I took Cody to the Amtrak station Thursday evening for his sendoff to the Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago, with a trip out to Portland to see my mom/visit a couple of colleges to follow. We lugged his stuff - he packed light on clothes but heavy on technology - to the ticket window and found out the train was running late. I’ll hang out until 8, I said. That’s fine, he replied.

So I did. I hung out until 8. They have a flat panel teevee in the station now; some of the people waiting for the train to Chicago sat slackjawed watching CNN. Others played with their phones. Cody and I played with our phones and talked about the rather offensive “health care” ads CNN was running. It was the ads, actually, that drove me out of the station at 8, but I could also see out of the corner of my eye that a couple other festival-goers Cody knew had spotted him and, you know, why get in the way?

In keeping with the festival theme, Jim and I watched Woodstock: The Director’s Cut over the weekend. I’d never seen it (I know!), but I’ve seen so much performance footage from Woodstock that I wasn’t sure I’d been missing anything. Turns out I was pretty wrong. Canned Heat! The Who! Santana! Richie Havens looking/sounding like a giant Jose Gonzalez crossed with Tom Jones!

So. Cody has Pitchfork (hardly capturing the zeitgeist [is there even such a thing any more? Can you have a zeitgeist to capture when everything is in your face at all times?], but still a return to non-traveling festivals); my parents had Woodstock (they didn’t go, but that whole generation claims it, I grew up on the music and its influence AND it really did capture the zeitgeist of that approximate moment in time). That leaves me with early 90s Lollapalooza, which was nothing like either of these festivals.

1994 was a weird time for formerly-small/indie-in-spirit music, having lost Kurt Cobain just a few months prior. You could definitely sense things shifting and changing, though into what was anyone’s guess. No one was giving much thought to the internet except for Courtney Love’s ramblings in the Velvet Rope folder on AOL. (I didn’t find an archive after a cursory search, but back then a friend in California had access to this mysterious AOL and would fax - FAX! - me pages of Ms. Love’s postings. I’m sure I still have them)

I went to Lollapalooza that year representing a Chicago magazine, though obviously not as a photographer:

Flaming Lips played the second stage, did an amazing cover of Queen’s “Under Pressure” (I’d link you, but I can’t find any good audio), and had a plain old bubble machine instead of putting Wayne in a bubble.

Cody, who was not with me that day, had just turned two.

We’re on limited $$ rations (well, more limited than usual) due to camp fees and doctor co-pays and things of that nature, things that always seem to happen at the same/wrong time, so we’re cooking from the freezer/fridge as much as possible. This used to be SOP chez B-K, but with full-time work and lassitude and, yes, laziness, we’ve come to the point of too-full fridge, too-full freezer.

With Lilly off at Cousins Camp last week (this is a week-long sleepaway camp hosted by Jim’s parents and attended by a total of 5 cousins ages 11, 10, 10, 7, and 7), we did not go through the Saturday Market nectarines the way we usually do. Another day in the fridge and the two week-old fruit would become compost, so I cranked out a half-dozen “rustic” (read: quite imperfect) nectarine tartlets with what was left. Good god. It’s been ages since I’ve done something like that, since I’ve made food with what was already there, not needing to go out for a special ingredient or mess around too much with… whatever. They were easy. Jim made Caprese salad sandwiches (fresh mozzarella, leftover tomato, leftover pesto, basil leaves on baguette from Mirabelle) for dinner, the two of us (Cody at a photo shoot and Lilly at musical practice), and then we had a bike ride and came home and had dessert.

We have never NOT had children - we began hanging out when Cody was two and-a-half.

As it turns out, I rather like his company. And he likes my tartlets.

We’re all in, summerwise. July denotes the beginning of 5 months’ worth of celebrations - we started with Cody’s 17th birthday on 2 July and will observe our wedding anniversary, Jim’s birthday, my birthday, and Lilly’s birthday, in August, September, October, and November, respectively - and we’re sure to have other random neighborhoody get-togethers, not the least of which will be the Third, Fourth, or Fifth Annual B-K Dessert Potluck in early August.

We looked forward, all winter and spring, to the weather’s eventual improvement precisely so we could have people over. I didn’t grow up in a family that had people over with any regularity - nay, even visits from relatives were rare, especially after we moved to what surely appeared to be the frozen tundra to all of our Florida-based relations - and having friends over was also a rare occurrence. I’m a deeply social person and love nothing more than a good mashup of all our friends in their different permutations, and have been gratified to discover that the guy I married is also down for these endeavors. While he he’s never been antisocial, it’s only in the last several years that we’ve had largeish impromptu gatherings in addition to one or two planned blowouts each summer.

I’ll admit that the planned blowouts were much easier to handle when I wasn’t working full-time, especially since I now work on Saturdays from 4:30 AM - about 1:30 PM, and have to carve out time to make food when really, I should be taking a nap. Jim has taken on most of the other work, especially for the impromptu gatherings, but at the same time I feel some guilt (?) and definitely some resentment about work sucking up all my energy (because, frankly, it does). I think I’m moving into a different phase of my life - I know I’ve alluded to it - and it’s all tangled up in the kids getting older (17 and almost-11? HOW DARE THEY?) and me trying to realign the constellation.

I got my first non-babysitting job when I was 14 years old. I was a turkey leg wench at the Renaissance Festival for at least one and possibly two seasons; the job started out hot and humid in mid-August and ended frosty-like the last weekend September, and was the only way a kid my age could earn good money on the weekends. After making a few hundred bucks over 6 weekends, I was pretty sold on working. Let’s just say I was never much of a babysitter, anyway. Other summer or other non-career, non-parenting jobs I have held:

- house painter - convenience store operator - movie theater schlep - community education art intern - games operator at Valleyfair - pastry seller - barista - diner waitress - schmancy waitress - cocktail waitress - record store clerk - candy maker - temp (oh, the temping positions I have held! Very weird!)

What kind of non-career, summer-type jobs have you held?

In terms of “career” jobs, I’ve either worked in the music business as a sales rep, a buyer, a publicist/A&R type for a record label, or as a journalist (that last was freelance, unpaid, and my flakiness at the time definitely worked against me), or I’ve worked in the food business in non-profit, a cooperative setting, or in a municipality running a large farmers’ market. My career, such as it is, has been short thus far due to doing my rather rudderless thing after graduating -> having kids and staying home with them -> and it’s all been frosted with a commitment to working for small businesses/nonprofits/government. Basically, I’m pretty much resigned to the fact that I’ll likely be working (or looking for work) outside the home for the rest of my life, and I’m of mixed mind about it. I like earning money and I like having health insurance, but I miss my freedom, or what amounted to freedom back when I was home with the kids. I remind myself that while my time was mine (well, mine and theirs), there wasn’t very much money and there was a whole lot of stress, and neither were particularly freeing. But I must work, and in these times, I’m especially grateful for my job. I just don’t want to BECOME my job.

Back when I was 21 and just out of college, I couldn’t identify -at all - with the concept of a midlife crisis. I still think it’s a luxury, a navel-gazey Hallmark creation wrought out of Western ennui. But I can now see how one’s forties, while liberating in so many ways, can also be perplexing. And I’m perplexed. Benevolently, but perplexed nevertheless.