Someone is Calling My Name from the Back of the Restaurant

Looking back at sunsets on the eastside
We lost track of the time
—“Smile Like You Mean It” from the Killers 2004 Hot Fuss album

The photo above was taken from the east side of the Las Vegas Valley. It was sent yesterday by an LDS missionary of my acquaintance who is serving in my hometown. As Brandon Flowers once told a Times reporter, “Have you been to Los Angeles? Well, our sunsets are better!” The large buildings below the mountain silhouette are hotels on the Las Vegas Strip. (Click on the photo for a larger image.) The leftmost of the buildings, the one showing two yellow-orange lights below the roofline, is the Mandalay Bay. Sometime between when the missionary snapped this lovely photo and when he sent it to me, perhaps hours after he took it if he did so the evening before sending it, a murderer from a room a little below the light on the right fired upon concert-goers across the street and below him.

Among my thoughts are pleasant memories of a summer Saturday night in 1983 at an open air concert behind Caesars Palace. Two and a half years later, then an LDS misionary myself, I sat down one evening in a home in the Patagonia, about 50 miles up the coast from the Magellan Strait, to watch live boxing matches on TV that were taking place in that same space. Between the undercard bouts and the main event, the broadcasters favored me with the sight of the sun setting behind Mt. Charleston. To see something so familiar as it was happening seven thousand miles away produced unanticipated longing.

At this sad time, having this photo from Elder Nyborg is valuable to me. In a certain way, so is the song linked above.