It was a memorable week. First we hopped on the Amtrak train and went down to Seattle to see the Rolling Stones at cavernous Lumens Field, home of the Seattle Seahawks. We met up with my sister and niece there, and they had an Airbnb rented near the venue. I was always of the opinion that the Stones were crappy in concert. Every so often you would hear a live version of one of their songs, and it would not sound good at all. So my expectations weren’t high for musical quality. It turned out that they were actually pretty damn good! And no band on the planet can come near them for the depth of their catalogue of tunes. They played around 20 songs and without using Google I could probably name 100 more they didn’t play, and many of those would have been great to hear too. They did a “vote a song” promo for the concert, and Seattle voted to hear Wild Horses which, it turns out, they rarely play live. Mick had tons of energy for a guy of 80, and Keith looked pretty spry as well, possibly aided by the fact he quit smoking a few years ago. Mick took a little break and let Keith sing a couple songs – You Got the Silver, and Little T&A – which was my favourite part of the show. For some reason I’ve always loved Keith’s singing voice. It’s sort of flat and atonal, but in a good way. I wished he had picked Happy as one of his songs to do, but hey, you can’t always get what you want.
By the way, despite the testy caption, the seats were just fine! Who wrote that?
The train trip down was a throwback to an older time, sort of a nod to the Mt Rushmore of rock oldsters we were going to see. It’s a beautiful part of the world to go clickety clacking past the window. There were conductors and little towns’ stations and the wooded corridors into every town, and then endless miles of beaches and boats and trees. We only got a couple hours of sleep the night of the concert, so staring blankly out the window was infinitely safer than having our hungover asses careening toward home down the crowded I-5.
After the trip south I worked as an arbiter at the Keres Memorial chess tournament, Paul Keres was from Estonia, and he is a national hero there. He is widely regarded as one of – if not the – best chess player who never became world champion. He came close five times to being world champion, but got thwarted by the outbreak of WWII and by coming second four times in tournaments that would have given him a shot at the world title. In Estonia, he is sometimes referred to as Paul the Second. In 2000 he was named Estonia’s Sportsman of the Century. In 1975 he came to Vancouver and played in the Vancouver International chess tournament, which he won. On the way home he died of a heart attack, aged 59, and the tournament was renamed in his honour. Every year it is the biggest tournament in BC, and this year I got to be an arbiter which gives me my second of four required FIDE arbiter norms. There were 205 players, of which we had a Grandmaster from Romania and several masters.
The next week I had a gruelling two days of work, then I attended a retirement seminar Thursday and Friday. I knew of the existence of the seminar, but I sort of thought it would be like two hours one Tuesday night, not 16 hours of info packed into two long days. There were 14 of us there, grey haired and ready to take the plunge into obsolescence. The guy doing the seminar was 80 and an aged-spot speckled old fellow who knew more about the ins and outs of paperwork and legal matters than anyone should almost be allowed to know. In fact they say a person should take the seminar twice: once about five years before retirement and once again when you are near enough to peer into the abyss – that’s how much info was jammed into the subject. Well, I got my pre-emptive seminar out of the way, and the real goodbye one is about six years off. I expect those six years to go streaking by.