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My roommate had an extra ticket and I said yes the way you say yes to a coworker's improv show. I brought a book. I want that on the record: I brought a book to Red Rocks.

Two hundred and some miles on a steel touring bike with a sleeping bag bungeed to the rack like an idiot. I left on a Wednesday. It started raining Thursday morning and did not meaningfully stop.

I adopted her the week after SPAC 2013 from a shelter outside Albany. Brindle, forty pounds, built like a coiled spring and completely unhinged about open fields.

Classically trained, badly. I could read anything and play nothing. My teacher kept saying "make it breathe" and I kept thinking that was a personality trait I was missing.

I taught high school music for thirty-one years. Somewhere around year twenty I started using the pause in Divided Sky as the entire lesson on tension.

"Can't this wait 'til I'm old? Can't I live while I'm young?"

She played standards in hotel bars for twenty years. When I put on a 1998 Ghost she listened to eleven minutes with her eyes closed and then said, "Oh — they're comping for each other."

I was seventeen. The record came out in May and they told us in June and I spent July driving my mother's Corolla around a county I had already memorized, with one CD.