Tags
Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, Coming of Age, Independence Day, love story, The River Tour 2016
I’m remembering the fireworks that exploded into the sky over Slane Castle on a summer evening in 1985 when Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band made their Irish debut. Close to 100,000 of us had made the pilgrimage through the sleepy and disapproving village of Slane to see The Boss. Between assurances of increased security and a promise–– that remains unfulfilled–– that this would be the last rock concert to disturb them, the residents had been placated. Even the weather cooperated. It was the kind of sun-drenched day the Irish pray for. Everybody was young that day, even the crotchety old farmers who let us park our cars on their fields. Everybody was Irish, even Bruce Springsteen. When the band burst on stage with Born in the USA, he turned his baseball cap backwards and bragged, “I had a grandmother from here.”
We basked in his pride, denying for a few hours the truth that our weather was rarely that sunny, and that many of us would be forced out of Ireland as economic immigrants, forever branded the “brain drain” of the 1980s. But on that glorious day, in spite of Ireland’s economic and political realities and the narrowing possibilities before us, a defiant Springsteen held us aloft, and we all believed in America.
I first heard Bruce Springsteen’s “The River” when I was 17 years old. I bought the record and played it until I had memorized every song. Mr. Jones, my English teacher, was responsible, sensing that Springsteen’s plainspoken poetry would appeal to my blue-collar sensibilities. He knew I had never seen a Cadillac or a State Trooper ––most likely he hadn’t either. I had never heard a screen door slam or the crack of a baseball bat. But Mr. Jones also knew I knew disappointment. I knew about the dole and diminished opportunities. I knew men who worked at the factory, and when the factory stopped working, they did too. I knew they would never be the same. I knew pregnant girls whose boyfriends married them. I knew Derry Girls and Jersey Girls stood on a different stretch of the same river. I knew the drizzle of rain and small-town life in a tiny troubled country on the other side of the Atlantic. I knew young people were leaving that life for an American dream, and that I would too. Springsteen was talking to us.
When he revisited “The River” one Thursday night in Phoenix, Arizona, over three decades later, flashes of my teenage self resurfaced, a little tougher, and wiser maybe, hardened by the beginnings and endings that make up a full life; the marriage, the mortgage, the raising of a good person, the career, the cancer, the death of the man who had for so many years quickened my heart, the worry about what might come next, and the waiting – always the waiting – for the other shoe to drop. In the middle of my life, it occurred to me that my parents–– the people I rebelled against at 17, determined to escape my circumstances–– were once in the middle of their lives with beautiful dreams that were dashed, just like some of mine. I know now the darkness that sometimes got the best of us . . .
Papa now I know the things you wanted that you could not say . . . I swear I never meant to take those things away
From the cheap seats, I listened to Springsteen tell the stories of an American life, stories that could have been plucked from my dead husband’s life. The one about not being drafted to Vietnam because he was the only surviving son of a man who died in military service; the one about how he cut his hippie hair when his buddies didn’t come back; and, the one about trading in his beloved motorcycle and the muscle car to settle down when he and his girl were just too young. He had settled. She had too. They continued to settle for too long, each of them making compromises and taking care of what became obligations until they didn’t even care much for each other.
With a shot of courage one hot Saturday afternoon in a Phoenix parking lot outside a place that could have been Frankie’s Joint – he showed his cards. All of them. And, in the space of a heartbeat, he turned from that life, to follow instead a heart beating wildly, to follow me. The alternative he later told me felt like “dying by inches.”
Cause point blank, bang bang baby you’re dead.
He brought with him the shirt on his back and a shiny Ford Thunderbird. He had the heart – and he had the stomach – for all of it. All of it. He was all in. He would drive all night just to buy me some shoes.
For as long as we could be young, we had a great run. Born to run, we raised the kind of hell that belongs in a rollicking Springsteen song. It had lost much of its luster before he died because the “in sickness” part of the deal was tougher than either of us could have imagined. Through it all, he was in my corner – always – and any regrets are so small now, they don’t matter. We were married for one day shy of 22 years, and together we had done something good – really good. The lesson? It’s about time. It is always about time. We have only so much and not enough to waste to learn how to live and to live well with another person, a partner.
Over 40 years since I first listened to it, “The River” reminds me to take stock. Just like the America we’re celebrating today, something good is just up the road. It always is.
The River is how you learn the adult life and you choose your partner and you choose your work and that clock starts ticking and you walk alongside not only the people you’ve chosen to live your life with but you walk alongside of your own mortality and you realize you have a limited amount of time to raise your family, to do your job, to try and do something good. That’s ‘The River.’
That’s Independence Day.
