While the jukebox containing the soundtrack of my life is not uniquely populated by his music, it is not an understatement to say that Bruce Springsteen dominates it. Today, the Poet Laureate of the State of Concrete Gardens celebrates a birthday. May it be a happy one.
My oldest brother Bill introduced me to Springsteen’s music so long ago that I cannot remember precisely when. I do know that in the four-and-one-half decades or so since, it is a relationship that has served me well. All these years later, my favorite Springsteen song is - as it has been since I first heard it way back when - Racing in the Street. It is my poor homage to him that this particular piece of real estate on Al Gore’s cyber-superhighway is named what it is named.
Among the songs and the stories that have engrossed me the most throughout the years are those chronicling his relationship with his father. My father and I had a very difficult relationship during what proved to be the final year of his life. Dad died on May 31, 1981. In what turned out to be the final Christmas of his life, I received The River. By mid-January I had committed “Independence Day” to memory.
Springsteen released Nebraska in 1982. Included among its tracks was “My Father’s House”. Its final verse both spoke to me and gouged me: My father’s house shines hard and bright/It stands like a beacon calling me in the night/Calling and calling, so cold and alone/Shining ‘cross this dark highway where our sins lie unatoned.
As much as I love and relate to his music, it was when I read his autobiography “Born To Run” that I felt as if I got it. He wrote at length about his relationship with his father, including the road they traveled from perdition to redemption in the final few years of his father’s life. Although Dad died long before he and I had an opportunity to make that journey, reading that it had in fact happened for the Springsteen men gave me hope that maybe - just maybe - in fact it could have happened for the Kenny men.
Happy Birthday, Bruce, and thanks very much. Of all the voices in my head battling for supremacy, yours is the one to which I pay the most attention.
Truth be told, it is the one to which I pay the second-most attention. Margaret’s is number one. I am a fan. I am not a man with a death wish.
-AK
A wise man understands every word his wife doesn't say.
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