Call Your Mama, see if she wanna

Austin City Limits Music Festival has been a tradition for my Mom and I for a decade now. We recently enjoyed the festival just the two of us, unaccompanied by our usual tribe of audiophiles and raucous, drunken hippy chicks. It was just us two this year.

Between the two of us, we managed to get into more mischief than should have been possible. I tell you what, my mom turns into a fish after 10pm.

She's not one to ever be confined or controlled. She's always been an outsider and for a long time she was concerned about that. In her recent years, after enduring personal hardships and physical disablement, she's let some of that concern go.

And then, music...

She's a life long music lover, always devouring music and new musical styles with open-minded curiosity and a simple, comprehensive joy of tunes; loud, very loud. She's grown three children to adulthood and has embraced an incredible range of music on their behalf. And she still introduces us to new bands all the time!

This year at ACL we saw every band we wanted, hung on each other, descended into giggles, pulled at each other in wild dance moves, laid on our thin festival blanket just listening and smiling ear to ear. This is a beautiful version of who she is. Pure, unaffected, open to joy. She always has been.

We jammed out with glittered gay men, talked sense into the young overemotional, high-fived cool parents who bring their kids to concerts, picked up trash, licked nacho cheese off our fingers... Clearly we were unconcerned with hygiene. We laid on the dusty, dirty ground in Zilker Park, hand in hand, solving all the world's most pressing problems. And then we got up and did it again for 3 days total.

I can't say for sure if she's truly magic, though she has obvious sorcerous tendencies. Maybe she's wise and noble and a vessel of goodness. I can say for sure she's joy, plain and simple.

She's also a bloody handful to get up a steep hill to our place to stay. But, like all the other challenges we've faced together, we got there. A bit bruised and surprised and in need of hydration, but we got there.

There has never been nor will there ever be a person more loveable than my Mom. By all. By me.

Happy, happy birthday Mom!