Musing Magnetic: The Memory Remains

Pakol Magnetic

It was hard to stay connected with loved ones during the yearlong stint.  There were a couple of VOIP phones that we shared among the Base occupants and could use when bandwidth allowed.  I tried to talk to my wife and daughter back home roughly weekly. I also rang up my son, who was in his first year away at college, maybe biweekly.  The combination of a highly inconvenient time difference and my exceptionally poor telephone performance meant that the calls were seldom satisfactory.  I regularly heard myself inexplicably leading unnecessary inquests into whether yard work was being done and vehicles serviced or conducting ad hoc financial audits and unsolicited remote arbitration of minor disagreements.  I missed my family immensely and wanted desperately to send and receive love across those fleeting airwaves, but I too seldom found the correct frequency to carry that tune.

My kids grew up hearing music played constantly; in the car, in the house, and everywhere else.  With me, they’d hear rock and metal, and with their mom it was salsa, cumbia, and Top 40.  While I encouraged their own interests in “whatever the kids are listening to these days,” I also actively sought to cultivate in them an appreciation for the head-banging strain.  I loved it when my son caught Metallica fever in his middle school years.  I quickly bought him music lessons and a beautiful flame-top Ibanez SZ-series electric guitar, and then annoyed him endlessly to play Metallica riffs for me as he showed himself to be an incredibly fast-learner.  In later years, watching him rock the axe in high school bands would be some of my proudest vicarious musical moments.

So, when my boy mentioned during one of our globe-crossing calls that Metallica’s World Magnetic Tour would come through his college town, I told him he had to be there.  Unsurprisingly, he did not bristle at the command, accepting happily my instruction to use Dad’s credit card to score the tickets.  (Now that I think back on it, I actually had to give credit card guidance twice as he somehow inadvertently bought Jimmy Buffett vice Metallica tickets on the first online try.  How does one confuse the ‘Margaritaville’ dude with the purveyors of ‘Master of Puppets’?  I’m still flummoxed…)

The upcoming concert became the main topic of our much-improved phone connections through the fall.  As gig day neared, I was as excited as he was, if not more so.  When the actual day hit, I had calculated the time difference and knew just when he would be in the arena.  I got little work done as I daydreamed about the glories he was witnessing.  I felt close to him; I put on headphones and listened to Metallica and believed I could somehow sense his elation.

Within hours of the show ending, I was on the internet looking for reviews or a set list or anything else I could find.  What a wonderful surprise when I found that Metallica’s own site not only put up a set list, but offered for purchase an actual recording of the concert itself.  I double checked; it wasn’t a concert, it was the concert, the actual one my boy had attended.  I couldn’t type in my payment details fast enough.

We had strict rules about our communal satellite internet connection.  There was absolutely no streaming or downloading allowed.  It simply was not fair to use up that much bandwidth given the number of us that had to share it, a point I made to my colleagues regularly.  But I was the boss and I had a special family-related need, right?  I chose the poor-quality, but significantly smaller 128 kbps file option so as to slightly moderate my hypocrisy and started the download at about 0200 hours in hopes it would finish up before the morning online rush.  (Note: It didn’t.  Even opting for the lower bit rate, the full download took over six hours.)

I put the show on my iPod and listened to it repeatedly over the next few weeks, fantasizing I could hear my son within the crowd noise, yelling and singing along throughout the two hours of live metal.  Even though I was alone and using the headphones to block out the real world, it somehow felt like a two-way connection.  I burned the full gig onto a pair of CDs and sent them off on a protracted mail journey to him, but I doubt my son ever really understood how important that “shared” concert experience had been and remains for me.  In the middle of shit, those imagined two-hour turns rocking out with my beloved boy were a much-needed, emotional escape.  We’ve attended many fantastic concerts together before and since, but Metallica in Charlottesville, Virginia, on 17 October 2009 is, to me, the most special of all.

My boy is a man now, and once again we are separated by both distance and demeanor.  He is making me very proud on the other side of the country, achieving much and making his own mark.  He has unfortunately inherited my substandard telephone manner, however, which means the airwaves once again carry an insufficient charge when we speak.  I miss him dearly and worry he’s not as happy as I would wish him to be.  I want him to know how often I think about him, and I want him to know that the vast majority of those thoughts are thankful and loving, vice judgmental and prescriptive.  Most of all, I want him to know how deeply I pine for our next Metallica moment.

Metallica- Seek and Destroy (live), Charlottesville, Virginia; 17 Oct 2009: