Free Bootstrapper: From Broke to Badass on a Northern Michigan Farm by Mardi Jo Link Page B

months ago I fancied myself the Victoria Barkley of the north, striding through my range-riding life. Today I’m sitting on my front porch, big toes poking out of wool socks, shelling beans into a jar. These changes happened so fast, it almost feels like time travel.
    And this day speeds by too, just like the others before it, but at four o’clock Owen bursts in the door, the first one home from school, grinning wide, his face flushed with excitement.
    “Aberration’s got a show!”
    His band has been invited to play “a show,” he says, this very night. Usually when my sons use terms I don’t understand I just give a nod and hone my ears, sure that an understandable meaning will eventually make itself known without my having to reveal my unhipness. And although I gather from his body language that “a show” is something to take pride in, I don’t. Not yet, anyway.
    “A show” sounds suspiciously like something public. I’ve been trying so hard to keep us within target range of normal that I really don’t want anyone to know that my oldest son, my pride and heir, not only thinks that he is an aberration but aligns himself with a posse who share this worldview and even name their band in honor of it.
    You’re supposed to feel like an aberration in your teenage years, I gently prompt, when they’re here practicing together in the Quonset hut.
That’s the point
. It’s normal, I assure them. If there’s anything at all abnormal about these boy musicians, it’s that for a high-school death-metal band, they are actually pretty good.
    “What kind of a show?” I boldly ask Owen, who looks at me with what can only be pity.
    When I was a teenager, going to a show meant going to see a movie at the movie theater. But in today’s teen parlance it means paying a cover charge to go into a basement, a parking lot, a VFW hall, or a farmer’s field to hear local bands play. And tonight, just a regular old Wednesday night with school tomorrow, Aberration has been booked to perform at one of these events for the first time.
    Owen even pulls a homemade poster out of his backpack with the band’s name on it as proof.
    “Will you drive us?” he asks. Not “Can I go, Mom?” because he knows me, and knows that letting him go, and letting him stay out late on a school night, won’t really be an issue for me where something as important to him as music is concerned. Because he is my oldest, and has plenty of experience to draw upon, he also knows that this is how I mother: it does not even occur to me to say no.
    Even though according to the poster they don’t go on until 10 p.m., and even though that means they might not get to bed until 1 a.m., and even though Owen has to be at the bus stop by 6:35 tomorrow morning for school, and even though if I agree to drive them Luke and Will are going to be home all alone, and will have to put themselves to bed, it still does not occur to me to say no.
    Which son has a better chance of encountering danger? The fifteen-year-old out with his friends onstage at a late-night, coed, teenage rock “show”? Or an eight-year-old and his middle brother, who just turned thirteen, home alone with two loyal dogs, a microwave oven, and homework?
    Owen spends hours practicing his bass guitar, he plays the cello in his school orchestra, and he has learned to play keyboard, drums, and acoustic guitar all on his own, without lessons. Hewants to be a professional musician. Late nights like this one are a big part of the life of a musician. A hard life, I imagine. And if that’s the life my son is dreaming of for himself, he might as well learn that now.
    Luke helps us load up the minivan with amplifiers, instruments, drums, microphones, microphone stands, and enough coiled extension cords for the whole band to rappel down Mount McKinley. I put Luke in charge of Will and then drive Aberration to the VFW. We arrive at eight. There are four other bands performing tonight, and as performers