For Stella :P

Monday before last I get a phone call from my grandpa. He is in 'insert my location here' and just happens to have an extra ticket to Yanni. I politely decline the offer stating, "I really appreciate the offer grampa, but Yanni just isn't my bag. If you had tickets to Metallica I'd be all over it though."

Yanni is one of the last performers I'd ever subject myself to. Sure it's great that he's been playing the same type of orchestrated music for the last 30 or so years, and has always kept his long flowing black hair nicely conditioned. But really, I'd rather pull my nails out one by one. Or that's what I had thought at that moment.

I called home right after talking to my grandpa and explained to my wife the conversation I had had, thinking it was all quite amusing. However she didn't see it that way. She brought out a valid point. My grandpa lives four hours away and I don't see him as much as I'd like. And in the last two years I've lost two grandmothers, the most recent being last month, and one great grandmother. And maybe it would mean something to grandpa if I did go with him, if for nothing else just spending time with him. I really hadn't been thinking about him, more about myself.

So I called grandpa back and asked how much the ticket was. He said it was free for me, but I insisted on paying for it. He wasn't alone, he had one of my aunts with him. See what happened was, she had used grandpa's credit card to buy three tickets to Yanni last month, one for each of them and one for her male friend. Well my grandpa doesn't get much money as a senior citizen on his pension each month, and the friend of my aunt had cancelled the day before the concert leaving grandpa with an extra ticket he had paid for. This I believe was unfair as he really can't afford that, and my aunt had no means to pay for the unused ticket either even though it was her friend. It makes me mad that grandpa kind of gets taken advantage of by some of his children.

He was ecstatic that I had changed my mind, and I was kind of disappointed in myself for not thinking about him in the first place.

So that's what I did. I not only spent 2 hours of my life with 15,000 well behaved concert goers listening to the 80's style keyboard and orchestra music of Yanni, but I also forcefully paid $110.00 to do so. And while it differed quite heavily from my last concert outing, NIN in 2000, it made an elderly 76 year old very happy.

So how's that for a good explanation? ;)