From 10 to one, the most amazing things I have seen in this world

What are the most amazing things you've ever seen?

I'm not the world traveler my wife, my children or my parents are, but I have traveled enough and been enough places to have seen more of the world than a vast majority of Americans. When it comes to countries, I have been to Canada, Great Britain, France, Monaco, Italy, Austria, Greece, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, China, South Korea and French Polynesia.

The list I came up with included four natural sights, five man-made sights that are very old and one modern man-made event.

In reverse order from 10 to 1:

Yosemite

10. YOSEMITE -- One of the loveliest natural views in the world and the greatest of America's national parks, Yosemite has something for everyone. I spent three days there in 2004 when my wife and I took her sister and her husband on a three-week trip around California.

We saw a lot of beautiful places, but our time at Yosemite was clearly the highlight of the trip. I'm hoping to get back someday and to be in good enough shape to do a lot more hiking.

9. 1997 LAUNCH OF CASSINI -- The only modern work of man on my list. My wife spent most of her career working for NASA at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and she put in 20 years working on the Cassini-Huygens Mission to explore Saturn and its satellites.

In October 1997, Nicole and I and our son Virgile -- 12 at the time -- went to Florida for the launch at Cape Canaveral. The manned launches of the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs in the 1960s, and while I watched them on television, it would have been wonderful to be there.

The best part of the Cassini launch was that it took place at 3 a.m. The nearest spectators were about 10 miles from the gentry, but as a reporter I was only three miles away. The thing that put this on my top 10 list was that when the rocket left the gantry, the  fire from its engine turned a pitch-dark sky into high noon. As the rocket climbed higher and higher, the sky grew brighter until all of a sudden the dark swooped back in and it was the middle of the night again.

Definitely an amazing sight.

From 50 years ago, a lot of songs still resonate in the present

In the last couple of years, the music companies have been doing some interesting things in trying to fight back against the dominance of online companies like iTunes.

One that strikes me is a package of "5 Classic Albums" on compact disc for about $20, all by the same group. An awful lot of people buy the greatest hits packages, but it's a lot of fun sometimes to hear the original albums as we heard them back then.

Yesterday I picked up five early Beach Boys albums, although "Pet Sounds" is only an early album based on the fact it was released 48 years ago. It was actually one of their last great albums during their heyday, but it's all a matter of perspective.

The album I really wanted was "All Summer Long," their second album from 1964, which in the pantheon is almost a greatest hits collection in itself.

The collection starts out with the group's first No. 1 hit, "I Get Around," which Music.com rates as the 15th most popular song of the year in its combination of U.S. and U.K. charts.

You may recall that 1964 was a big year for the Beatles, who held the third, sixth and seventh slots on the chart.

They might have done even better except for the fact that "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" topped the 1963 charts due to its December 1963 release date in England.

"All Summer Long" includes "Hushabye," "Little Honda," "Wendy" and "Girls on the Beach" as well as the title song made famous in the 1973 movie "American Graffiti." That's a lot of meat on one bone, and there are six other cuts that are pretty good.

As popular as the Beach Boys were, they actually didn't have that many songs that reached No. 1 -- three in the '60s and one much later. After "I Get Around," only "Help Me Rhonda" and "Good Vibrations" topped the chart in the '60s, and "Kokomo" did the same in 1988.



There's one thing very strange about the way music hangs around these days. Listening to music from 1964 in 2014 is almost the same as listening to music from 1914 in 1964. Of course there's one big difference. Advances in the quality of recordings were much greater from 1914 to 1964 than they have been in the years since.

Burr

Songs that were recorded in 1964 can be made to sound as if they were new last week, although there are very few recordings from 1914 that are even remembered. Someone named Henry Burr had three of the top 10 recordings of the year. Burr, a Canadian, was one of the most prolific recording artists of all time with more than 12,000 recordings to his credit.

His top recording in 1914, which was second behind a comedy recording called "Cohen on the Telephone," was "The Song that Stole My Heart Away," and recordings of it on YouTube are about what you would expect from a hundred year-old recording.

That's progress, I suppose. Still, there's no way I would sit around listening to music from 1914. If there is any irony in all of it, it's that as I've gotten older I have started listening to big-band music from the '30s and '40s, music I never cared for when I was young.

We all grow up, we all get older.

And as we do, if we're fortunate, we discover so many wonderful things we never knew when we were younger.

The evening a 72-year old man's energy put me to shame

Paul in Atlanta

"The long and winding road ..."

I didn't think I would ever see Paul McCartney in concert. When the Beatles stopped touring, I was only 16 and had never been to a concert.

In 1976, when Paul was coming to the Capital Centre in Landover, Md., in the "Wings Over America" tour, the date of the concert turned out to be the very day I had to put my first wife on a plane for the start of a two-year tour in Austria.

I was going two months later, but I wasn't about to suggest that I see McCartney without her.

We went to a lot of big concerts in the '70s. I saw the Rolling Stones, Chicago, the Beach Boys, Crosby Stills Nash & Young, Loggins and Messina, the Eagles, Billy Joel, Jimmy Buffett, ELO and others.

But never McCartney. The last arena concert I saw was Bruce Springsteen in 1984 in St. Louis, and the last big concert of any kind was in 1989, when I saw Ringo Starr and His All-Starr Band at the California State Fair in Sacramento.

I was about to turn 40, and I figured the rock concert part of my life was pretty well finished. In 2010 we moved to Georgia and I didn't think that would change anything. A few more years passed, and all of a sudden I saw that Paul McCartney would be performing in Atlanta in June 2014.

One last chance?

I got two tickets, but before we had a chance to go, McCartney became ill and postponed that part of his tour. The Atlanta concert was changed from June 21st to October 15th. When the time came, my wife wasn't feeling up to going, so I went alone.

I read a review of the concert in Dallas two days earlier, and at least one part of it knocked me for a loop. The 72-year-old McCartney had performed for nearly three hours.

I'm eight years younger and I was pretty certain I couldn't sit through a three-hour concert. As it turned out, he didn't play for three hours. He played for three and a half hours, and I made it through only two thirds of it before I couldn't manage any more.



Of course I missed the wonderful stuff at the end, but it's stuff I have on CDs from other McCartney tours. What I heard was a great mix of the Beatles, Wings and Paul's later solo career. The opening number, "Eight Days a Week," brought a smile to my face, and the third one, "All My Lovin'," brought tears to my eyes.

Jeez, 1964.

Fifty years ago.

Two songs from the classic "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" album -- "Lovely Rita" and "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite" -- really touched me, because they were songs the Beatles never performed live.

I lasted for about two hours and 15 minutes and I had nothing left. I left right after Paul sang one of my favorite of his songs -- 1975's "Band on the Run." I hummed it all the way to the car and then played a McCartney CD on the way home.

I'm sorry I didn't last for the whole show, but definitely glad I made it at all.

It was well worth the wait.

Time passes, both good and bad, but we have to hang in

"If you live long enough, you will lose everyone you ever loved."

I don't know exactly when I first heard those words, but I do remember the first time they meant something to me. It was Thanksgiving 2008, a very"circle of life" year in my life.

In January I lost my job after 29 years in journalism. I probably deserved it, but my employer had sold out in 1999, and the next eight years were spent working for people I would never have chosen to be my bosses.

My parents in 2006

In March I lost my dad, who died at 82 after years of fighting various illnesses and medical conditions. When we buried him at Arlington National Cemetery, it was only the fourth family funeral I had attended -- two grandparents, a young nephew and my dad.

In September the wheel started turning when my first grandchild, Madison Nicole Kastner, was born in Beijing. And at Thanksgiving in Southern California, I learned that the oldest living American -- an Indiana woman -- had just died at the age of 115.

Six years later, I have forgotten her name, but I remember some of the facts. She lived in three different centuries -- the 19th, 20th and 21st. She was married once. Her husband died of a heart attack when she was only 38 and she never remarried. Seventy-seven years alone.