WOKE UP IN Salt Lake City on the second day of a 30-day tour. Already it felt like we'd been gone for weeks. The older I get, the harder it gets to leave home. But getting old has nothing to do with anything.

Not wanting to wake the rest of the band, I dressed in the dark, cracked the door, and slipped into the Salt Lake dawn. It was an icy and unfamiliar planet out there, a world without coffeehouses. By the time I gave up and got back to our room, the boys were all showered and the van was loaded. Our first of three shows that day was at 10 a.m. On our way to the place, we found an actual restaurant where we could have a more-or-less actual breakfast – it wasn't fast food, anyway. The coffee was terrible.

The show was great. We played at a day care center for seniors and kids, all decked out in straw cowboy hats and neckerchiefs. There were posters up declaring the day "Western Day," featuring a "traveling western band from California." That was us.

The kids danced and the old-timers sang along from their wheelchairs. During "Comin' round the Mountain" (we honor requests when we can) I looked up and there was a wall of little girls standing right in front of us, swaying and staring, as if we were stars.

All of us play in other bands, and most of us have been on tour before. But this was something else. This was really something.

We played at 12:15 in the super-institutional cafeteria at a low-income high-rise senior center. They couldn't pay us, but they did offer us lunch. I was the only one gracious and/or brave enough to accept: a slice of meatloaf with by far the worst mashed potatoes I have ever poked a plastic fork into. Applesauce. Plus I scored a pair of two-dollar cowboy boots from their basement thrift store. They were going to fix us up with free haircuts, too, but the barber had left by the time we finished our set. The activities director wrote down directions to a place in town that was running a one-dollar haircut promotion if you brought in a can of food for their food drive. Then, as we were pulling away, she came running out to the van with a bag from the kitchen: gigantic cans of chocolate pudding and apple sauce, and smaller ones with tomatoes and garbanzo beans. So our one-dollar haircuts would only cost us one dollar.

But first we had one more gig, at 3:00 at one of those Sunrise assisted-living facilities. An international chain of high-end nursing homes, Sunrises tend to have more of a budget for entertainment, but – perhaps not coincidentally – the shows tend to be less fun for us. In such posh, elegant settings, I start to feel self-conscious about my rusty old steel drum, or our homemade percussion kit with saw-blade cymbals, colanders, and bottle caps. Kazoo solos. Unruly hair.

I mean, this place's dining room, in sharp contrast to that last cafeteria, looked like a five-star restaurant, with cloth napkins, tablecloths, and real flowers. After our set, on my way out, I stopped to talk to a guy about the food. This line of talk had quickly and naturally become my way with the old folks.

"Food any good here?" I asked.

"It's not good," he said, his voice just barely more than a whisper. I had to go down on one knee and lean over his wheelchair to carry on the conversation. "I hesitate to use the word 'exquisite.' " He shook his head. "You know, I've traveled a lot in my day ... "

I got as comfortable as I could get, on one knee, leaning, and listened to him talk about frog legs in France, and so on. I'd picked this man out because, well, he stood out. For one thing, he was a man – and the overwhelming majority of the folks in these places are women. They're grandmotherly. If they're men, they're grandfatherly. But this guy struck me as one of us. He seemed bohemian, in his red-and-black plaid vest over a black-and-white checked shirt, smaller-patterned black-and-white checked pants. White beard and cowboy hat. Here was a true elder, in the sense that you + years = this. I listened intently, respectfully, as he told me how, on his first morning in this place, he woke up dreading breakfast, expecting the worst.

I knew what he meant: meatloaf.

"I don't understand it," he said, looking truly confused. "It doesn't make any sense," he said. "But the food here is consistently excellent."

I didn't understand it either. It didn't make sense. I wanted to stick around and have dinner with this guy, but, of course, nobody invited us.

So we went and got our haircuts. The girl had to ask me five times how I wanted it. She was young and scrubbed and ... young. We were looking in the mirror together. I hadn't had my hair cut professionally in years, and I just didn't know what to tell her.

"I don't know," I said. It was all I could say. "I don't know."