Once a friend and I settled in on a cramped patch of grass to see Ben Harper and the Innocent Criminals. While we waited for the act to start, a high-school-age girl leaned across a couple of other people, pointed to her boyfriend, and said to me, “He wants to take your picture. Is that OK?” I am not typically accosted by the paparazzi, and she must have detected my puzzlement. “He wants to be like you when he grows up,” she said.
Then I remembered I was a 50ish guy in a sea of younger people, a gray-haired “aging hipster,” as my daughter calls me, in a Johnny Cash T-shirt amid bronzed prime-of-life kids. It was a rock festival, after all. I awkwardly but happily posed for the commemoration of the moment.
About halfway through the set, Harper and his band were cooking red hot. I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was the boyfriend. “This is real, man!” he yelled over the pounding music and raucous applause. “We are really here!” I gave him a thumbs-up. The girl beamed.
When the show was over, we gathered our backpacks and water bottles. I told the teenagers, “Thanks for helping to make this a fun evening.”
The girl nodded, but the boy vigorously shook his head and sputtered, “No, man! Thank you for being alive!”
I chose to take it as the compliment it was intended to be. In summer, with good music, good friends and sweet strangers, just being alive is joy enough. And you know what Barth said about that: “Joy is really the simplest form of gratitude.”
