We went to see Paul Simon last night. He’s 84 and likely on his last tour. I can’t adequately describe the show — epic, beautiful, career-spanning, emotional. I’m still singing songs from it in my head.
That’s part of what I love about live music: a brief escape from daily life, a connection to thousands of strangers feeling the same thing at once. I’ve listened to Paul Simon my whole life — Simon and Garfunkel, his solo work, all of it part of my soul.

The show was quiet in places, his voice strong but a little wavery. A full two-and-a-half-hour set with a short intermission. The first half covered the entirety of his latest album, “Seven Psalms,” a quietly questioning album, most likely his last. It’s beautiful, poetic, and seemingly a sort of exploration of life from someone who’s lived one. It’s different than a lot of his other work, but definitely worth a listen. The second half was a career-spanning set — he opened with “Graceland”, performed many hits, crowd favorites, and his personal favorites, whether they were hits or not. His wife, the wonderful Edie Brickell, joined him for several songs. I loved her work with the New Bohemians and her solo records, and seeing them perform together was something else entirely. He closed his second encore with “The Sounds of Silence” — performed alone on stage, just him and his guitar. There wasn’t a dry eye in the place. We gave him several standing ovations, all of them earned.

We almost missed the show. I somehow had the date wrong on my calendar. We’d just settled on the couch after dinner, debating what to watch, when I came across a Reddit post asking about traffic heading to Starlight Theatre considering the FIFA crowds heading towards the nearby Arrowhead Stadium. “Wait — tonight?!” I thought. I checked our digital tickets. Sure enough, the show started in just under two hours. I told Maura, we changed clothes, put on our shoes, took the dogs out for one final potty break, and drove the fifteen minutes to nearby Starlight. If I hadn’t seen that post, we’d have missed it entirely — and we would have been devastated.

During the short intermission, we decided to stay in our seats rather than fight the crowds heading towards refreshments and bathrooms. While we sat talking, a bird took aim and fired — it missed my head, but the blob landed squarely on my leg. I’d been sneezing earlier, so I had a tissue handy and wiped most of it off, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the precision it must take to hit one person in a crowd that size — windspeed, trajectory, all of it. I’ve heard that it’s good luck to get pooped on by a bird, the odds being what they are. Hey, I’ll take it.

Paul Simon has been a staple in so many homes across the country, over the decades. He is beloved by all and that showed, the audience was rapt, even when we sang along it was at a respectful sound level and the applause was truly genuine — you could feel the love flowing up to the stage.