The woman and I were seated elbow-to-elbow in a crowded Asian fusion restaurant in a basement on Park City’s Main Street, and when her man excused himself for a moment, she looked toward me and began to chat. Turned out we both were headed that night to a bluegrass concert by The SteelDrivers. For the couple it was an easy outing; they live in the greater Salt Lake area, while I’d flown in from St. Louis to hit every show of the band’s four-night stand. When the man returned, they filled in their story. Their names were John and Annette. The SteelDrivers brought the two of them together, said John. He was mindlessly swiping left on a dating app when Annette’s  face popped up, and he glimpsed “The SteelDrivers” in her profile. John stopped. This made her worth a pursuit, he decided. “With Stapleton or without?,” he messaged. It was a knowing reference to Chris Stapleton, a founding member who helped launch the band in 2005 and co-wrote most of the songs on its first two records before going solo and becoming a country superstar. “With,” Annette replied. That was 10 years ago. They’ve been a couple ever since. But they’d never seen the band perform live. This Saturday night show in October would be their first time, and like the preceding three shows, it was sold out; Annette had snagged the last two seats together in the third row of the three-row balcony in the Egyptian Theater. We established Lyle Lovett, John Prine and Jimmy Buffett — the early Jimmy Buffett, of “Come Monday,” not “Cheeseburger in Paradise” — as shared interests. Two nights earlier they’d seen country star Eric Church play an arena show in Salt Lake City with a band of 13 including three backup singers. The SteelDrivers comprise just five musicians – on banjo, mandolin, fiddle, bass and guitar — and three handle the vocals. The arena seats thousands; the Egyptian seats just 266. John and Annette were very excited. “This is a lovely story the band needs to hear,” I told them. “Did you try to contact them? Send them a note?” Annette seemed tickled but almost embarrassed by the suggestion. “Oh, you’re right,” she said, before demurring: “But we wouldn’t know how.” But I knew how. The previous night I’d done just that. I did not tell this to John and Annette, or say why I’d contacted the band. But I told the band why. Three years after he died, traveling without my husband and partner of 34 years comes with a weight. Even as I tackle new places alone, I’m still navigating the emotions of returning solo to places Nelson and I loved together, and Park City in October is one of them. Actually we loved anywhere in October — a month that holds both our birthdays, three days apart. As I felt my hand being forced to use expiring timeshare points that I failed to manage as astutely as Nelson did, I half-heartedly considered October options that included Park City. Then I learned the band would be passing through. Mountains — any mountains — are my place of solace, and I return to them as often as I can. But this time, the band drove my decision to go. I could embrace my happy memories of Park City but not have to worry about my nights, which still are the hardest part of my days — the hours when Nelson and I would slow down, catch up, reconnect, share a meal, watch our TV shows (actually, Nelson’s TV shows), go out or just cocoon and cuddle in the quiet comfort of our home and bed: the mundane, easy, everyday moments of life that play out, as John Lennon once put it, while you’re busy making other plans. I’d seen the band with Nelson before, but this time his absence would be tangible. The audience energy on Friday night had been electric, and I wanted to tell the band I felt it, and thank them for the joy that turned my Park City experience around. Then, as I summarized all that but before I could finish, my hand brushed the send button.  “Shit,” I thought. “Now I’ve got to start over.” As I rewrote, someone with the band dinged me at 12:46 a.m. through Facebook Messenger: “What’s your name please?” I kept typing. I knew the architect of the group, Mike Henderson, back in my Missouri college town, where he played with another future member of The SteelDrivers, the bass player Mike Fleming, along with my friend Forrest Rose in a legendary group called the Hellband. I said I’d seen The SteelDrivers back when the Nashville- based act, now celebrating its 20th anniversary, was just coming up and still playing bars in St. Louis. I told them I’d fallen into a chat with their touring sound tech, and he said I should seek out a breakfast place he’d heard about that led me to discover the exceptional beauty of Big Cottonwood Canyon, with its road signs that warned of black ice and undetonated explosives along the trail to Donut Falls, and aspen leaves that glowed a fiery yellow and gold when backlit by the setting sun. I wove in my travel through grief to places named Nelson, and I told them how one of their songs in particular cut straight to my heart. It’s the only happy song in their catalogue, otherwise awash in whiskey, or killin’, or whisky AND killin’. It’s a bouncy, upbeat ode to a lasting love, co-written by fiddle player Tammy Rogers and performed by guitarist and lead vocalist Matt Dame to his bride at their wedding. It’s called “I Choose You.” “People wonder how we made it, how we even came this far. It’s a wondrous thing to turn around, see where we are. It’s a good thing love forgives and it’s a blessing love is Blind. They ask me how we made it, I say one day at a time. “Cause I choose you. Every day in a hundred different ways. I make the choice to stay. I can hit the open road and run my life away. But I choose you. Every day.” “I know you’re not responsible for the ways your songs connect individually with each person in the audience,” I wrote, “but now you know how they connect with me. Thank you.” I signed my name and went to bed. In each of the first three shows, Tammy the fiddler had playfully trolled the audience for a connection to High West Distillery, whose locally produced spirits she praised with firsthand knowledge. She believed the whiskey maker should be happy to get in bed as sponsor of a nationally touring, Grammy-winning bluegrass band with a catalogue heavy on drinkin’. No hands went up. But on the fourth day before I landed in the restaurant seated next to John and Annette, I hit the High West Saloon myself, and can faithfully attest that Tammy Rogers knows good whiskey when she drinks it. I bought a rocks glass with the High West logo etched into it, and trusted I’d find a way to get it into her hands. The glass was hidden inside a brown paper bag in the chair opposite me in the restaurant when John noticed the black ballcap I’d placed on top of it. By then we’d established we both were semi-retired, and free to chart our own work hours. John looked at the logo on the hat, which paired a green maple leaf with one word stitched in white across it: “Nelson.” “Is that the name of your company?,” he asked. In such moments I inevitably pause to think: What door do I want to open? How much time do I have? Without knowing what they’re getting themselves into, how much does someone really want to hear? A bustling, low-ceilinged, shoulder-to-shoulder basement restaurant with hard-to-hear conversations and clattering dinnerware did not feel like the place to explain. I answered, “That’s the logo for the Nelson Leafs hockey team in Nelson, British Columbia.”  And I stopped there. John didn’t follow up. He and Annette left for the show. Before I followed, I borrowed a pen and wrote “TAMMY” in large block letters across the bag, which I carried into the theater lobby and handed over to the band’s tour manager, who I knew ran the merch table. I wasn’t looking for any credit. I didn’t include my name or a note. But he asked for my name anyway, and snapped my photo on his phone, and then disappeared to run it backstage before the show. Not until he was gone did I think: “OH! JOHN AND ANNETTE!” I grabbed a cocktail napkin from the concession stand. I wrote out their names and everything I’d learned about them over dinner. When the tour manager returned, I stood waiting again. Now flush with power and connections, I insisted, “You need to get this to the band,” and I put the napkin in his hand. With few questions and admirable trust in me as a stranger giving orders and a story about a couple falling in love that was totally unverifiable in the minutes before the show started, he scrambled to get backstage again. I turned the corner into the auditorium, and saw him hurry up the steps to the stage and disappear through a door stage left, and who knows what he told the musicians next.  As the band wound down its first set, Tammy the fiddle player paused.  “There’s a couple here that’s been together 10 years,” she teased. “John and Annette, are you here?” From the balcony above me, I heard Annette squeal. My face turned flush with glee. My heart grew 10 times larger. My pulse raced, and I could tell no one I had a hand in it as Tammy shared with the audience, from memory, every detail I’d written down on that napkin. And then she singled out John and Annette for a dedication, launching the band into “I Choose You.”  We found each other in the lobby at intermission. Bouncing bear hugs and handshakes. Wide smiles and I-can’t-believe-you-did-that, and we-knew-right-away-it- was you. I wanted to grab those in line for drinks or the bathrooms in the tiny, packed lobby and announce, “Hey everybody, this is John and Annette!,” but didn’t.  They wanted to buy me a poster, a CD, a t-shirt. “No need,” I said.  “We’re your new best friends,” said Annette. “Next time you come through, let us know and we’ll take you around.” Her offer hung there in the air for a second, and I was aware that I was letting it hang there. Although the path I’m on embraces new connections, it felt like this magical moment should be left alone and remembered by them for what it was and would always be. We did not exchange contacts. I regret it now. The second set kicked in. Deep into it, Tammy the fiddle player paused again. “Is there anyone here,” she asked, already knowing the answer. “Who’s been here all four nights?” I threw both arms in the air and yelped, “Woo-hooooo!” I was the only one. Whether she could see me or not, Tammy pointed in my direction in the darkened theater. “Is your name Jeff?” “It is!” I hollered back. Or would have, if I’d thought of it. Instead, I answered, “Yeahhhhhh?,” drawn out as a question, not sure where this thing might go. She pressed further. “Are you from … Missouri?” “Proudly so!,” I said. Or wished I did. (Two of The SteelDrivers hail from Missouri.)  But again I replied, “Yeahhhhhh?,” doubling down on my hesitation and aware that Tammy already had spilled the beans on John and Annette.  Would my story be next? I didn’t shy away from it. In fact, I sort of hoped it was. “Never before,” Tammy told the audience, had someone heard her say something during a show and returned the next night with a related gift, as I’d done with the glass from High West Distillery. She repeated her pitch for a whiskey backer, and in the band banter that followed, I became “Missouri Jeff,” a faceless presence in the crowd with a gift-giving nature. And then Mike Fleming, the bass player, spoke up.  “We know you’re on a kind of pilgrimage,” he said, without filling in anyone else but knowing I understood. “We’re so glad you came out to see us.” There it was, and it was enough. The musicians had seen and shared my message amongst themselves, and my story had touched another. It was immediately clear to me that my four days and nights in Park City had been building toward exactly that moment with Tammy the fiddle player, and Mike the bass player, and John and Annette in the balcony, and that Nelson — my Nelson — had drawn me to it. In fact, I’d only gone to the restaurant that night because, at the show two nights prior, I’d added my name to the nonprofit theater’s email list in exchange for a $50 gift certificate to that very restaurant — which, being Park City, barely covered the cost of the entrée. Before the encore, Tammy the fiddle player paused once more. The Egyptian Theater is a nonprofit, with a group of backers known as Pharoahs who have first crack at the best seats — and as Tammy thanked the Pharaohs in the front rows collectively, a voice farther back in the audience called out. “And Jeffrey!,” it said. Almost immediately came a second voice: “Thank you, Jeffrey!” My seatmates looked at me. I looked back at my seatmates. Was I the Jeffrey in question? Behind the musicians, where panoramas of mountains and wilderness had been synched with the music during the show, a new projection suddenly appeared: “Thank you Pharaohs — and Jeff.” Making someone’s day is its own reward. And The SteelDrivers, intentionally or not, certainly made mine.  But it meant even more that I’d made John and Annette’s. The post Love, Loss and The SteelDrivers appeared first on Park Record. ...read more read less