26 Years

According to Deutsche Bank's chief international economist, Torsten Slok, the largest single age cohort in the U.S. now is 26-year-olds. Apparently there are 4.8 million of you. Minus one.

Twenty-six years ago today, that one was born. I used to joke that we should have named her "Pearl Harbor Smith": then she would have had my initials. But I think "Katherine Elisabeth Hillyer Smith" was a better name.
 

Meanwhile, one of Kt's and my favorite bands is retiring after 40 years of making music:

Saga spent the summer touring Europe. And every time I saw another gig announced, I couldn't help but think how much fun it would have been to take a week with Kt and go to three or four shows. That sure would have been a great trip, especially since she never managed to see them live, since they played so few shows on this continent.


For any Saga fans out there, here's a YouTube tribute from a fan (not me, someone who can play keyboards). Kt would approve.

Classic rock and lawn chairs

Got email this morning for an upcoming concert at Merriweather Post Pavilion:

Steve Miller Band With Peter Frampton:
Classic Rock Comes Alive

Of course my immediate thought was of Kt, who would definitely have enjoyed the show.



Unrelated: Many years ago, while driving north in the dark from New Orleans on I-10 on a business trip, I spotted what I took to be a dead animal on the shoulder, legs sticking up in the air at an angle. As I got closer, I realized it was a lawn chair.

Katie seized on this when I told her about it, and whenever we'd see a dead deer in the road, she'd  yell, "Lawn chair!" (Smaller animals, such as raccoons, elicited "Lawn stool!" instead.)

Today while driving home in the rain from running an errand, I saw a brown mass lying across the centerline of the road, and yelled "Lawn chair!" in her honor. Not a deer, as it turns out: just a large, sodden cardboard box. She would have been amused.

Oh my

...but would Kt have loved this one:

 

Not that she had anything in particular against the Berenstain Bears, at least as a kid (unlike The Family Circus, which she hated as soon as she could read), although I suspect the heavy-handed moralizing would have irritated her as a young adult. But this would definitely have appealed to her sense of humor (as it does mine)!

Road Trip!

Just got back from a two-day trip to Ontario, to visit my sisters and see a rare Saga concert. The band has announced that they're retiring after this year, so I figured I'd better carpe diem and see them when they were playing in Oshawa, just east of Toronto.
I've followed Saga since 1980. I was moving into my first apartment when I ran into a guy on the elevator wearing a Saga T-shirt showing their first album cover:

I asked "What's Saga?" and he said "It's kind of science-fiction rock & roll". I had no idea what that meant, but figured I needed to check it out.

As soon as I could, I stopped by a record store (you see, we used to have to physically go to a store and buy these things called "records", which were kind of like CDs, only bigger and more fragile and lower-quality audio—really!) and bought their eponymous first album. The minute I heard the first track, I was hooked. Thirty-seven years later, I have 39 Saga albums on my phone.

Meanwhile, the band hardly ever tours in North America: they sell out arenas in Europe, but have never really caught on here (other than the cadre of die-hard fans like me, of course). So when, back in January, they announced that they were retiring after this year, and that the tour would include North American gigs, I started watching their tour page even more carefully than usual. And sure enough, Oshawa was on the list!

My sister in Halifax was planning a Toronto visit along about then, so we coordinated to be there at the same time. I flew in Thursday morning, spent a day and a half with my sisters, and then headed off to Oshawa.

I had bought my ticket as soon as they were generally available, and got a seat in the center of the third row. And the show sold out-they even added a second show the next night. So I was surprised when I realized that the seat next to me was empty.

It was a great show, and I couldn't help but feel like Katie was there in spirit, sitting next to me and rockin' out in that empty seat…