The Big Concert - From Dad's Point of Viewby Jim Zola
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Sooner or later, every boy accepts the reality that he has finally turned into his father. I don't know if the same is true with daughters and mothers. But I am sure it is a fact of life for fathers and sons. We go through stages. The first years we emulate our fathers, wanting to be so like this being who we might feel attached to, but also know so little about. Then comes the teen years when we sons proclaim that the last thing in the world we will become is like our fathers. Everything our fathers say and do somehow grates the teen boy‚s fragile nerves. This is a necessary and natural occurrence. Without this rejection of the father, the move to independence would be so much more difficult than it already is. The length of time of this rejection of the father differs. Usually the son realizes that he is turning into the father and bemoans the fact. Eventually this evolution is accepted and embraced. By this stage, the son most likely is also a father and has his own teen son to reject him. The glorious cycles of life. I have reached that stage where I am embracing my evolution into my own father. And despite the acceptance, sometimes I shudder when I hear myself in this odd role. This shudder hit me the other night when we went to a big rock concert. My wife and I usually like to bring the kids, and if the concert is one that is at night and too late for the little ones, then at least we usually include our oldest child. But this time, we didn't. We decided it would just be the two of us. A big rock concert and a night away from the kids. What a treat! I spent half the night gripping about this and that, adding in my head how much money we were spending. It was my father‚s voice in my head. We got a babysitter to stay at our house for the night. We had to drive all the way to Raleigh (about 1 hour and 15 minute driving) so we got out of work and jumped into the car and took off. We thought we had given ourselves enough time to get to the concert that was scheduled to start at 7:30 (they never start on time). But we hit a huge traffic jam at the highway exit for the concert amphitheater. An hour later, we finally get into the parking lot of the amphitheater and discover that the traffic tie-up was caused by the fact that the amphitheater parking lot was charging everyone 6 dollars to park. Each car had to stop and dig around for 6 dollars, not a nice round number like five dollars. What bothered me was that the 6 dollars was on top of the 75 dollars it cost to get the concert tickets. Why didn't they just add another 6 dollars to the price of the ticket and bypass the money collection delay? We finally got inside the parking lot and parked in some muddy field about 4 miles from the actual concert stage. We hiked around to the front gate and first had to pass through a team of inspectors checking for alcohol, weapons, food or drink, anything that you might happen to spend money on once you got inside the place. So when we finally got inside, I was shocked to see that a cup of beer cost 6 dollars. During the break between the music acts (of which we missed almost the entire first because of the parking snafu) they had vendors going through the crowds selling cotton candy. For a second I thought maybe I had taken a wrong turn and was at the circus. And can you guess how much the cotton candy was? Six dollars of course. Something magical about that number I suppose. The wizards of consumer psychology must know something. The other big sales item at the concert were roses. A single red rose. A symbol of romanticism in any other venue. I didn't even bother to check the price on the rose. After the concert, we had to wait 1 1/2 hours to get out of our mudpit parking spot. It was so late that we decided to get a hotel room instead of driving back home. A sure sign of age. In my youth I would drive across 50 states at the drop of a hat. Finally, after a late morning breakfast at the local waffle emporium, we made it home to the babysitter, took out a second mortgage to pay her fee, and settled back in the pandemonium of our home life steeped in the memories of the night‚s music. The whole affair ending up costing us over $300. While my father would ride that costly outrage for days, I managed to let it go. Perhaps we become our fathers, but the evolutionary process, though slow, could be progressive. By the way, the concert was excellent. Bob Dylan and Paul Simon. I wouldn't have missed it for all the tea in China. Unless of course that tea happened to cost more than $300.
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