The Boulder and the beautiful

If I’ve learned anything about raising daughters, it’s that sometimes you have to meet them halfway.

So, I did.

Because she lives 2,000 miles away in Los Angeles, and I live here in good old Wisconsin, my daughter, Katherine and I got together for a quick weekend in Colorado where we discovered the Boulder and the beautiful.

We hiked, chatted, huffed, puffed, listened to some excellent music, ate some good food and found out we were better hikers and worse map readers than we thought we were. So, it all worked out.

Mostly, we appreciated each other and the fragile beauty of moments.

She introduced me to the rock blues band Tedeschi Trucks headed by the extremely talented Susan Tedeschi and Derek Trucks, a married couple based in Jacksonville Florida.

We heard them play at Red Rocks, a geologically formed, open-air, bucket list amphitheater that has been hosting formal concerts for more than two centuries, and echoes with nature a couple thousand years old.

We thought we caught those old rocks laughing at us when we accidentally settled ourselves in the reserved seat section, munched comfortably through our picnic dinner, sat through a few opening sets, and had to pack up and vamoose quickly when the real ticket holders showed up and shooed us away.

“This is still a good view,” we assured each other as we watched the rest of the concert from our new seats behind a garbage can. And, it was, because it allowed us to dance uninhibited under the glorious stars (though the occasional clunk of actual garbage heading into the can was a teensy distracting).

Laughter and music can be as fleeting as the time we get together to enjoy them. But, love lasts forever.

Katherine and I appreciated the opportunity to celebrate all of it — the music, the laughter and the love, on our quick little weekend getaway to Boulder.