A week ago Friday I got six inches chopped off of my hair. It was a considered decision in that I had been thinking casually about it for some time, and a snap decision in that I was surprised to find myself telling my hairdresser exactly what I wanted him to do. My hairdresser worked at a nuclear power plant for years, pushing buttons and making measured decisions until he could no longer resist the lure of cosmetology school. He has been a hairdresser for an equal number of years, and if I think that I, as an attorney, keep secrets and counsel people through hard times, I have nothing on him. All of which is to say  this:  He is a man familiar with those decisions that are a weird amalgam of considered and snap, and he wants to make sure that they are more of the former and less of the latter. So with my head leaning backward, chin pointing to the ceiling, still-long hair sudsing, I found myself on the receiving end of a miniature psychological examination, hairdresser-style, about exactly why I wanted a drastic haircut.

I had not really thought about the why, so even I was curious about my answer, which turned out to be “It’s just not me these days.” This answer earned me the haircut, which I loved ferociously for the 90 seconds it took me to walk from the front door of the salon to my car. When I pulled down the visor and looked in the mirror, I nearly burst into tears. What had I done?

As I drove home from the salon, I thought about a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Bernice Bobs Her Hair,” and on the drive, I had convinced myself that the moral of the story was that Bernice suddenly felt liberated by her shorn locks, sure-footed in her path, and ultimately more confident and beautiful. But I have noticed a real problem in a 28 year hiatus from reading a story, and that is that I tend to forget exactly what happened. Chris apparently does not, for when I walked in and exclaimed, “Bernice Bobs Her Hair,  baby!,” he said, “Don’t be silly. You look a whole lot better than Bernice did.”

What?

A trip to the bookshelf and a discreet read later, I realized that I had gotten it all wrong. Bernice visits her cousin Marjorie and laments the lack of male attention. Marjorie tells her to engage the men, and Bernice obliges by telling them all that she is going to bob her hair and that they should come watch. Soon Bernice’s dance card is full; Marjorie simmers jealous and ignored in a corner; and Marjorie calls Bernice’s bluff. Bernice bobs her hair. And it looks terrible.

In my circumstances, I liked my version better.

I have been thinking a lot lately about being a woman in general, and a middle-aged woman in particular. It started a few weeks ago when I saw on Facebook a video version of “This is My Fight Song.” I find it a genuinely awful song, but I could not help myself: It had smiling celebrities and bright colors and quick cutaway shots, all to the end of being a musical version of a Little Debbie Swiss Cake Roll. (I devoured it quickly. I could not help myself. And I felt slightly sick after.) But at one point, Eva Longoria grabs the mic, and she shouts, “CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW?” I recognized the tone in her voice, the flash in her eyes. She was angry. I burst into tears. And I wondered why I was angry, too.

About a week later, I read an essay about why women drink, written by a woman who had quit drinking. She discussed the plight of the modern-day woman and referred to an Enjoli commercial that I memorized, loved, sang, and danced to in the mid-70s: I can bring home the bacon/Fry it up in a pan/And never let you forget you’re a man/Because I’m a woman. After a brief reenactment of that commercial in my office, voice in tune and imaginary frying pan in hand, I continued reading. The essayist wrote about the wine culture in women (apparently every birthday card she could find for a friend referenced wine), the escapism brought about by drinking, and her own experience on a panel at work, where men dramatically recharacterized her job and her role and the company, glossing over the hard parts. She wrote that she wanted to yell, “Don’t tell me how to feel!”

And just for fun, I have thought about how women report feeling invisible as they age. I had read this before, and I did not know exactly why, and then the game changed: In the last six months, I have fallen victim to middle-aged weight gain.

I thought that my body and I had entered into an uneasy truce: I would eat right and exercise, and it would stay the same. So I upheld my end of the bargain, getting up every morning to take care of it, eating plenty of fruits and vegetables, unstrapping the feed bag at the right moment. But in the last six months, it has gained eight pounds. Eight pounds despite Pilates and dance classes and weights and spin. Eight pounds despite portion control and lots of spinach and only one square of dark chocolate per day. Eight pounds! Apparently, as women’s bodies age and estrogen levels drop, their bodies develop a coping mechanism: an average weight gain of ten pounds, mostly in the middle, since fat produces estrogen.

And here it all was, waiting for me to unpack: anger, not being heard, being told how to feel, feeling invisible, being betrayed by my body. It’s enough to make a girl want to reach for a glass of wine — except that I don’t drink much these days, since it feels like poison.  It may even be enough for a girl to blame the patriarchy. But I don’t. I thought about times that I have wanted to yell, “CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW?,” and in most of those times, I thought about how I bit my tongue. Perhaps the first step toward being heard is simply speaking up. I thought about the essay about drinking, and I thought about how that problem really wasn’t only a woman’s problem. I have known plenty of men caught in the cross-hairs of competing societal expectations, men who wallow in their own bouts of unhappiness, men who are being told what to do and what to feel. And I thought about those damn eight pounds.

About half of my clothes still fit. The other half — clothes bought during bouts of extreme stress, clothes bought as aspirational sizes, clothes bought even if slightly too tight — hung in my closet, scathing indictments each one. (Of what?, I wondered. Of my inability to escape biology?) But I continued to hold on. I should mention here that I become attached to my clothes, even to the point that I name many of them. There is, for instance, The Kitten Dress (a velvet leopard print jumper that is 15 years old), The Picnic Skirt (an enormous round skirt made from an old red and white checked tablecloth), The Flapper (a black knit dress with sewn-on pearl necklaces). How could I bag up old friends?

And then it hit me. I decided to throw the clothes a retirement party, where I would toast each discarded piece, think about the good times we had, and envision a new, better life, complete with time for it to pursue other interests having been released from my service. I came awfully close to serving up champagne, but in addition to the inevitable headache, I figured that drinking in my closet at 11:08 on a Saturday morning might be the final straw in Chris’ picture of my good mental health. The Kitten Dress, The Picnic Skirt, The Flapper stayed. The Rubik’s Cube Skirt, Amy Lee in the Rain (a black trench), The French Secretary (a grey sweater vest), Baby Aspirin (a cotton cardigan) did not. The pile grew. My anxiety subsided.

Surrounded by my vestments, my armor, I caught sight of myself in the mirror. Yes, there was slightly more of me, and as much as I tell myself that it just means more of me to love, more of me to contain all this awesomeness, it still stings. But I am not angry. I can be heard. I can speak up. I can wear these bright clothes with funny names. I can dance. I can shake my shorn hair, unencumbered by the old. I can be more visible than I ever was before, unafraid to speak my mind and act like myself. And all of this, my friends, is a lot.

ALC

P.S. — I started this blog in September 2014, and this is my 100th post. From the bottom of my heart, thank you all so much for reading. It has meant so much to me.

And as it turns out, the long hair really wasn’t me these days.

 

Shortly after I woke up last Friday morning, I learned that a friend from high school had died from a brain hemorrhage the day before. I knew him the way that I knew almost everyone from Moultrie: through school, yes, but also through church and his family. His older sisters had been some of my babysitters, and his father handled my mother’s divorce. During the time of that messy disengagement, he began driving a new BMW, whose provenance my mother strongly suspected. The last time I saw him was in 2005, at our 20^th high school reunion. When he found out that Chris and I had booked a hotel room, he said that that was nonsense: We were always welcome at his parents’ house. This seemed preposterous at first. Then I thought what would have happened if I had actually shown up at their home, suitcase in hand, hungry, and in need of lodging.  He, of course, was right. His parents would have welcomed me with open arms and open refrigerator, even if they had drowsily murmured, as they drifted off to sleep, about the oddity of my appearance. But this is how it is with parents and children, your family and their friends.

I have thought about his death a lot over the last week. He was 49, three months shy of 50, and his passing was a little too close to home age-wise. It seems an almost personal affront (how could someone die without warning?) and an all-too-sad fact of life (people die without warning all the time). I am heartbroken for his parents; he was their baby, and their only boy, and I think that any parent will tell you that surviving a child is her worst nightmare, hands down. And 31 years after high school, and 11 years after the class reunion, I had an unbelievable urge to drive to Moultrie, attend his funeral, and hug his parents’ necks. Tightly. For they (at least according to the obituary) were welcoming friends at their home, instead of a formal visitation.

But I could not attend the funeral, and as it was being held, I was sitting in the Atlanta airport, which was its own sort of purgatory. As CNN blared in the speaker over my left ear, I said a prayer for his family, and I checked a little too frequently the weather in Moultrie, where it was 91 and sunny, a typical August day. Knowing the weather was an odd comfort, and somehow mentally took me where I needed to be. At that moment, though, I was coming home from where I needed to be over the last few days, which was visiting my own parents, my brother, and my sister. My mother turned 71 on Tuesday, which prompted the trip.

Notes are fine. Cards are great. Packages in the mail are bit of serendipity. Flowers are an expensive way to say that you forgot to get anything in the mail on time. But there is nothing like being there. A few years ago, I thought about what to get my mother for her birthday, and it occurred to me that she is a woman with too much, possession-wise: Her cup overfloweth and runs out the door until it floods the street. So like Dick Cheney, who headed a vice-presidential search campaign only to determine that he would make the best vice-president, I looked all around and after extensive study, I determined that the best gift was me. And if my own selection committee erred, well, my mother keeps her mouth shut, and together we perpetrate that fiction. While she pretends to be surprised that I am flying up for her birthday these days, I don’t think she feigns the delight.

I am happy to see her for her birthday, for that means that she is celebrating another year alive. She almost died a decade ago. By “almost died,”  I do not mean that she was simply very sick. No, I mean that her cardiologist told me, while we toweled off after a hard swim, “I thought that your mother was going to die.” Perhaps this was not the pool-side manner that they taught her in medical school, but I appreciated her candor.

The pool is one of a few things that I remember well from that week-long stay with my mother during a very cold January. I had flown up to take care of her after her hospitalization. I was in my late 30s, tired and impatient, and damn near perfect — all of which compelled hard workouts to make me tolerable. So every afternoon, when my mom was secure and could spare me, I headed to the pool to swim. I had access to one pool: an outdoor one, with an inflatable white bubble covering it. True to its appearance, it was like swimming in an igloo. The water temperature can be charitably described as polar. Even better, the fresh water feed came on intermittently, and as I would flip turn off the wall, its arctic blast would make me scream underwater. (This detracted from the crying.)

The pain of getting out of the pool nearly equaled the pain of jumping in the pool in the first place, and I drove back to her house shivering uncontrollably every single day. One day, with hair still slightly wet and reeking of chlorine, I took my mother to the cardiologist, who extended an invitation to train with her in an indoor pool in a heated, permanent space; I leaped at the opportunity. Which is where I learned about the true gravity of the situation.

While I remember well the swimming, I remember most something that I would rather not: I spent a lot of the week glowering at my mother, barely feigning kindness, for I was angry. I love her so much, yet she had been so very careless with her health. If I could change anything about that time — anything — I would not ask for a gold-plated pool with an ambient air temperature of 80 degrees and towel warmers. I would ask myself to show some compassion. I would ask myself simply to accept.

It is hard sometimes to do. Especially — and unfortunately — with the people you love the most.

I sat in a CPR class for three hours yesterday.  I teach spin classes at a hospital gym in town, and while the Code Blue button and an AED are steps away, quick action during cardiac arrest is crucial. So I certify for basic life saving every two years, and every two years, these classes scare the crap out of me. I will tell you now that if I ever have to deliver CPR, I will do so well and competently as a massive amount of adrenaline courses through my body and I yell OH MY GOD! OH MY GOD! There is even money that I will require CPR when I finish delivering CPR. My mother was on my mind, as she often is, and pushing aside my fears, I asked question after question about how to adapt care for someone in her circumstances.

Since the class was held at the hospital where I teach, the instruction was geared to a hospital setting. Part of it centered on team dynamics. That portion of the video showed an emergency room awaiting the arrival of a patient in cardiac arrest. A physician told people what to expect and what to do: (Pointing) you will do compressions for two minutes, (pointing) you will do rescue breathing, and (pointing) you will do the AED. He continued: Know your limits, and if at any time, you tire, let everyone know so that we can help. And he finished: If you see anyone who is not performing correctly to save a life, tell them calmly and kindly. This scene was staged, not real, but the hospital employees, my CPR classmates, told me that it was accurate.

So here is basic life saving for you: Be prepared. Assess the situation, work with it, and apprise what you simply cannot change. Know your limitations. Ask for help if you need it. Remain calm and kind. For someone who struggles to accept — a friend’s death, a mother’s carelessness with her health — it was a much-needed shot to the heart.

ALC

If you have barely given a moment’s thought to my garden this summer, then you are not alone. I have kept it watered (sort of), and weeded (barely), and mowed (mostly). Yet it survives. Alas, the mower has not, and its imminent departure from my life makes me sad.  Chris and I bought it at Lowe’s for $79 in the summer of 1993, right after we moved into our first home and became saddled with responsibility. (This sentence makes me laugh as I type it, imagining what responsibility felt like in the summer of 1993 to two newlyweds with no children, no dog, no garden, just a small bungalow, a small mortgage, and a cheap mower.) For about a decade, one of the wheels has wobbled wildly, barely tethered to the body with a screw, and a few weeks ago, it finally realized its desperate bid for freedom. Since we are southern, and since there is plenty of dirt poor in both of our backgrounds, the three-wheeled lawnmower remained on blocks for longer than I care to admit. Chris said he put it on blocks to survey the damage, and even though the metal itself had sheared, to find a replacement bolt, but I like to think of the lawnmower’s lying in state, on a pedestal, for one last sorrowful pass by its adoring fans.

And now, I am sad to report, we are on the hunt for a new lawnmower. No doubt they do not make $79 lawnmowers like they used to.

In addition to watching the demise of the mower, I have spent some time this summer pondering the Mystery of the Fish Pond. Last year I dug the pond myself, which may explain why the fountain sits slightly crooked in its center, and purchased three goldfish from a local pet store. The fish were like puppies, swimming to the side at feeding time. One day a friend offered water hyacinths from her pond, at my favorite price (free!), and despite scooping them out of the most terrifying koi pond I had ever seen, I placed them in my own.  You may be wondering how a koi pond can be terrifying, but this one was murky and dark, overpopulated and sinister, like a Disney villain had cast a spell. But lured by the free! part, I took some hyacinths, placed them in my pond, and found the lifeless bodies of two fish, the third MIA.

This was a job for Chris.

The next week, I bought two replacement fish from a tank that said “FEEDER FISH 29 CENTS.” Gone were the optimistic fish, the eager American of fish, and in their stead were two dour, furtive, and stoic fish – fish that seemed straight out of the Soviet bloc. These fish, one orange, one speckled, made themselves scarce, passing up the purchased fish food and surviving instead on bugs, algae, air, God knows what. One day, the orange one disappeared — no body, no explanation – and in his stead, another, completely different fish appeared. So I present to you the mystery of the fish pond: Is the completely different fish, in fact, one of the original fish? Is the orange fish waiting for his own resurrection? Do I have two fish, or do I have three?

One thing is for certain: The pond is now stocked with pollywogs. Life goes on.

But everything struggles in the heat, and somehow everything survives, and the pecan tree will bear fruit, and the nuts will bring the squirrels to the yard soon enough, and we will be overrun.  In preparation for the squirrels, I have purchased a squirrel-proof feeder (as if!) that is possibly bird-proof and nearly Amy Lee-proof. And I wait.

But what to do with my time? The heat has driven me indoors, and I have staked a flag in a room that used to be the children’s playroom that morphed into the town dump, and from the rubbish, I have envisioned a creative space just for me. A dead giveaway that it is just for me is the walls: They are pink, the color of my favorite handbag.

Although I typically shy away from relationship advice, I will dispense some now. If you ever need to purchase a gift for a woman you love, I recommend a bright, slightly extravagant purse. Not only will it please her, it will cause most of the rest of the female population – a group with a ruthless assessing eye for these things — to comment favorably. So it goes with this purse, a birthday gift from Chris a few years ago. When we are together and I am carrying the purse, women invariably compliment it; I allow that it was a gift from my husband; and the almost-certain reply is that he has very good taste. Whereupon Chris beams, and I behold the power of positive reinforcement.

But I digress.

I am excited about this pink room, and I am slightly afraid of this pink room, and I worry that what I create will simply not be good enough, or that my projects will be too frivolous, to justify the land grab. But I also keep thinking about two podcasts that I listened to on the journey last week  to the Concert that (figuratively) Made My Ears Bleed. One was about creativity. The take-away was that while everyone thinks that she is a creative genius, almost everyone has about average creativity. The geniuses — the outliers — tend to foment revolution and seek change. The rest of us are, apparently, content to sew, knit, and write in brightly colored rooms.

The second podcast was about Rick Barry, a basketball player who had an enormously high percentage, well into the 90s, at the free throw line. He did it by making his free throws using an underhand shot, or as I kept yelling, “A granny shot. He shoots a granny shot.” Indeed he did. Rick Barry even taught Wilt Chamberlain, a free throw shooter with a percentage in the 40s, how to shoot a granny shot, and for one brief and glorious season, the Stilt made free throws. There was a game in Hershey, Pennsylvania where Chamberlain made 100 points, and 28 out of 30 free throws, yet he abandoned the underhand shot. But Barry persisted where Chamberlain (and almost everyone else who plays basketball, except for Barry’s son) grew too embarrassed. Barry had a low threshold, comfortable in himself and what he was doing, with a low susceptibility to peer pressure and outside forces. He was the dude who shot a granny shot, and he was perfectly fine with it.

I loved both of these stories. The first one takes off the pressure: I am not here to revolutionize the world. The second one, my favorite one, salutes someone who clearly marches to his own beat. I have a friend who take ukulele lessons, others who dance. I know people who paint and throw clay on a wheel and make films. As I get older, I find that I need to be one of these people. I just need to create.

So what do you do when you feel like this? I think you do what you can. A tour guide in Paris described Monet as a double creator: He created the gardens, and then he created the paintings of the garden. I have the garden, and it was too hot to stand outside and paint. So I found a $10 black skirt at a consignment store, and I bought $10 in supplies, and I looked around the bright pink room for old buttons and thread and scraps, and I started to create the garden on a skirt. It is far from done, but here it is.

O

You can see the sun and the clouds. A bright red bird. The elephant ears. A giant flower. A string of lights. Ladybugs. A slightly crooked fountain. Goldfish, and in a fit of optimism, three goldfish. There will be a squirrel, and if I can figure out how, a woman in glasses and a straw hat. There may even be an old green mower, and there will be birdhouses. It will be wonky and strange and uneven and childish, but I will wear it without care. It is an imperfect project by someone of average creativity with a very low threshold indeed. But it will feed me. And that is good.

ALC

P.S. — A story that mentions a purse would not be complete without a photograph. Here is one, taken in February, where I am carrying it. Doesn’t Chris have very good taste?

I have come to expect certain things at my age. A strained and painful relationship with carbohydrates, simultaneously the love of my culinary life and the bane of my waistline’s existence. The term “pop and lock” referring to my knees, not my dance moves. An endless on/off loop with my glasses as I struggle to find my visionary sweet spot. What I did not expect at age 48 was that I would attend my first punk rock show. Which is what I did last night.

Wearing mall bangs and acid wash, I attended my first concert — Rick Springfield — with my cheerleading squad. (This is a quintessential 80s sentence, if ever there were one, and by the power of the internet, I have discovered that that concert was on August 4, 1983, with Quarterflash as the opening act.) While still in high school, I saw Rick Springfield again, a couple of years later; Chicago, with a high school boyfriend who sang every word in my ear (which may explain why I loathe Chicago now); and Hall and Oates with my brother and father (who got a migraine). I am still smarting at my mother’s refusal to let me see The Go-Gos, a decision that continues to strike me as fundamentally unfair over three decades later. I attended the Budweiser Super Jam on a hot day in Albany, Georgia, a show that featured Jermaine Jackson and New Edition in the awkward period after Bobby Brown left and before three members became Bell Biv Devoe. (Now you know.)

And then I went to college in Athens, Georgia, in the late 1980s, and I moved to Savannah, Georgia in the early 1990s, and both have been rich veins of live music. Last year I went to see the Rolling Stones, and I drug my 70 year-old mother (and her walker) to a Very Motown Christmas, featuring original members of the Temptations and the Miracles. For the last 33 years, I have seen my share of live performances of pop, rock, alt, bluegrass, zydeco, swing, country, jazz, lounge, R & B, and even folk.

But I repeat. I had never been to a punk rock show. Which is what I did last night.

For his birthday in May, my daughter’s boyfriend received two tickets in the pit for a Blink-182 concert in Atlanta, featuring opening acts DJ Spider, All-American Rejects, and A Day to Remember. (I knew you’d want to know.) My daughter and he are each 17, and having tickets to a concert three and one-half hours a way is a slightly different proposition than having a way to attend that concert. So knowing that 1) I have a wonderful daughter, 2) she has a terrific boyfriend, and 3) Chris is a big Blink-182 fan, I asked if they would like for us to take them. They took us up on the offer, and I bought two tickets.

The four of us ended up doing this as a single day proposition, a road trip that lasted exactly 13 hours, which somehow made it feel more epic. Since I am a mother, and I have a camera phone, I felt compelled to take an official photo. So here we are, at 2 p.m. yesterday afternoon:

(If this photo appears to you upside down, it is not purposefully punk. It is just the sign of an inept computer user.)

The trip went smoothly, and we tormented the kids with podcasts for a few hours, and I like to tell myself that they learned something — which may be to hide the CD with podcasts on it before the doors lock. But I eventually relented, and we listened to some of the songs by the bands that we were going to see. We arrived without a hitch, just as the All-American Rejects took the stage. (No one was sad to have missed DJ Spider. Bless his little arachnid heart.) We left our daughter, my cash, and her boyfriend at the merchandise table, only to be entrusted with $120 worth of T-shirts (which is to say, three) when they stopped by our seats on the way to the pit.

So the Rejects sang, and in between songs, the lead singer mostly cursed, gratuitously and inartfully detonating F-bombs to the point that I wanted to jump on stage, give him a hug, and say, “There, there. No need to try so hard. You are among friends.” But perhaps I was mistaken, for I saw a fellow concert-goer with both middle fingers in the air, rhythymically shooting the bird, elbows up and bending and straightening for the entire 30 minute set.

At this point, I think it is incumbent upon me to impart a few pro tips. First, if the music press bills a band as “pop punk,” you should know this: The band that you hear on the radio is pop, and the band that you hear at the concert is punk. Going to a punk concert led to warnings being flashed frequently:

HIGH FIVES, EXPECTED. PUNCHES, NOT ACCEPTED.

and

IT’S OKAY TO ROCK OUT. IT’S NOT OKAY TO BLACK OUT.

(You will be pleased to know that I rocked out, not blacked out, and that I punched no one.)

Second, you only think that you have heard loud music. If Nigel in This Is Spinal Tap! had a speaker that went to 11, Travis Barker in Blink-182 built a speaker that went to 432. And that’s a conservative estimate.

Third, if you are 48, you can expect to see exactly eight people at a punk concert who are your age and older. I counted. To be fair, I saw most of them at the “Wine Oasis,” a slightly barricaded vendor, with its own barricaded deck, in the middle of the refreshment area.

Fourth, no one uses cigarette lighters any more. In a safer, and perhaps more beautiful move, everyone waves cell phones, flashlight app on. It looks like fireflies, as this picture shows:

Finally, there is no need to agonize about what to wear. Although we threatened our daughter with mom and dad jeans, crop tops, and trucker hats, there was no way that we could keep up with our fellow concert-goers’ kilts, mohawks, cargo shorts, and cut off jeans that fit like denim underpants, and there was no way we would fool anyone into thinking that we were hard core fans. So I wore noted counter-culture designer J. Crew. And if you were dressed as Chris was (starched white shirt, khaki shorts, white Chuck Taylors), you will be the most noticeably different dresser there. Which is kind of punk in itself.

Chris’ punkdom may have been what prompted a question from the couple in front of us after the first band played. Bands select the music between the sets, and I sang along vigorously to “Baby Got Back” (Sir Mix-A-Lot) and “Low Rider” (War), and sort of mumbled along to “Bulls on Parade” (Rage Against the Machine), and then got lost completely as the music grew more angry, modern, and loud. At the point that I had abandoned all hope of singing along, a young woman turned around and asked me, “What is this song?” And her boyfriend turned around and said, “Do you know these people? Why are you bothering them?” But me, I loved the fact that someone thought that I might know.

The second band came on, and after the benefit of splitting a $14 Heineken with Chris, I embraced the loud music and jumped around and moved my arms in the air — only to see that two young couples were looking at me and laughing. At the time, I felt slighted, but in retrospect, I can see the sheer comedy in seeing someone who could be your mother — gingham skirt swinging, pink bracelets bobbing, silver Chuck Taylors flashing — acting like she wanted to crowd surf.

Finally, Blink-182 took the stage. As the band played my favorites, the Most High Maintenance Girlfriend in the Entire World, attached to the right arm of the man standing next to me, would yell and pantomine, “Can you take our picture?” I wanted to yell back to him, “You really have your hands full with that one!,” but mentally acknowledging that his life was probably hard enough, I kept my mouth shut and snapped photos. So between singing along, acting as the official event photographer for the Most High Maintenance Girlfriend in the Entire World, going into momentary cardiac arrest during the pyrotechnics, listening to normally fast songs played at double time, and nervously scanning the pit to ensure that my daughter was not being tossed like a beach ball, the concert moved quickly to its end, and the crowd demanded an encore. As its very last song, the band sang

All the small things, true care truth brings

(And shot off fireworks)

Always I know you’ll be at my show/Watching, waiting, commiserating

(And shot off giant cannons of pink confetti)

Say it ain’t so, I will not go/Turn the lights off, carry me home.

When Chris and I met our daughter and her boyfriend near the entrance, I saw her face, and I remembered exactly why I had done this: Her normally beautiful features were alight, and her always beautiful voice sounded like a song. For the next four hours, in the back of the car, she slept a little and woke excitedly and slept a little more. And to Chris and I fell the time-honored job of parents: To stay vigilant and shepherd everyone home. As the two of us drove in the darkness, singing to calmer songs and hoping that the hearing loss was only temporary, I asked him questions to keep him awake. The questions were insignificant, but I had the not insignificant thrill of hearing a few stories that I had not heard in our 30 years together. The hour was late, but we had had late drives before, and both of us recalled how good it felt to be a child asleep in the back of our parents’ cars on long trips at night. We talked of our childhoods, and our daughter’s childhood, and of our future as a family. And I had a glimpse, years into the future, of my daughter dragging me into a Very Rick Springfield Christmas (walker and all) and asking me if I remembered my first punk rock show.

ALC