but our show began with karma as well. I got a random email months ago telling me that I had access to a presale for Taylor Swift. One of our credit cards was a sponsor of the tour. I didn’t think too hard about how many other people must have also received that email. I just shot out a text to a bunch of guys I’m friends with asking if they had a kid who’d be interested. Surprisingly, only one said yes and he had access to a presale too.
He’d seen T. Swift with his daughter on the last tour. As a previous attendee he got invited to an earlier presale than mine. By now, even if you don’t care for T. Swift, you are likely aware of the difficulties that arose with the ticket purchasing experience. As it turned out, we would not have been able to purchase any tickets with my presale. But my friend got tickets. Two for us and three for them. He was planning to bring his eighth grade daughter and one of her friends. I would tag along with my fifth grade daughter. I was scheduled to work that day but that was just a detail to be sorted out.
Getting the tickets should have been the hard part but there were two big twists still to come. The twists are a story of their own so for now we’ll just stick to the impact of those twists. My daughter had to be sixty miles away in a different direction at 7:45am on the morning of the concert. My friend’s daughter would not be able to attend at all.
New plan: my daughter and I would be up at 5am, on the road at 6am and then have to get it together later to get to the concert. The other three tickets would still include the friend who was in on the original plan plus two other eighth graders (without another adult). Of these three young women, I only knew one and not well. In fact, it had been years since I’d seen her although I still considered her parents as friends.
As the concert date approached the other parents began to have thoughts about their daughters making their way through the crowd of 65,000 people into and out of the concert. (You see where this is going?) I was asked to step up. But we already had a long day and we weren’t sure when we’d be able to get to the stadium even though we hoped to get there early. Not everyone shows up to a concert at the same time but everyone leaves at the same time. The bigger crowd and bigger chaos would be after the show. I’d be able to help with that.
Fast forward. We got to the show later than we would have liked but still well before Taylor Swift took the stage. Our three young lady neighbors were in their seats when we arrived. It was raining. And it kept raining. There were lulls and even when it was raining hard it wasn’t a true downpour. Until the last couple of songs. It really started to come down near the end of the show. By the end, no one was dry.
I hadn’t talked to our three companions much. I wasn’t sure if they were even told that I’d be walking them to their pickup car. I didn’t know two of them at all and the third I barely knew. I thought I’d introduce myself to them when we got there but they were their own group of three and didn’t seem interested in us. My daughter and I were tired, arriving later than we’d hoped and it was already raining. I didn’t want to intrude on the independent adventure of the other girls either. Looking back on it, they are eighth graders and I am an adult man that they didn’t know. It was really on me to break the ice and I probably should have just introduced myself. But it was ok. They had their night out on their own without me bothering them.
When the concert ended, I just said to the girl I knew that I told her mom that I’d make sure they got to the car. No big deal. We walked down the stairs together then down the ramps with the mass of other people. A few times it took a little effort to stay together but it was pretty easy. When we were out of the stadium but close enough to it that we were still in the midst of a big crowd, one of the girls I didn’t know stopped, looked around, and said “Where’s Shawn?”. I was right behind her where I was supposed to be.
That was the moment. They did know that the plan was for me to walk with them and as much as they may have enjoyed going to the concert on their own, when they were tired, at the end of the night, walking in the rain, through that crowd, not really knowing where they were going, they wanted to have an adult with them. I was glad I was there.
After we found their ride, my daughter and I still had to get back to our vehicle. As we got closer to where we had parked, we were rewarded with the sound of frogs. There were little ponds from the collected run off of the parking lots. We had parked on the end of the last row in the lot. I thought it would be easy to get out but they had wood barriers blocking the way to the road I came in on so I would have to go all the way through the parking lot. We were not first. We were last.
The road that was blocked to me went through the middle of what was two lots and kept going beyond our last row of cars. When we parked, there were two police vehicles stopping cars from going any farther down the road beyond the parking lots. I asked one of the officers if that road would be opened and we’d be able to sneak out after the concert. He said it was a new road and he didn’t know but he thought they’d make us go back out the way we came in. And that’s what we found as we walked back up that road at the end of the night. The two police vehicles were still blocking the road and the barriers were blocking me from accessing that road anyway.
Cars were already lined up just sitting amidst the parked cars not going anywhere. We had to deal with ourselves being soaked and trying to get more comfortable. My daughter fell asleep quickly in the back seat and I was prepared to just sit for an hour or two. But after a few minutes the police vehicles left. And a few minutes later a little cart with parking employees moved those wooden barriers that were right next to me blocking my way out and they exited down the road that the police had been blocking. That was it. I started the engine and took off. Our windows were all fogged up but I wanted to escape before everyone else noticed that this back exit had opened up.
My excitement ended quickly as I didn’t get very far before stopping and turning off the engine behind a line of other cars. But from the time I sat behind the wheel of my truck expecting to wait forever to the time I pulled out on the main road was only 50 to 60 minutes.
So, we had a little karma of our own. By trying to share my presale with others I ended up in an even better presale and that’s how we got tickets. Then at the end of the night, if we had gone straight back to our vehicle maybe I would have been tempted to pull out of our parking spot and get into what would have appeared to be a shorter line to leave. I would have been stuck in that line and missed the escape out of the back of the parking lot that opened up later.
I got to bed at 3am but still had to work that morning. No surprise that I left for work later than I should have. Pulling out of the driveway I noticed a white iris blooming. This iris comes up every year but rarely blooms. It wasn’t blooming when we left at 6am the day before. All that rain woke it up. Then on the main road to the bridge out of town I would have been speeding to get to work but the driver of the white SUV in front of me kept us at the speed limit. The police were waiting in one of their usual spots. I would’ve been pulled over if that SUV wasn’t in front of me.
One more thing. Since we didn’t get to the concert early, we missed out on people exchanging the friendship bracelets they’d made. My daughter didn’t know about that tradition early enough to make any bracelets but I’d hoped she’d receive a bracelet at the show. We got to our seats and had totally forgotten about that and realized later that we missed our chance. But at some point in the show, the person behind my daughter in section 315 row 15 tapped her on the shoulder and gave her a bracelet. Thank you to that Swiftie for your generosity. I expect that karma will come back around for you too.