Sometimes, you take your history where you find it.

I had two interesting experiences last week. One was personal and one was, for want of a better term, historical.

The first was, of all things, a Bob Seger concert. Karon, my girlfriend, is a huge Seger fan and she’d never seen him, so we bought tickets for his performance Thursday at the Sprint Center in Kansas City, Mo. I’m not a huge Seger fan; I like him well enough, and I really like some of his songs, but he’s not ordinarily someone I’d pay to see in concert. But Karon is, as I said, a big fan, and since she really wanted to go I figured I’d at worst enjoy seeing her have a good time.

Well, it was a really good, solid concert. Seger sang most of his big hits (“Down on Main Street,” my favorite, was third on the set list). His band, some of whom have been with him for four decades, was solid and tight; the sax player was phenomenal.

But what impressed me most, as a former concert critic, was that the man really knew his audience. It’s been a few years since he had a big hit, so most of the concert was songs that have been on the radio for years.

What I found fascinating, though, was the crowd’s reaction. It was an older audience, which was one reason I enjoyed the concert; I get really tired of attending large events with people who are apparently having their first beer and there was none of that. The folks around us were friendly and into the music, but not so much that it hindered our enjoyment. A couple of middle-aged women two rows in front of us stood for virtually the entire thing, but they were far enough away that they didn’t really block our sight lines. And when they made the little hand sign, the forefinger and pinky, hook-‘em-horns thing that apparently means “rock ‘n’ roll,” it might have looked a little silly but it was no skin off my nose.

But it occurred to me, looking around that crowd and listening to the reaction, that part of what made the evening so fun was that it was simple, stripped-down, rock music. There was no light show. There wasn’t even a screen to show Seger to those of us sitting near the back (the venue isn’t all that large, so that was no big deal). Seger’s no Michael Jackson onstage, but his voice has held up really well, he’s a good pianist and guitar player, and his fans don’t go to his concerts to see him moonwalk across the stage.

But every time he sang a song, you could almost see the air grow thick with the memories of those in attendance. It was one of those shows where every note carries some sort of association for the fans. The couple next to us first saw Seger 25 years ago, and had been together for 32. When Seger sang something they liked, they were immediately a quarter-century younger, transported back for a few precious moments past the victories and regrets of the intervening years. As for me, when I heard “Down on Main Street,” I was suddenly a drunk 18-year-old talking to one of the dancers outside a strip joint in Eau Claire, Wis. (nothing untoward happened).

It was personal history at its best. And it occurred to me that the kind of concert experience we graybeards have in that situation must be totally different than that of the kids watching this week’s hot band. They are listening to the now, we are listening to the then. Our music may not be as hip or whatever. But it carries the freight of years for us and can be a fine, lovely thing.

The next day, Karon and I had a more conventional history experience. We went to the National World War I Museum in Kansas City. It was my idea – I’m a serious history geek – but Karon was interested in it too.

It’s a hell of a museum. It’s impossible to go through it without mourning the stupidity of the leaders who plunged the world into that war. And it really shows you what it was like to be there. There are mockups of trenches that soldiers fought in and over for two years, and there aren’t many worse ways to endure a war.

But again, it was the difference in our experiences that interested me. I knew a little about the war, being a geek, and it mostly reinforced and deepened my knowledge. But for Karon, one of whose sons spent a year in Iraq, it was a deeply personal, even shattering, experience. I looked at the uniforms on display and thought, “Gee, uniforms have changed.” She looked at them and thought about how they had clothed some other mother’s baby, and all too many of the people who wore those uniforms never came home. She saw the war as a mother; that’s a whole different experience from seeing it as a history geek. We talked about it a lot on the two-hour drive home, and it was fascinating to hear her perspective and see her almost palpable grief (and she is, by the way, not psychologically fragile). That a war that ended nearly a century ago can do that is a tribute to the quality of the museum. We’re planning on going back.

So two “historical” experiences, one happy, one deeply sad. It made for an interesting couple of days.