06.27.08 ~ Week Eighteen

Learning to ‘Cope’

Last night Jason and I went to a Citizen Cope concert here in New York. Jason had surprised me with the tickets after my endless complaining that we don’t do enough “stuff”. He knows better than anyone that all we do is “stuff”, but being the sweet, caring, and attentive husband that he is – he sprung into action anyway. So after work yesterday we headed down to midtown and stood in line outside of the venue. The experience of this concert was filled with three repeating themes: 1. I love live music and I will be obsessed like a groupie with the people who play it until the day I die; 2. Jason and I are old and getting older by the minute; and 3. pregnancy changes things a lot.

Theme number 2 reared its ugly head while we were standing in line. Everyone in the line around us was young. Really young – like, ‘didn’t get a wrist band to buy beer’ young. We immediately felt old and a little out of place and started wondering when Citizen Cope had become such a teeny bopper band. But later as we got inside and the venue started filling up we realized all the older people just arrive later. I realized again that we’re old when we didn’t even glance toward the standing space that was still available at the front of the stage (remember, we were really early) but made a beeline instead for the third floor balcony where we spotted and snagged some seats.

The show started with Alice Smith who is amazing and lived up to every bit of her amazingness during her performance. Through her whole set and during the first half of Citizen Cope’s set, I was filled with musical bliss. It was loud and encompassing and moving. I was full of pride for the experience that this was offering our small, developing, unborn child. Even though I’m sure his or her actual hearing is not fully developed, there was no doubt that the baby was experiencing the concert through the vibrations. I imagined the amniotic fluid pulsing around our little baby, whose brain synapses were at that moment connecting to establish a sense of rhythm and musical talent. I made silent resolutions to continue this musical education by never allowing any of those terrible kid CDs into our house, but only exposing our child to real music that Jason and I also enjoy. (This conjured up old memories of Niklas walking around with his portable tape player in the Outer Banks singing along to “Harry Clappy” a.k.a Dirk and Meike’s favorite, Eric Clapton – not our artist of choice, but the general pedagogy I’m going for here). Jason must have been thinking along the same lines because when we talked about the baby being able to feel the music, he shared his vision of enrolling our kid in music and dance classes and his or her classmates complimenting them on how they don’t dance like a white girl/boy.

About three quarters of the way through the Citizen Cope set I was jarred out of my musically induced daydreams by the people edging in around us. I realized I had people touching me on all sides and that I had been sitting in my chair leaning slightly to the right toward Jason for about an hour now. My back had started aching and I began shifting around uncomfortably. After a bit, Jason realized I was getting antsy and we pushed the chairs out of the way so that we could stand. But the chairs had been the only barrier between us and all the others standing around us and now I was truly pinned between Jason, the balcony railing, and two guys to my left who were intent on video taping the entire performance with their crappy point-and-shoot cameras (don’t get me – or Jason – started on them). Being old and pregnant was taking over my happy concert experience quickly. I couldn’t even imagine how uncomfortable I would have been if we had been standing in the crowd on the floor the whole time – where I would have undoubtedly been…and loving it… if I were still in college. My back was aching, I was getting tired – and to top it off Citizen Cope started having problems with his guitar which was prolonging the encore. He played an extra Radio Head cover while he waited for a new guitar. This is something I should have thought was a delightful bonus, but instead I was uncomfortable and getting nervous because the show was running so late. We had been planning on meeting up with Ingrid and her fiancé Daniel after the show (Hannah’s host sister from France who was visiting New York for a day), and it was already a half hour later than when I had told them we would be finished. So we packed it up and left before the encore was finished. Terrible, I know.

I was frustrated and flustered as we headed down into the subway to go meet with Ingrid and Daniel. It was 10,000 degrees down there and the train wouldn’t come. The platform was filling up with people and as I glanced into the tunnel, I saw no train lights. Ingrid called to let me know they were at our meeting place already – and I got more and more flustered since I knew we were keeping them waiting. When the train finally showed up, it was totally full, and chaos broke out as the all the people waiting on the platform made a mad dash to squeeze in. Jason and I made it into the train – but not without a large older woman jamming her round body into my mine to squeeze into the train behind me. My evil cocktail of pregnancy hormones boiled. If I had had enough room around me to get my leg up that high, I would have drop kicked her. As we stood rocking back and forth on the crowded train smashed between hot, sweaty, stranger bodies, Jason recognized the strained look on my face and asked if I was ok. I answered “yes”, but was secretly planning a brutal, cold blooded, mass murder of everyone on the train at that very moment (sparing only my dear husband of course). What the hell were all these people doing commuting at 11pm anyway?? When the train pulled up to our stop I violently pushed our way off and we walked up the stairs, above ground, and enjoyed the sweet relief that comes with a sudden 20 degree drop in temperature. And then the sweet relief of spotting Ingrid and Daniel. And suddenly my frustration and unhappiness melted away. Ingrid looked exactly the same as I remembered her! And she and Daniel are both the kind of people who are truly pleasant and impossible to maintain a bad mood around. Smart, funny, engaging, happy, and outgoing. Over a glass of wine (sparkling water for me) and a late night snack they told us all about Paris, their travels in the U.S., how they met, and their wedding plans. It was the perfect ending to an almost perfect evening. By the time Jason and I made it home it was almost 2am and I was exhausted to the core, but totally, completely happy again.

I am a girl of extreme emotions anyway, but being pregnant brings the high points even higher and the low points to a dark, dark place. But I drifted off to sleep thinking that even though we were getting older and I was getting pregnant-er, we had still managed to enjoy a concert and stay up late drinking and talking. With some slight accommodations, we’re still the same Jason and Nina who still like to do the same things. And that was a truly comforting thought.