Our son Jarrett sent us pictures of himself and his lady-friend, the delightful Hillary, today from Nashville, TN where they have spent the day sight-seeing.  Seems they have been having a good time.

Jarrett  got out of the military earlier this year.  He was in the Army.  He was a crew-chief  on a Blackhawk Helicopter and did one year-long stint in Iraq and two deployments in Afghanistan.  He currently works as a consultant for a large company that is in the business of helping the Army with their helicopters.  He has been working at the Kandahar Airfield in Afghanistan.  He  has been on ” leave”, for lack of a better term, and will be going back to work there on July 31st.

Five days shy of exactly four years ago, my dear wife, Carrie, and I were in Nashville to see Paul McCartney sing.

Circumstances led me to write what follows.  This is the first time I have ever published these words, even though they are four years old.

Hey Jude…Let it Be

My dear lovely wife, Carrie, and I were in Nashville, Tennessee recently.  We were there on business.  The business of witnessing history and taking in the songs of the most important singer on planet earth.  We heard Paul McCartney sing.  And did he ever.  Thirty-eight songs.  Five minutes shy of three hours of continuous song…no intermission here.  And I swear during the first thirty-two songs before the first of two three-song encores, the old Beatle never once took a drink of water.

It was the third time Carrie and I had gone to see Sir Paul.  As always…he shelled the corn.

He sang songs recorded over a span of five decades.  Beatles tunes, Wings tunes, solo tunes, Fireman tunes, John Lennon tunes, a George Harrison tune, he sang them all.  I once likened going to a Bob Dylan concert to visiting a museum.  You can listen…but you can’t touch.  Paul McCartney, however, grabs you by the hand and puts you in position to sing back-up.

The first time I ever saw Paul sing was in Indianapolis.  I vividly remember the Conseco Fieldhouse campfire sing-a-long that concluded the song ‘Hey Jude”.  You know the one… where everyone is singing Na-Na Na- Na Na Na- Naaaa.  I remember thinking to myself…if only we could get all the people in the world that are throwing rocks at each in this basketball gym and start singing this together, folks would stop throwing rocks at each other and try to be friends.

I know.  That sounds a bit simplistic.  It is.  But good grief…that moment is so powerful.  Music helps to sustain us.  Even though life sometimes throws us off key in mid-verse, music is there for so many of us to help provide some harmony…even if it is in the background.  For every life does indeed have a soundtrack.

For Carrie and me on this night in Nashville, listening to “Hey Jude” brought on even more gravity this time around as we sang along.  We were also singing right along with Paul as he sang John Lennon’s “All we are saying is Give Peace a Chance”.   The gravity and the rumble in the stomach fell hard during these tunes.  Our son, Jarrett, is flying around in a Chinook helicopter around the mountains of Afghanistan.  He has his legs wrapped around a big gun he holds with both hands around it.  This ain’t no twelve-gauge shot gun.  He’s hanging on to this thing and there are folks around there that, like me, wish he was back home again in Indiana….but they aren’t very nice about it.

Was it tough listening to Paul McCartney singing about peace?  Darn right it was.  But…we need that.  We need that spirit…regardless of what may come.

In the hotel lobby the morning after the concert, my cell phone rang.  It was Jarrett. At the outset of our conversation, I was thinking about how he was on my mind the night before as we sang of peace and hope.

He proceeded to tell me of the crash landing his Chinook made around the time we were having our sing-along with Paul inside the Bridgestone Arena where the biggest battle we faced was jockeying for position at the T-Shirt table.

Jarrett lived to tell the story.  That is the victory I’ll take any day.

Right now I going to find a nice quiet place and listen to “Let It Be”.

Jarrett punching out the Chinook