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Todd hung the phone up, and the music returned to the truck. While the concert I was seeing tonight was classical – with pieces from Mozart, Beethoven, and other composers on the list for the night – I also enjoyed an array of metal and pop music.
I was the only one of my siblings to enjoy pop music, which I found interesting. Zeke hated it and couldn’t stand it after the military. Jesse and Luke were neutral towards it. Perhaps with the right reasons, they could be interested, but the right reason had not yet come along. I enjoyed the distraction from real life at times, though metal always allowed me to escape the stress and trauma of the military.
I pulled into my driveway about twenty minutes later with enough time to shower before my pizza arrived. I didn’t take a long time in the shower, especially since I had not been working in a mechanic’s uniform today. My plane had passed its annual inspection, and I kept it in tip-top shape. I wouldn’t fly it anywhere if I thought that it needed a repair or anything.
The shower was relaxing enough, and I threw on a pair of sweatpants and an older tee shirt to get the pizza in. The delivery man arrived shortly after I’d finished getting dressed and had my money ready. It was perfect timing. It was always satisfying when things worked out like that.
Once the pizza had been paid for, I ate it quickly. I only had about an hour before I had to leave. While it wouldn’t take me that long to make sure the suit fit and everything, I did want to leave a little earlier just in case parking was a nightmare. It was a concert hall, so it wasn’t like this was a venue used for something else that wouldn’t fit a lot of people. Still, I liked to be prepared and plan ahead.
I put the leftover pizza in the fridge and then quickly put on my suit. It fit, which was a relief since it had been a while since I’d had an occasion to wear it. I brushed out my hair and made sure that I looked as presentable as I was going to get. There were some things that just wouldn’t be fixed in ten minutes.
Once I was all ready to go, I grabbed my keys and headed for the door. I locked my house up tight and started the drive to the concert hall. The concert hall was about an hour and a half from my home, further out than the airport. If I had been thinking about it, I would have just taken my suit to the airport, changed there, and gotten something to eat at a restaurant instead of spending an extra hour on the road just to get there.
Then again, I wanted to shower. I hadn’t known what today would entail, and though it hadn’t been much manual labor, the hangar had been sweltering, and I definitely didn’t want to slap my suit on after sweating so much in there.
I turned the music down a little as I drove out towards the venue. With the windows rolled down and the open road around me, I was reminded of my youth. We had all done all sorts of things with our father – such as a trip to Pine Beach, North Carolina, when we were kids – but I had always loved the car trips that each of those vacations entailed the best. The open road, the wind whipping through the open window, and all of us singing as loudly as we could to the songs Dad would play on the radio. In a way, I had always been inclined toward music, much like my brother Luke.
It just hadn’t been enough for me to consider it my passion. It was more of a hobby, in my opinion. Being up in the air, among the clouds – that was really my passion… but it fueled my hobbies too.
I arrived at the venue shortly thereafter and found myself a decent spot to park in the parking garage attached to the concert hall. It would make getting out of the concert easier since I wanted to get home as soon as possible after the concert. While I’m not flying tomorrow, I still plan on getting up around my usual time. Don’t like to disrupt that schedule – it makes returning to work the following day much harder if I mess with it.
It didn’t take me long to walk into the concert hall, show my ticket, and find my seat. I was four rows away from the orchestra, which was incredibly wonderful. After sitting so close for other concerts, I decided that I couldn’t sit in the back any longer.
If I was going to attend, I wanted to see and hear everything.
Chapter two
Grace
I bit back a sigh as I snapped another picture of the orchestra playing Mozart’s “Für Elise” in the Tulsa concert hall. After working at the local newspaper for four years, I was so over this concert hall. In that time, I must have shot pictures at three dozen or so events featuring various orchestras, singers, and even a few musicals that featured everything from dazzling scenery to glamorous actors and everything in between. The musicals were my favorite because I was too busy trying to get pictures of everything to really care that I was at the concert hall… again.
The only upside to this particular concert was that, if everything worked out, it would be my last one. The newspaper was going to start a new summer column, and since it was almost the end of spring, we needed to get pictures for the column. It was going to be all about places to visit this summer once the school year was over.
My boss hoped that it would bring revenue up for the newspaper since a lot of people were starting to only read the few free articles online and hardly anyone had hard copies delivered anymore. Only the oldest of the population still wanted to read the paper in their hands and not on their tablet, phone, or computer.
He had agreed to get me off the concert hall and the various musical events held here each year if I could make the first column a smashing success. Of course, he was not telling me what those metrics were so that I could be sure to meet them all. It probably had more to do with the metrics of who was reading, how many people were trying to get behind the paywall and all of that. These things, I couldn’t necessarily control. The pictures and the column itself, I had full control over.
I’d even already picked my first place to cover: Corinth, Oregon. It was a town on the southern coast of the state, which made getting to it from the large airports harder. I’d have to fly a private plane or helicopter, which was going to cost quite a bit. My boss didn’t want me looking into some of the normal sites that most families in Tulsa would visit if they had a chance – such as any of the Disney parks, the Universal parks, Kings Dominion in Virginia, or even the Lagoon Park in Utah. He said the market for those kinds of articles was already oversaturated and I should therefore feature the greatest national parks (as if those also haven’t already been written about ad nauseum). I knew I needed to dig deeper into the hidden treasure trove of travel destinations, finding interesting places that the normal family wouldn’t think of going to on their own.
I picked Corinth because I knew that there were plenty of people interested in going to see the sights of Ancient Rome in Italy, Greece, etc. However, flights overseas were expensive. Not everyone could afford to go with their families, much less go alone. Corinth, Oregon, took a lot of that cost away while still showing reportedly excellent, albeit miniature, replicas of the most famous sights.
It was sort of like Vegas but without the focus on gambling and adult fun that came with that city. A far more family-friendly way to go see the sights without having to leave the country.
However, since my boss hadn’t even realized this was something that could be done in the United States, he was skeptical that it would be worth featuring in the first column. I had argued that it was exactly that reason it would be a good thing to feature in the first iteration instead of the Grand Canyon or one of the other national parks that he had suggested.
Besides, I wanted to travel for this position. I couldn’t do that if we did the attractions that had public domain or creative commons pictures already available for newspapers.
I shook my head as the orchestra finished Mozart’s piece. There were a couple more songs, and I had to make sure to get pictures of the conductor afterward. My boss wanted to spotlight the conductor since it was a job that was often seen but never acknowledged outside of the music community. I could get behind that, but there was so much I wanted to do other than be here at the concert hall so often.
At least a press pass meant that I could attend any performances that had standby tickets without having to pay for the standby ticket myself. My paper would pay for it, as part of my employment as a photographer.
I had seen a couple of Broadway plays in this manner because I had been able to convince the boss that I would be the best person to get good stage pictures. So far, I had not disappointed him. It was probably why my boss didn’t want to move me off the music pages, but Broadway aside, this beat really wasn’t for me.
The orchestra began to play Vivaldi’s ‘Seasons,’ which was the last piece of the night. They were playing all four pieces, which meant I had a decent half hour or so to figure out what other pictures I wanted from my position or from where I could get to easily. Around the other side of the concert hall would be a good option.
The press pass for concerts like this meant that I was able to stand on the stairs and snap pictures as I listened. Most of the audience didn’t care, and since I didn’t have to worry about the flash, I wasn’t disrupting anyone’s vision with an unexpected bright flash of light right beside them.
I quietly walked around the back of the audience to find another spot to take some good photos . An interesting angle from the middle offered me a good look at both sides separately. I caught a good picture of the violin and viola sections playing ‘Spring’ on the right and waited a couple of moments to catch an equally good shot of the second violins and cellos on the left. I’d need to move around to get a better angle of the wind, brass, and percussion.
