AUSTIN — This thought kept popping into my sun-soaked brain during a 10-hour stint spent in 90-degree heat while pelted by a constant dust cloud in bone-dry Zilker Park — along with 65,000 other souls attending the Austin City Limits Music Festival: I am getting too old for this foolishness.

But then another band would launch into a tight set, and I would be dancing, badly of course, along with people young enough to be my children.

Actually, a couple of them were my children. My two oldest daughters are ACL veterans, gamely traipsing through all three days of this massive music festival, held each September. This is just my second year. I am only good for one day. Three days would require a week of recuperation.

A Taj Mahal song titled "Music Keeps Me Together" encapsulates my love for tunes. I saw Taj perform at Armadillo World Headquarters in Austin on the next-to-last night of its existence — Dec. 30, 1981. Being a poor graduate student, I couldn't afford the cover charge for the final night, when Commander Cody and the Lost Planet Airmen shut down the old armory on Barton Springs Road. So my friends and I went the night before. Since I was a photojournalism grad student, I shot Taj performing on stage. I still have a grainy black-and-white print somewhere.

Music does keep me together. At least it helps. I love listening to live music and happily head to a smoky bar or dusty venue several times a year to escape reality in the artistry of folks with great talent, performing until the wee hours. It lifts my heart and spirits.

ACL sates a music lover with its eight stages featuring non-stop music from 11:30 a.m. until 10 p.m., when curfew kicks in since there are neighborhoods nearby with folks ready to go to bed. After more than a half-dozen years, the ACL organizers have the drill down. Acts start and stop on time. No encores are allowed, unless the band decides to stop five minutes early so as to effect an ersatz version.

Amazingly, the beer lines are short. Toward the end of the evening, the bathroom lines, predictably, are long. Supply and demand, I suppose. Women flee the port a-potties with looks of disgust and make a beeline for the hand-sanitizers. There are times being a man has its advantages. Those are rare times, but ACL Fest and being forced to inhabit a well-patronized port a-potty is one of them.

I admit, of the 115-plus bands playing at this year's ACL Fest, I've only heard the music of maybe three dozen, and have passing knowledge of fewer than a dozen more. I am not that hip, despite my best efforts. Thus my daughters and I rarely crossed paths during our day together at ACL, since their musical tastes and mine intersect intermittently.

Still, I was thrilled to hear, once again, Robert Earl Keen, a veteran Texas troubadour and college roommate of Lyle Lovett. John Fogerty, founder of Creedence Clearwater Revival, delivered an amazing one-hour set of classics and new tunes, with a frenetic energy that had folks dancing in the dust. I was one of them, though my moves can hardly be defined as dancing. More like shuffling, I suppose.

The highlight, for me, was the duo of Alison Krauss and Robert Plant. The former is a lovely blonde 36-year-old virtuoso bluegrass fiddler, with a voice that I imagine God blesses to angels allowed to sing. The latter is the 60-year-old former lead singer for Led Zeppelin, one of the great rock bands of the late 1960s and 1970s. Their collaboration CD, "Raising Sand," is one of my favorite CDs from 2007.

Backed by a stellar band that included their producer, T-Bone Burnett, another legend of Americana roots music, Krauss and Plant sailed through a lovely set of fascinating songs, including — at first unrecognizable — versions of Led Zeppelin tunes, performed at about half the tempo of the originals.

By the time Krauss and Plant appeared, the sun had mercifully sunk behind the stage, and a whiff of autumn hung in the air. Just a whiff, but enough to remind me ACL is one of the last gasps of summer's heat here in Texas.

We walked the mile or so to the car, every exposed surface of our bodies covered in dust stuck to sunscreen. It was great. I'll be back.

But for just one day.

Gary Borders is publisher of the Longview News-Journal. His e-mail address is gborders@coxlnj.com.