I left my show last Wednesday at How Bazar with the glow of love and gratitude. Maybe it was because it was my first solo show since my hospitalizations. Maybe because it had been so long since my last solo show. Maybe because I had tempered my expectations of turnout and my own performance. Probably all of these.

But mostly, I think this show was so special because of the people who came. My wife. My friends. My mom and her boyfriend. Family friends. My students. My colleagues. Special people who make Gainesville my home and suffuse the audience with deep meaning in a way I could not find in my shows in Taiwan or Thailand. These are the people I grew up with, who grew up with me, with whom I’ve shared years and years. The venue was literally standing room only. I counted forty seven people at intermission.

Some of the highlights:

• Singing the song my mother requested me to learn for her
• Singing a song I wrote about growing up in Gainesville while many of those same people I grew up with sat before me, listening, reading the lyrics, and referencing the drawings of those places from my book
• Sharing little stories of the songs and where I learned them with a truly invested audience
• Chatting with students for the first time in a long while, with one even having driven from Tampa
• Sharing my childrens music from Angibles with those same angibles on stage
• Displaying my artwork selected to hang at Falafel King, with one drawing and one photo from the nineteen countries of the Muslim world I have visited
• Watching my students re-connect with each other and with those of other generations—looking out into the crowd and seeing people in their late teens through their early eighties

I wish I’d been able to write more immediately after the show. This post is somehow missing the depth of gratitude I felt then. Suffice it to say that I feel so lucky to have survived (when sometimes in the past year I felt it would have been more convenient not to have), to have my wonderful community, and the wonder of being able to share my music and art and for people to enjoy these things. I do not know if I will have another show of this quality again, but chasing the feeling of this one will likely sustain me for many concerts to come.