Adventures Out of Vacationland

My "At least I tried and here I am outside
of Madison Square Garden" face.

God is funny. Sometimes you get exactly what you need, even though you didn't know you needed it. Nor does it come the way you thought you wanted.

So it was last week. I was hopped up after seeing U2 with The Wife in Boston. 

"I can't explain why, exactly, but I think I need to go to New York to try to see U2," I told her. 

"Great! Go!" was TW's response. 

Awesome. We have clearance from TW. 

Grand Central Terminal

Getting to New York from Portland isn't a huge undertaking. You drive 3.5 hours to New Haven, Connecticut, and hop on a train. Five and a half hours later you walk into Grand Central Terminal. The trip is one of solitude. I know all the NPR stations between here and Hartford. When that gets old, you flip on the classic rock. As someone who walks to work (and everywhere else), I put about 2,000 miles on my car last year. Roadtrips are a rarity.

It didn't used to be that way. When we lived in Utah, you had to drive for 5 hours to get anywhere, and "anywhere" was often Las Vegas. But we went to Colorado for ski trips, Denver to visit a friend, Oregon to be hipsters and California for weddings. Our house was 35 miles away from Salt Lake. We were always driving.

So rolling to New York is kind of a big deal. A friend had a hotel room near the arena, so I brought with me a trusty black duffel bag jammed full with a toothbrush and two blankets (one to put my head on as a pillow; the other to cover me while I slept on a hotel room floor). 

TW, whose unwavering support convinced me to go on this trip, was mostly concerned about one of the blankets because her mom had made it for her. I assured her the blanket was fine.

A SURREAL SCENE

I walked from Grand Central to Madison Square Garden, duffel bag in tow. It was a scene. It's New York. It's MSG. There's always a scene. On Thursday, at 2:30 p.m., it was graduation time for ASA College at the MSG auditorium, which is separate from the arena U2 would be playing that night. There were girls in wobbly 5-inch high heels and proud families carrying congratulatory balloons. 

People who actually went to the
U2 concert on Thursday.

Off to the right of the entrance, there were about 45 people standing near some security guards. 

"Is this the line for U2?" I asked a guy. 

"Yeah, U2," he grumbled.

Probably a scalper, I figured. I took a breath and settled in. About 20 seconds later, the entire line sprinted forward to a different area. Always quick on my feet, I passed a few people and found myself 20th in line. We were waiting for day-of-show tickets. There are always day-of-show tickets. People cancel their tickets at the last minute and they're sold to people in line. People like me.

That was surreal. Show up at MSG in the middle of a graduation and then sprinting to 20th in line. Slowly, I realized that wasn't supposed to happen. U2 fans keep lists to show when fans had shown up in line. Security at MSG didn't care. They dropped the rope at 2:30 p.m., and the line had formed. They didn't make the list and they didn't care about the list. 

This actually works in my favor, I thought, as I watched a fan screaming at security. "This guy's a scalper. He's a scalper! Scalper! Scalper! Scalper!" he yelled, pointing at the dudes in front of me in line. He was probably right. I don't think the 61-year-old black guy in front of me was all that into the band. Nor the guy with the Marines cap on. They were all working their cellphones to keep in touch with guys in front of the arena who were selling the seats these guys were trying to buy. They all carried cash. 

There was also a great group of fans. Original Diane. Baker Dyann. Matt, the special ed teacher. Natalie, my U2 wife, who asked me to buy a ticket for her if I got the chance. And, of course, a girl named Amy.

We had a long wait in front of us. We talked about the graduates. We talked about U2 concerts we had seen. Amy (I think it was Amy) saw the same 2001 U2 shows I'd seen, including the one where Bono lost his voice and asked the crowd to sing for him. It was the coolest unscripted moment I've had at a concert. And we waited some more. 

THIS NEVER HAPPENS

Finally, around 7 p.m., there was movement. The box office opened and they offered $280 tickets. A few people got out of line for that. Around 8 p.m., just as the show was supposed to start, they offered $35 obstructed view tickets. Hilariously, the scalpers leapt out of line to buy the $35 tickets. They could flip them for $100 out on the street, they figured. They were wrong. Once they went in to buy tickets, they had to stay in and see the show. 

Post-sprint selfie.

The U2 fans shook their heads. We were there for the standing-room-only floor seats. They released them every night. They always release General Admission seats. I checked my new friends. None of them were taking the $35 seats. And they sort of closed the line off anyway when I got to the front, so I'm not sure if I even had the option to get a $35 ticket. But I didn't want one. I was now fourth in line for U2 tickets. Which they always release.

"Something awesome or something terrible is about to happen," I texted TW.

It wasn't exactly terrible. We were sure we were going to get tickets. We saw on Twitter that the concert had started and we were still pretty sure we would get in. A security guy even came over and told us we were going to have to go straight in to the concert once we got our tickets. The band started its second song. Then it started its third song. Finally, I checked the Grand Central schedule. I could catch a 9:06 p.m. train back to New Haven, where my car was waiting. It was 8:40 p.m. Grand Central is about a mile and a half away. I'll give this ticket thing 5 more minutes. 

At 8:44, I started saying my goodbyes. The impossible had happened. For the first time on this tour, there were no extra GA tickets. Everybody was so sweet. They knew I'd driven down on the spur of the moment. They knew I cried when I saw U2 in Baltimore in 2001 and played "Please" in response to the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. Everybody cried that night. But I wasn't sad leaving MSG. Surrounded by scalpers, I took a quick selfie out front. Since the show had started, I probably could have gotten a screaming good deal on a ticket. Didn't occur to me. I had a train to catch. 

Google Maps will tell you it's only about 1.1 miles from MSG to Grand Central. My pedometer says it's 1.5 miles. I ran like hell to catch that 9:06 train even though there was another train at 9:36. That 9:06 train was the difference between getting home at 2:40 a.m. and getting home at 3:15 a.m. I wanted that train. I ran so hard my bag popped open and my antiperspirant fell out while charging through Bryant Park. I picked it up and kept running while I put it back in the bag. 

I boarded the train at 9:03 p.m. I had to take a seat next to a 20-year-old kid. He later told me he had just come back to Connecticut from his family's summer home in Maine. He jumped off Frye's Leap on Sunday. I'd jumped off Frye's Leap on Wednesday. He left a bunch of chocolate-covered raisins for me. He must have known all I'd eaten was some crappy sandwich from Dunkin' Donuts.

It was all an adventure. Every minute of it. It was emotionally exhausting. It was physically exhausting. And it was the most fun I'd had doing something frivolous in a long time. But that didn't necessarily make the trip special.

CODA

I was listening to NPR near Worcester, Massachusetts, at around 12:30 a.m. when I heard a personal diary entry. Of course, I can find no record of this diary now. 

It was about a teenage boy who was his grandma's favorite. Even as she sat in bed, half in a coma, she would talk to him. 

When she took a turn for the worse, he was confused. She talked about God in glowing terms. She saw a white light. But the boy didn't believe in God. He didn't know what to think as she told him she was going to a better place. 

One day at work, the boy gave God a challenge. He worked at a golf course parking carts in a big shed. The shed was about 50 yards long, he figured, and there was a small cupboard about the size of two scorecards on the floor at the other end. 

"All right, God," he thought. "I'm gonna chuck this golf ball. If it goes in the cupboard, I'll believe in you. This is your *only* chance at this."

The kid got all pumped up for the toss. This was a big deal. He wound up and unleashed a throw ... that went straight into the ground in front of him, caroming off the ceiling and then going behind him. It was a big miss.

He walked down to the other end. It was a letdown, you know, after all that setup.

As he got to the other end, he heard the slow dribble of the golf ball. He turned around and saw the ball deliberately rolling down the exact middle of the shed. The boy watched as the golf ball rolled past him and into the cupboard, landing square in the middle.

God delivers. Life delivers. It often isn't exactly what you think it's going to look like. That was my trip to New York City in a nutshell. God works in Mysterious Ways. And TW's blanket survived unscathed.