Inspired by the first story featured on The Moth Radio Hour, May 23, 2023, which addressed a different – and much more valuable – musical item that was lost and later recovered.

We were off on an adventure.  Leaving our 4 kids for 1 glorious, adult-only, overnight in Canandaigua, NY.  Driving roughly 4 hours to see Jason Isbell and Sheryl Crow at the local performing arts centre.  Now it might seem crazy to drive 4 hours for 1 concert, and 1 overnight – but we were living in crazy times.  While it was June, 2022, COVID was still keeping artists leery of booking across the Canadian border and even the metropolis of Toronto had become, at least for those 2-3 years, a live-music desert.

We hit some traffic due to an accident – as you’d expect on a 4 hour road trip, but still had time to visit 1 brewery on the way and share a bottle of wine at our hotel pre-concert.  While not far, we snagged a $6 UBER and arrived at the venue at the perfect time.  The CMAC events centre was incredible – an outdoor venue on the perfect summer night, with plenty of vendors serving mediocre beer and local finger-foods, so the line-ups were mild.  I was feeling overjoyed for the sense of freedom, time with my husband, Tim, and the whole night ahead.

Sheryl was incredible in her pink knee-high boots and pink leather jacket.  She played all the 90s classics you’d expect: If It Makes You Happy, Strong Enough, Leaving Las Vegas, The First Cut is the Deepest… And I sang my little heart out.  I was wearing this awesome blue, linen jumper and in my excitement to drink my beer and sing along, I managed to dump a significant amount of beer down my cleavage.  Now the funny thing about a flowing jumper, is that the beer flowed right down by mid-section before spreading out at my crotch – leaving a wet spot that absolutely made it appear that I had wet my pants.  And I guess I had.  But I didn’t let that dampen my style.  I kept on singing and let the beer dry – sending a warning (and a photo) to my sister-in-law, who I could envision landing herself in a similar fate.

Sheryl wrapped up her set, and Tim and I took a walk to check out the concert merchandise.  There was one amazing t-shirt, sort of a heathered-sage with this funny, trippy design that looks like it’s from the 70s: mushrooms and smiling trees with someone playing the guitar in the middle.  We decided that was the shirt for us.  Both of us.  And we bought 2 of them.  We don’t often wear matching t-shirts, but when we do… it seemed totally appropriate for them to be merch from a concert.

And then Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit took the stage.  Jason can rock with “Super 8,” can tear your heart out with “Elephant,” and can inspire so much emotion and storytelling through a song like “Overseas,” that he will forever be a legend to me.  And while his wife, Amanda Shires, wasn’t there, he even performed their love ballad, “If We Were Vampires.” This song’s message is that the finality of life – and of love, is what makes it so precious. I send a video to my aunt, Reen, who knows this to be so very true.

It was, as expected, an incredible show.  And as we followed the crowds out of the stadium we felt content and complete.  In harmony.  The night was warm and humid, with heat lightening flashing on the horizon.  The little town of Canandaigua has a population of only ten thousand people and the concert venue holds around fifteen thousand, so the availability of taxis or UBERs to support the crowds wasn’t in our favour.  Luckily our hotel was less than a 2-mile walk, and the storm seemed to be holding off, and so we just kept walking.

I was leaning on Tim’s arm as we made our way along the main road, which was quite busy – at least 3 lanes of traffic in either direction with gas stations and strip malls along the way.  Eventually we made it back to the hotel.  The storm let loose – pouring rain and putting on a fantastic lightning show, but we slept through most of it, happy and content.

The next morning we packed up our stuff, ready to hit a few wineries in the Finger Lakes before making the long drive back to Toronto.  As I collected things around the hotel room, I realized that I had my favourite denim jacket, my phone and wallet – essentially all the items I had at the concert.  But our matching concert t-shirts were missing.  We checked under beds, in closets and drawers.  They were not in the hotel room.

Now I may have been slightly buzzed as we walked out of the show, but I could distinctly remember tossing them over my arm when we left our seats in the arena.  Where could they be?!  I asked the staff at the front desk, hoping perhaps if I had dropped them in the lobby, or maybe the elevator?  The hallway outside our room?  They checked the lost-and-found and took down my phone number in case they turned up later.

In an attempt to shake off the drinks from the prior night, Tim suggested we take a walk before hitting the wine country.  He recommended that we retrace our steps from our post-concert saunter back to the hotel, in the unlikely event the shirts were somehow along our path – like the breadcrumbs dropped by Hansel and Gretel.  I was feeling a bit dismayed, groggy, and disappointed about the lost shirts, but I complied.  It was a stifling day with 1000% humidity and the temperature already rising above 30 Celsius, but we walked along that same busy road, with me grumbling and rolling my eyes.

About ten minutes later, as we approached a stop light at the driveway into the strip mall, something caught my eye.  There, on the road, in the middle of the intersection, was something that didn’t match the pavement.  It almost looked like a dusty green.  I started jogging – into the oncoming traffic.  Holy Hell.  It was our concert t-shirts.  They were completely flat, having been run over several times in the past 8 hours or so.  They were also soaking wet from the storms the prior night.  But as I peeled them off the pavement and shook them out, we realized they were 100% fine.  No damage, no rips or mis-shaping.  Clearly, I had let them slip off my arm during our walk back to the hotel following the show.

That day my sense of optimism peaked and I felt a keen belief that sometimes, just sometimes, the forces of the universe align to help you out.  Not always in big, seismic ways, but in ways that give you just that little bounce in your step or belief in fate.

Now I would love to tell you that this Jason Isbell Concert t-shirt has since been my favourite, one I wear weekly, but that would be false.  It turns out trippy patterns on heathered-sage isn’t my first go-to.  But on the occasions when I put it on, it always makes me smile.