When they were young, and I was younger, they were the gods who knew all and would never grow old. Their hands sang with electric guitar strings. Their words pulsated to the rhythms of a lumbering train, the uuuwa and aaahhh, seemed to cause our hearts to beat.  When the music came, we just felt good, and the world through all our eyes was a paradise.

          Tonight, almost fifty years later, Bob will be in concert within a large college campus just outside of Fort Lauderdale. Back then it was the youth, ours and his, that brought us together. And it is the youth he has returned to.

          I park in an expanding parking lot, see a sign that it is patrolled by police, and all of the other cars have student ID parking stickers, I lack. I find a tiered parking lot that is open and put my little car there. I worry I will get a ticket throughout the night, until I come back to her at ten thirty.

          Approaching the concert venue, I stop a college student heading for a dorm or to go studying.

         “Do you know where the Don Taft University Center is?”

         “Yeah man, follow to the circle and go straight through and you run into it.”

         “Thanks.”

         Yeah man, yes I’m in the right place.

         Bob’s concerts always sold out, even tonight’s. This theater will hold maybe a thousand. I got my ticket online within ten minutes of when they went on sale. I am diagonally off center stage, at eye level about twenty yards away. I can’t believe my luck.

         Bob still and will always do his own thing. While some big stars wait for their audience to be seated, Bob starts six minutes after eight when the auditorium is only half full. His band has some very good looking thin young men on guitar with a rough, road traveled look. Reminiscent of ‘The Band’ he traveled with in his early years.