“No, you can’t always get what you want… But if you try sometime you find you get what you need.”
– Rolling Stones
Petco Park, San Diego 5/24/15
UNBEFRICKINLIEVABLE! I’m still reeling from it.
The Stones concert was one of those once-in-a-lifetime experiences that leave you wondering if it really happened at all or did we each fall into some universal worm hole that careened us into another world of wayyyy beyond “satisfaction!” Maybe they couldn’t get none of it but we sure did. In all the rock concerts Pete and his high school buddy, Peter (who was with us with his family too) helped worked at in their youth both said they’d never been to one this phenomenal. Too many images to even relate. The sweet kid next to us from the appropriately named town of Grass Valley, passing around weed. The hilarious British invasion in front of us. One of them doing lap dances and playing air guitar with his selfie-stick and threatening to topple over the edge of the balcony causing us all to scream every time he gyrated backwards. Adam, towering above me, his arms flailing wildly as we all were—shouting, screaming, cheering, dancing, laughing, singing . Together, we were each one living breathing entity of Rolling Stonedness forever changed. Amazed by the timelessness (Age? What’s age?) of these mad geniuses—Mick gyrating, strutting, running back and forth prodding his brilliant cohorts to laughter—Keith, Ron, Charlie and some new and fabulous bass and sax players and back-up singers, along with opening act and legend in his own right, Gary Clark Jr.
Posted by Adam Granat on Monday, May 25, 2015
Adam screamed “Gimme Shelter” and for a brief and untethered moment we got it–forgetting all the trials and travails of the world for this insane sense-bombardment (I’m only now being able to actually hear again.) The noise was deafening. Adam and I could only converse via texting each other. The camera crew climbed two steel towers like lithe monkeys way above the stadium in layers blasting color eye-feasts of fire and cosmic animation and dripping tongues and fireworks and on and on and on. And the sound was more visceral, more gut-pounding, lung-sucking sensation than anything I ever heard or felt in my life.
And not once did those mad geniuses stop rolling song and after song each topping the other to the point that we were exhausted like love-sick teenagers in heat. We were all—no matter where we lived chronologically–reduced to youth and beauty and passion and wildness. I will never complain about getting older. I just want to be a Rolling Stone and keep on keepin’ on like them. No, you can’t always get what you want, but for everything that’s holy, I sure got what I needed last night.
WOW.
Could it really be 44 years since I nursed my firstborn in a sweet, long-ago rocking chair? And then two years later my second baby boy too? I try to recapture the feeling and smell and sound of it all. Such purity and innocence. The beauty of timing out the rest of the world while holding the entire universe in my arms. I could say no to everything and everybody without guilt because my baby came first. I could laugh and lullaby and coo and cuddle forever and it was alright. I would just rock on and it was as it should be. I knew my place and purpose and discovered the amazement of letting my body take over and do what it was born to do naturally. I never could have imagined that I was capable of nurturing another without running interference. Without me getting in the way of such loveliness…
The cats were on it first. Poised in a purrrmanant stance dictated by some primordial instinct they remained fixated and staring at the glass door of our balcony. There, on the other side of the night, pummeling the door and windows in frantic flutter back and forth, was a baby bird. Seemingly lost in the dark drawn to the light beyond the glass, it slammed its little wings over and over again in a futile attempt to free itself from the nightmare.
