My son and I ate a hurried, although well-made and satisfying, dinner at a Chinese restaurant near the Temple Masonic theater in Cleveland, Ohio then scurried along and across wet, rainy and cold sidewalks to the front doors of the venue to step inside, shake off the raindrops, and watch Steve Howe and the band Yes perform their magic.
We were lucky that mom purchased fifth row center seats for us in this robber baron-era theater with its low stage height designed less for orchestra pits and more for bunds of limelights hissing beneath spoken word entertainers of days gone by.
Who needs an orchestra pit when Steve Howe is playing his many guitars and his many styles of melodic interpretation to those of us sitting where robber barons once sat, hardly three feet lower than our guitar genius was standing?
Life is good!
My son and I did not realize just how burnt out and buzzed we were from the non-stop 450 mile trip from Philadelphia to Cleveland in one day but we were both too excited to allow the frailties and limitations of the human condition to interfere with our fantasy experience and we forged ahead.
As Howe opened my son’s eyes to playing scales along and across the fingerboard of a guitar I sank lower into my seat between the ghosts of robber barons gone by with every one of those nostalgic guitar licks which I had heard in the first person, if one will, in the late sixties and early seventies and realized there was, at once, a fifty year chasm between myself and my son at one end and a four beat measure drawing us together at the other.
Yes.