looking overwhelmed and a little let down both. Mary Katherine asked if she could go down to the floor, where people were standing -- a sea of rabid, swaying, dancing fans -- and I said something along the lines of “Like hell!” and she sat back quietly and listened to the next song, and the next.

A STRANGER APPEARS

I guess he’d been playing for about half an hour when the stranger appeared.

At first, in the darkness, I thought the gentleman had a seat farther down our row. He was saying something to me, I couldn’t hear what, and I kept rising and making room for him to pass on by. But finally he put his hand on my shoulder and asked if the girls would like to go down on the floor with us, where they could hear better.

“Well, sure,” I said -- the man had some sort of nametag-on-a-necklace thing -- “Sure, thanks,” and I told the girls we could go down on the floor after all. Though none of us knew quite what was going on, we followed. And as surreal and unique as the whole experience had been thus far, I felt dimly that it was entering a new level.

The man, the stranger, was not imposing, but once we were down on the first-floor level and walking down the long aisle toward the pool of light that was the stage, there was an authority and crispness, a pacing and a force to his movements that parted people to either side of us. Waves of people fell back and away, and like a kite tail, we floated along, with Keith-Urban-up-on-stage growing larger and larger, and the girls’ eyes growing wider.

Then we were 20 feet out -- he was intent on his guitar, totally lost in his song, long hair flying and sweat shaking from him as when a dog shakes after passing through a sprinkler. His T-shirt was yoked with perspiration, we could hear every string, every chord, and the brief and shifting space between every note -- and then we were 10 feet out. He glanced down at us, seeing who-knows-what, and finally, with a flourish, like a skier or skateboarder or snowboarder peeling out with an elegant spray-sliding turn, the stranger veered to the side, depositing us at the edge of the stage. And both girls settled into this serendipity as if, indeed, the entire world had been made for them: alive and focused and present in the moment, as if believing such a thing had been meant to be and was but a natural and necessary cog in the gears of their world, and their world to come.

As a child, I possessed no such confidence. I was filled with wonder. Would joy have come more easily to me if I did not question overmuch whatever incredible and rare good fortune I encountered? It pleased me to see the girls inhabiting their miracle so naturally and fully, so joyfully.

He was right there, the whole band was right there. Mary Katherine was pressed against the stage, a big grin on her face, and at one point he crouched down and gave both her and Lowry high-fives as his other band members made lovely rocking runs with banjo and mandolin -- and on another song, lost even further in his music, he leaned down and held his guitar out and gestured for the girls to quickly play a chord.

How outrageous is this world, really? I had awakened that day as every morning, to quiet stillness: the mundanity of oatmeal for breakfast, and black coffee. I had been looking forward to our family’s journey to Seattle, but nothing about the day had suggested to me the near-presence of miracles. He played on and on. He played Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin’ ” and U2 and B.B. King’s “When Love Comes to Town.” It was a rock concert, not country. He played Mary Katherine’s favorite song, “You’re My Better Half” -- drawing out the word “sweet” into four or five lilting syllables, each one stairstep-cascading like the notes of a canyon wren in winter -- and at one point, like an old elk hippie himself, he addressed the ongoing troubles in Iraq and Afghanistan, saying succinctly and tactfully, “God bless them all, we hope they all come home soon” -- no rant of right or wrong -- and then he was rocking on again, and we were still right there at the lip of the stage.

Later in the night, Lowry grew tired of standing for so long and leaned her head down on the stage, folded her arms across the stage’s edge to make a little pillow. Keith Urban and the other band members looked down at her with concern for a moment, as if perceiving that she might have passed out -- but then they saw the equanimity of her repose, and how young she was, and realized she was merely sleepy, and they kept playing, kept thundering.

Then the show was over. The stranger was standing down at one end of the stage, to guard, I suppose, against folks trying to follow the band backstage. We went up and thanked him for the kindness of his gesture.

We said goodbye and good night and stepped out into the cool springtime night, the salt air of a foreign city exotic in our lungs, thoroughly amazed, and yet, in the way of children, somehow readily accepting of the notion that amazement, or the potential for amazement, was our due -- that it was anyone’s due, on any given day -- and that this had simply been one of those magical days. And that there would be more.

*

Rick Bass is a novelist and essayist. His latest book is “The Diezmo,” a historical novel set in the Republic of Texas.