Sunday
It’s Sunday night and our first proper snowfall of the season. Light, fluffy flakes are drifting down like something straight out of a snowglobe in a Hallmark Christmas movie, and while we know traffic is going to be a mess in the morning, that reality isn’t yet relevant. Everyone forgets how to drive the first time it snows. That, or they’ve decided the first snowfall is their time to shine as a budding F-1 driver. Much like our weather, the people here tend to do things in extremes.
Despite both these things, there’s a half-dozen friends of mine here at this bar with me. I’ve dragged one of them here before to, similarly, see a band she was entirely unfamiliar with. I think half the people who came out tonight had really short notice in that I absolutely did not for a second think that “hey, the band I haven’t shut up about for nine months is playing on a Sunday night, you should come” would actually, you know, work. (I’ll be honest, it would probably be a hard sell for me! I’m firmly in the camp of “asleep before 10pm”.) But here we all are, and I couldn’t be more glad of it.
Just before the show starts (when my friends finally arrive, love to them all: punctuality isn’t a skill any of them possess individually, and collectively it is often worse) I make a quick dash to the merch table to snap a photo of the offerings. I’ve promised people I met at the Vancouver show back in August the opportunity to do some cross-Canada show shopping. What I don’t know at the time is that it’ll take me six weeks to mail out the packages. I’ll also quickly relearn the lesson of “when shipping anything across Canada that isn’t a letter, just use the flat rate box.” What I also don’t know at the time is that one of the packages will wind up coming with me to Vancouver when I head back in May for in-person delivery after an address mixup. But I digress!
When Urban Heat goes on, my attention is split between the band and my friends. I’m watching this group of people dancing, smiling, and singing along and my heart is so, so full. Somewhere in the middle of the set I take a moment to appreciate how much my life has changed since April 2023. In April, if you’d told me I’d be able to get several friends out to a Sunday night concert for a band they only knew about from me frequently talking about them, I wouldn’t have believed you. Hell, I wasn’t even back in contact with 90% of the people here last April.
It feels a little bit surreal. And this is a memory – even in the moment – I know I’ll be holding onto for a long while yet.
Monday
I’m sitting in a café just up the street from the venue, staring at my phone in utter confusion and mounting panic. Jonathan Horstmann, frontman of Urban Heat, has just left after our interview (and has directions to my favourite doughnut shop in the city (which he discovered is also right next to a tattoo parlour)), and the “I’m here,” text I was expecting from the friend who is bringing me to the airport has just arrived. Except she isn’t… here.
Correction: she is “here”. Except for me, “here” means the café and for her “here” means the airport. You might be wondering how we got here – I sure was!
Dove, bless her heart, offered me a lift to the airport for my Monday morning flight to Philadelphia. We had the perfect plan: I crash at her place after the show, go to the interview, and she meets me at the cafe – with my luggage – to bring me to the airport so that I don’t need to lug my stuff around. Smart and considerate, right? Right. She’s wonderful.
Remember that perfect snowfall I mentioned? The one right out of a snowglobe? The magical kind we lived for as kids and that still brings a bit of wonder with it as adults? That snowfall? “ I can’t believe how much it’s snowing,” Jonathan commented at one point, “like it hasn’t stopped.”
He was right, it hadn’t stopped since the night before. Traffic was bad, yes, but possibly worse was the “hey so my car is stuck,” text I got midway through the interview. That car is how I’m catching my flight. That car is where my luggage is. Dove takes charge of this situation – I can only focus on one thing at a time just then. While “how are you getting to the airport?” should have been of greater concern, not losing my train of thought while speaking with the musician who agreed to meet me on a day off from tour is what’s occupying most of my brain.
Dove suggests Uber. This makes sense to me. She’ll get an Uber with my bag. Okay great, I think, that makes sense – she’ll get here with the Uber and we’ll then head to the airport. This was never said. This is what my brain understood.
A word of advice to anyone who might find themselves in a similar situation one day: take the five minutes to make the phone call and clarify how you’re getting to the airport!
If you don’t do that, it might go something like this: call an Uber at the time you thought you’d be on your way to the airport, give your friend who is waiting at Departures with your bag a really big hug (have a momentary flashback to your grandmother’s insistence years ago that absolutely nobody, not even friends, should touch your bag after you pack it – immediately box that thought up and store it away forever), and rush off to security.
Get through security and phew! Stress over, plenty of time to get to the ga – what do you mean you go through customs before landing in the US? What do you mean I have to clear customs before getting on the plane? I send the friend meeting me in Philly a serious “I might miss this plane,” message and then tell myself to breathe. Despite this setback, I make it to the gate – sweaty and more than slightly out of breath – with twenty minutes until boarding. Interestingly? Not the latest I’ve ever arrived. Definitely the most stressed I’ve ever been about it, though.
To top it all off? Laugh a little bit when your flight gets delayed for over an hour due to – yeah, you guessed it, that magical snowfall from the night before.
And then, finally, be immensely grateful when you’re in the air (and exhaustedly tell your brain to stop worrying about the plane crashing, but make sure there’s enough room to brace in either position regardless).
Want to keep up with Urban Heat? Check them out on TikTok , or find them on Instagram!
That’s all for this week! Until next time, stay cozy, and if you want to join your companions around the cauldron, signup for email updates below!
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