I should long ago have lost count of the number of moves Karen and I have made in our 28 years of marriage, but that number, 19, is as sticky in memory as gum in July to sneakers, easily making up in magnitude whatever it may lack in any evenness or roundness.
Sure, not all of those moves were of the long-distance kind, although enough of them covered enough ground, so that if movers in those days had given out frequent-packer points, we could long ago have cashed in. Even so, even the short moves, with the shortest of all only across a driveway in Vermont, were never easy. There was still the pitching of stuff accumulated since the last move and the packing of stuff that would seed the next move, still the lifting down stairs and the lugging up, still the last-minute cleaning; and then, once on the far end of the move, came the unpacking, the trial-and-error of the couch here or there or maybe there, the frantic, frustrating search for the bed hardware or the clock or your favorite cookbook, which, you knew, you absolutely knew, you put in a box somewhere; and then, slowly, imperceptibly, over some measure of months, the ineluctable settling in.
Karen and I have now settled in 19 times.
We have, however, settled down maybe once, that in the trim and heartbreakingly beautiful village of Peacham, Vermont.
There, over the span of a decade, interrupted only by a stint at Notre Dame, we raised our then-young children. There, in fact, in a robin’s-egg blue bedroom on the second floor of a quintessential white-clapboarded, green-shuttered, 150-year-old house on the main street — “the prettiest house,” I once told Karen, “we may ever live in” — our youngest son was born, deep in a knee-deep, mid-April snowstorm in 1992, his home birth at once the occasion for two weeks of meals provided by friends and neighbors and, briefly, a cause for village concern, as Karen and I dithered for a week over a name for the lad, teetering between eventual winner, Dónal, and also-ran Fintan (“That boy got a name yet?” came the inevitable, but good-natured question I fielded from all quarters, as I picked up the mail at the post office across the street and across the farther green). And there, too, in the steeply-gabled back room on the third floor, with VPR blaring from the radio on the windowsill and sheep bleating from the fields beyond our back fence, I wrote in architecturally lofty solitude for what was then my family’s living.
It was also in Peacham that our lives became inextricably stitched into the community quilt, that quilt blanketing at its center the old cemetery on the hill below the Bond house, where the graves speak of lives lived and lost in the 1700s; one edge then drifting up and over the Civil War monument steepling Church Hill; the whole thing a patchwork of field and forest, of farms in families for generations, its fabric stretching south from Harvey’s Hollow and the covered Greenbank Hollow bridge, up and over the brow of Cow Hill, its flanks forested and pocked with the cellar holes of homes that once were and are no more, your imagination free there to conjure up the long-ago scraping of plows, the lowing of cows, laughter in fallen kitchens, love in vanished bedrooms and lofts; down and up again to the village itself, over the mast of the Congregational Church, rumpling west to Macks Mountain and dipping eastward toward Harvey’s Lake, then spreading south to where the snow drifts perennially in winter across the road fronting Elizabeth’s Farm.
So, you ask, if so lovely, how could we ever leave?
Medical school, in short, the longer answer a topic for another day.
But for all our practice in settling in, and our single successful attempt at settling down, what Karen and I have never done, and what is so often misunderstood about us, is that we have steadfastly refused to settle for less.
It was desire that led us 25 years ago to cross the Atlantic to Ireland, and it was family that brought us back. Friendship pulled us to Massachusetts, and longing took us again to Virginia. Vermont happened, as I’ve often told the tale, because Virginia’s unrelenting heat and humidity at last drove me far enough north until, finally, only an hour from the Canadian border, I cooled off. Notre Dame took us west to Indiana, home took us back to Vermont, and medical school to Iowa. And always, always, to this day always, there remains the tug of adventure: e-mails that trumpet opportunities for doctors in New Zealand, Australia, British Columbia; others that tout jobs in Montana, Idaho or, dare I write the words, back home in Vermont; or that inner call, the one that says, life’s short, there’s so much yet to do, so little time in which to do it, sell the house, chuck the stuff, get up, get going, c’mon, man, you’re 57 and time, time, time…
Yet here we still are, still in Iowa, four years after medical school, one year after residency.
So, have we settled?
In, yes. Down, no. For less, absolutely not.
Karen and I are, I admit, and in keeping with the title of this blog, in the simmer dim, neither here nor there, but somewhere in between. Where we’ll be a year from now, I cannot now predict, but home, for me, remains the one place in which we once settled. Can you go home again? No, no, wrote Thomas Wolfe, so emphatically he put it in the book’s title. As for me, we’ll see.
© 2008 by Dónal Kevin Gordon
Monday, September 29, 2008
Saturday, September 27, 2008
So you think you can govern...
“I — I answered him yes because I have the confidence in that readiness and knowing that you can’t blink, you have to be wired in a way of being so committed to the mission, the mission that we’re on, reform of this country and victory in the war, you can’t blink….So I didn’t blink then even when asked to run as his running mate.”
Okay, if you’ve been reading or watching, you have to know who said that in response to a question from ABC’s Charlie Gibson, and you can probably already guess on what side of the readiness fence I’m on.
What’s that? Not entirely sure?
So, we’re talking a one-time mayor of a town of maybe 6,000, generously 9,000, and less-than-one-term governor of a state that is at once the largest and smallest, or almost smallest, in the nation. We’re talking she of the “Bridge to Nowhere,” who supported it, only to abandon that support after the Congress had already said flatly no, and who, even then, greedily took the same amount of money, to be spent at the Alaska’s discretion, in welcome compensation. And we’re talking the same former mayor and same current governor whose 20-20 vision remains so exquisitely acute that she can. in the blink of a designer-spec’d eye, readily winnow obvious supporters from hateful “haters”. The same former mayor, the same current governor who, in keeping with some-or-another faith, does unto others the way she would do unto others of some-or-some-other persuasion.
Okay, so now we’re on the same page.
And while we’re flipping pages, let’s skim the resume (and, risking insult to the injury of McCain’s choice, this won’t take long): small-town mayor, governor for less than two years, like 21 months and counting, a stint on city council paving the way, with a reputation for vindictiveness and cronyism to fill the potholes.
Now, let’s quick-reverse through recent history: small-potatoes governor of a big state becomes president; values loyalty above else to honesty and openness; has, on any level you want to choose — oedipal, political, ethical, religious — something to prove; shoots enemies from the hip of utter and unforgiving righteousness…hmmm…
And, over the last eight years, under the guidance of he-who-must-be-obeyed in the White House, that has gotten us where, as a nation, a people, a civilization?
Can history repeat itself?
Alas, a country that blinked, as Sarah is wont to say, and got Bush, only then to outright elect the same son-of-a-Bush, can certainly choose a Bush by another name the next time around. I mean, just because we pledge allegiance to one nation under God, invoke, again and again, that God bless America, and call down the One and Only from every near mountain on high, doesn’t mean that we, as a country, in the form of our prophet-in-chief, can’t align ourselves, knowingly or not, with the devil. Let’s face it, the moral balance sheet is anything but on our side.
Witness Iraq and the now-they’re-here, now-they’re not WMD. Or that nebulous and, I’m really being kind, link between Sadam and al-Qaeda. Or, dare we mention his name in anything more than a whisper, the not-only-not-dead-but-still-alive Osama bin Laden, on whom, if you believe him, our current president, he of the swaggering, dead-or-alive dictum, has drawn a bead for, oh, the last seven years. And do we even have to talk about Katrina, let alone the current mess on Wall Street, let alone that pesky definition of that troublesome word “torture” and its locus, the foreshortened Gitmo.
Oh, c’mon, what in the same Lord’s name possessed us, or at least possessed those tens of millions of voters who made themselves the W’s enablers!
And, then, along comes Sarah.
Let’s see, at the risk of repeating myself: worst financial crisis since the Great Depression; ongoing war in Iraq, to the tune of $10 billion per month; the ground gained in Afghanistan all but lost; Osama still on the loose, dreaming of who-knows-what in his own response to the now-and-forever war on terror; and, closer to home, New Orleans still not New Orleans, now three heck-of-a-good-job-Brownie years after Katrina; tens of millions — I mean, tens of millions, as in almost 50 million men, women and children, as in one out of every six Americans — without health insurance in this, a nation of ostensible equals; a tax structure that benefits the haves and leaves the have-nots to fend for themselves.
And we, as a nation, are going to put Sarah Palin — to whom that oldie-but-goodie “I Can See Clearly Now” conjures images of the icy Bering Strait and nearby Russia and, by convoluted extension, unexampled prowess in foreign policy — the proverbial heartbeat away from the presidency, when the president himself would be the actuarially-challenged John McCain?
Time out.
There’s reality TV — and then there’s reality. And, right now, it is time for a reality check, if you, forgive me, catch my blink.
© 2008 by Dónal Kevin Gordon
Okay, if you’ve been reading or watching, you have to know who said that in response to a question from ABC’s Charlie Gibson, and you can probably already guess on what side of the readiness fence I’m on.
What’s that? Not entirely sure?
So, we’re talking a one-time mayor of a town of maybe 6,000, generously 9,000, and less-than-one-term governor of a state that is at once the largest and smallest, or almost smallest, in the nation. We’re talking she of the “Bridge to Nowhere,” who supported it, only to abandon that support after the Congress had already said flatly no, and who, even then, greedily took the same amount of money, to be spent at the Alaska’s discretion, in welcome compensation. And we’re talking the same former mayor and same current governor whose 20-20 vision remains so exquisitely acute that she can. in the blink of a designer-spec’d eye, readily winnow obvious supporters from hateful “haters”. The same former mayor, the same current governor who, in keeping with some-or-another faith, does unto others the way she would do unto others of some-or-some-other persuasion.
Okay, so now we’re on the same page.
And while we’re flipping pages, let’s skim the resume (and, risking insult to the injury of McCain’s choice, this won’t take long): small-town mayor, governor for less than two years, like 21 months and counting, a stint on city council paving the way, with a reputation for vindictiveness and cronyism to fill the potholes.
Now, let’s quick-reverse through recent history: small-potatoes governor of a big state becomes president; values loyalty above else to honesty and openness; has, on any level you want to choose — oedipal, political, ethical, religious — something to prove; shoots enemies from the hip of utter and unforgiving righteousness…hmmm…
And, over the last eight years, under the guidance of he-who-must-be-obeyed in the White House, that has gotten us where, as a nation, a people, a civilization?
Can history repeat itself?
Alas, a country that blinked, as Sarah is wont to say, and got Bush, only then to outright elect the same son-of-a-Bush, can certainly choose a Bush by another name the next time around. I mean, just because we pledge allegiance to one nation under God, invoke, again and again, that God bless America, and call down the One and Only from every near mountain on high, doesn’t mean that we, as a country, in the form of our prophet-in-chief, can’t align ourselves, knowingly or not, with the devil. Let’s face it, the moral balance sheet is anything but on our side.
Witness Iraq and the now-they’re-here, now-they’re not WMD. Or that nebulous and, I’m really being kind, link between Sadam and al-Qaeda. Or, dare we mention his name in anything more than a whisper, the not-only-not-dead-but-still-alive Osama bin Laden, on whom, if you believe him, our current president, he of the swaggering, dead-or-alive dictum, has drawn a bead for, oh, the last seven years. And do we even have to talk about Katrina, let alone the current mess on Wall Street, let alone that pesky definition of that troublesome word “torture” and its locus, the foreshortened Gitmo.
Oh, c’mon, what in the same Lord’s name possessed us, or at least possessed those tens of millions of voters who made themselves the W’s enablers!
And, then, along comes Sarah.
Let’s see, at the risk of repeating myself: worst financial crisis since the Great Depression; ongoing war in Iraq, to the tune of $10 billion per month; the ground gained in Afghanistan all but lost; Osama still on the loose, dreaming of who-knows-what in his own response to the now-and-forever war on terror; and, closer to home, New Orleans still not New Orleans, now three heck-of-a-good-job-Brownie years after Katrina; tens of millions — I mean, tens of millions, as in almost 50 million men, women and children, as in one out of every six Americans — without health insurance in this, a nation of ostensible equals; a tax structure that benefits the haves and leaves the have-nots to fend for themselves.
And we, as a nation, are going to put Sarah Palin — to whom that oldie-but-goodie “I Can See Clearly Now” conjures images of the icy Bering Strait and nearby Russia and, by convoluted extension, unexampled prowess in foreign policy — the proverbial heartbeat away from the presidency, when the president himself would be the actuarially-challenged John McCain?
Time out.
There’s reality TV — and then there’s reality. And, right now, it is time for a reality check, if you, forgive me, catch my blink.
© 2008 by Dónal Kevin Gordon
Saturday, September 20, 2008
Dancing in the dark...
Sometime around 1972 or 1973, back when I would have been 21 or so, my sister Moira and I, and maybe even our very much younger brother Patrick, went to see then-hot Chicago at a concert in Richmond, Virginia, where we lived at the time. I dimly recall that we had pretty good seats at the Coliseum, for a show that I was very much up to see, having been a Chicago fan ever since the group’s debut double-album under the banner of Chicago Transit Authority some four or five years earlier.
I’ll admit that, prior to the concert, I hadn’t paid any attention whatsoever to the opening act and, in fact, didn’t even know who it was, figuring, not unreasonably, that, not unlike most opening acts, this one was preordained to be forgettable. I mean, c’mon, we’re talking Chicago, and any opening act could, even under the best of circumstances, be little more than a speed bump en route to the night’s ultimate destination — forty minutes, maybe more, of somebody else’s one-riff-beyond-the-garage music, then on to the real deal. And, whaddya know, as if to confirm that dim expectation, out on the stage steps this decidedly scruffy fellow from Jersey, a young guy, a guy with the seriously un-billboard-like name of Springsteen, backed by an imposingly large sax player named Clarence, linchpin, if only by stature, in a crew that inexplicably cast itself as the E Street Band.
Since then, my life, maybe like yours, has been signposted by Springsteen: 1984 and Born in the USA, me a mere 33, new dad, this time second time around, in relatively good shape myself, albeit nothing like the newly, sexily buff Springsteen; a year or two later and I remember, as if it were yesterday, the day I bought that boxed, three-CD live set at the Book Annex in Alexandria, Virginia, with that album, if memory serves, the incentive for buying our first CD player; come the 1990’s, and I’m pretty much cruising at 40 and steering beyond, my compass not then set on the Boss, with family, life and a writing career tugging my needle from the due-north of E Street; by 2001, and the unhappy inspiration for The Rising, I’m in med school, all ears when it comes to the Boss’s message, but all broke when it came to ever hitting a concert.
But just four years later, in the fall of 2005, at a solo concert in Madison, Wisconsin, a concert that was for Karen and me a celebration of our 25th wedding anniversary, Bruce and I had at last and again hooked up. And if Bruce didn’t know it, I certainly did. Entire decades had come full circle, I was for a moment that comparative kid again in Richmond, Virginia, and the world, apart from the devils and dust of our collective nightmare, was for that same moment, not the complicated place which Karen and Bruce and I otherwise inhabited, but for she and he and me a renewal of sorts, and, for Karen, in particular, a first chance to put flesh to the other love of her life.
But, for Karen, alas, that love was unrequited.
Sure, this was Bruce, but only Bruce, just Bruce, no E Street Band, and so Karen felt somewhat short-changed by what was a comparatively low-octane Springsteen gig. Fast-forward two years, though, and the Boss is again hitting the boards, this time to push a new album, this time backed by the E Street Band, and, with anniversary 27 in the offing, I, as a surprise to Karen, snagged tickets for two to Bruce and the Band at the United Center in Chicago.
If Springsteen was great that night, and he was, the concert was all the better for giving me the chance to watch Karen shed her middle years and dance that night in the dark, each lick of the Boss’s guitar cranking chords of memory as much as music: “Born to Run,” and, Karen, our own meanderings — 19 moves in 28 years of marriage — leapt that night immediately to mind, even as the Boss belted words I’d so often said in other words, “Someday, girl, I don’t know when, we’re gonna get to that place where we really want to go…but till then…tramps like us, baby, we were born to run”; “Thunder Road,” and, who’s kiddin’ who, we’re as scared as we’ve ever been, “that maybe we ain’t that young anymore,” with the ghosts of our own twined lives haunting all those decades lost to parenting and med school and residency, no less, beautiful Karen, than the ghosts of “all the boys you sent away,” like those of Springsteen’s storied Mary, haunt the “dusty beach road” of your own young life; and, don’t you know, dear Karen, that when I hear “Out in the Street,” that you, you, my own and much loved Karen, are that girl again, the girl I knew back when we first met, walking the way you wanted to walk, talking the way you wanted to talk, wha-oh, wha-oh-oh-oh-oh.
But if there is Bruce solo and Bruce with the Band, there is also Bruce as he can only be experienced from the pit, surrounded by fans of fellow deep persuasion, an experience that was then still unticked on Karen’s life list.
So, come this last March, there Karen and I were again at a Springsteen concert, this time in Omaha, this time right there on the floor, close enough to imagine what it was like, all those years ago, when a younger Karen, a younger me, might have rocked to a younger Bruce, right there on the floor, with everyone around us, then as now, writhing in unison, thousands of arms pistoning air, thousands of hips pivoting as one, thousands of mouths mouthing words long ago tucked into memory.
Am I going somewhere?
“You bet,” in the vernacular of this, the Midwest of my long-ago youth.
Because a couple of weekends back, back in those dying days of August, Karen and I motored to Milwaukee, where Bruce was the closing act for Harley-Davidson’s 105th Anniversary. It was, in addition, the last stop on the Boss’s latest tour, a tour begun about a year ago, a year that had also marked the loss of one of the members of the E Street Band, dead these many months ago to melanoma. Time, it seems, had caught up to the Band, as much as it had caught up to me, who in E-Street years, had already counted the loss of both parents and all too many friends and relatives, and to Karen, whose own father was among those more recently fallen behind, his hand slipped suddenly free of his daughter’s, his life lost, as Bruce, singing alone to Karen, might have sung, “in the shadow of the evening trees.”
But on that night, time, and loss, and memory, were one.
Because there Bruce was, his arrival announced, loudly and in total darkness, by the vroom-vroom-vroomvroom-vroom-vroom- vroom of a Harley, even as the audience, 50,000 or more shadows on the lawn of Milwaukee’s lakeside Veterans Park, Karen and me among the shadows, scanned a darkened stage, all of us fully expecting the Boss to power-drive the stage, only to have the lights light to reveal Bruce, not astride, but striding toward the stage, band members already at their stations, the opening lyrics of “Gypsy Biker” even then filling the black and starlit air. Minutes later, that song done, and with no breath between, the Boss declared his intention to have fun with “Out in the Street,” leaping, almost immediately from the main stage to the catwalk beyond, sprinting up and down the ramp, his free hand grabbing strangers’ hands, his back suffering unnumbered, anonymous pats, and, once and then again, flinging himself to the mosh pit of the audience, fans’ hands offering him to the gods of the black Milwaukee night.
Now, I’ll admit, that I was hardly enamored of the crowd around me, most of whom subscribed more to the Harley fetish than they did to Springsteen: leather, both thin and thick, fringed or not; denim shirts snipped short at the sleeves; cigars, sported as much by women as men, and, if not cigars, cigarettes seemingly touched one to another; weak-ass Miller slapped back at $5.75 a slap, and we’re talking beaucoup slaps, with the expected wobbly results in a standing-room-only crowd; and, dare I tell, those baring the most skin, men oddly more than women, were those who should most have covered up.
Still, fists pumped humid air, feet sprang, hands clapped, hips swayed, and I’m only talking Karen. And, song after song after song, the Boss played on, until more than three and a half non-stop hours later, after two concert-tested, half-hearted entreaties to band member Stevie Van Zandt, “ What time is it, Steve?” and the equally concert-tested, half-hearted response, “It’s quitting time,” even the Boss himself, now on the far side of midnight, finally had to call it quits, this after 31 songs, a record for the tour; after repeatedly throwing himself to the mercy of the chosen, wrist-banded 3,000 nearest the stage; after knee-sliding the catwalk; after glad-handing God-only-knows how many fans, suffering Lord-only-knows how many touches here, there and everywhere; and after making the night memorable, not just for Karen, but also for one very much younger face in the nearer crowd, who, echoes of Courtney Cox all those decades ago, suddenly found herself on stage sa-shaying hand in hand with the Boss to “Dancing in the Dark.”
Admittedly that night, some lines rang all the more true, if only for me.
In fact, all those decades ago, back in my once loved and still lamented Vermont, back in the days when I made my living as a full-time scribbler of words, I was known to play Springsteen, loudly, and I mean loudly (just ask the kids), to sparkplug the day’s writing.
To this day, I still joke that those lines in “Dancing in the Dark” — “I’m sick of sitting ‘round here trying to write this book…I need a love reaction…come on, baby, gimme just one look” — led, for this freelance writer and his all-too-available lover, in all-too-bucolic Vermont, to five children. And you can’t know how often in how many places since I have thought, like Springsteen, that, “this town is full of losers, and I’m pulling out of here to win.” And, I’ll confess, even now, even as recently as Milwaukee, wanna-be-adventurous me bellowed along with the Boss (just ask Karen), “I ain’t nothing but tired, man, I’m just tired and bored with myself,” even as I looked beyond the here and now of the here and now, “I ain’t getting nowhere, I’m just living in a dump like this.”
Whatever, as I’m too often wont to say, too often to the irritation of those around me.
But with Milwaukee behind us, both Bruce and I now get to motor on, he to home and New Jersey and whatever lies beyond, me to whatever waits beyond this specific moment, this particular place. I look forward, as does Karen, to whatever moves the Boss to make music, and hope, on behalf of Karen and me, that time and health, things all of us, Bruce included, had to take for granted when younger, conspire to allow future tours. As for Karen and much older me, we’ll keep feeling our way forward, too often blindly, so rarely with anything resembling sure-footedness, knowing nonetheless and all the way, “the night’s busted open, these two lanes will take us anywhere,” and, more important, that even at this late hour of life, “we’ve got one last chance to make it real,” (even as Karen reads this and thinks, oh, God, hold on and hold on really tight, ‘cause here we go again!).
And, yet, I confess yet again, the life I’ve lost ‘til now.
Spent, too late at mid-life, were those two years in grad school at beloved Notre Dame. Spent, too, even later, were four more years in med school and three years in residency, not to mention two more years along the way doing all those pre-med science courses. And all along, all the time I lost with Karen, with our children, years I can never have back, years that can never fully be justified on the profit-and-loss statement of life, no matter how many meaningless letters of however many worthless degrees get tacked after my name. Bruce, too, I’m sure, has paid the price for all his years on the road, but you can’t help but think that his lost years bought joy, while mine bought only security and, even on the best of days, mere contentment.
But, oh God, what I would give for joy.
Bruce, in parting in Milwaukee, vowed he’d be back. “We’re only getting started,” he promised the hungry of heart still begging for more deep into that August night. And, Bruce, buddy, I’m gonna have to hold you to it. After all, “There’s something happening somewhere,” both us spinning to sixty know, “even if we’re just dancing in the dark.”
© 2008 by Dónal Kevin Gordon
I’ll admit that, prior to the concert, I hadn’t paid any attention whatsoever to the opening act and, in fact, didn’t even know who it was, figuring, not unreasonably, that, not unlike most opening acts, this one was preordained to be forgettable. I mean, c’mon, we’re talking Chicago, and any opening act could, even under the best of circumstances, be little more than a speed bump en route to the night’s ultimate destination — forty minutes, maybe more, of somebody else’s one-riff-beyond-the-garage music, then on to the real deal. And, whaddya know, as if to confirm that dim expectation, out on the stage steps this decidedly scruffy fellow from Jersey, a young guy, a guy with the seriously un-billboard-like name of Springsteen, backed by an imposingly large sax player named Clarence, linchpin, if only by stature, in a crew that inexplicably cast itself as the E Street Band.
Since then, my life, maybe like yours, has been signposted by Springsteen: 1984 and Born in the USA, me a mere 33, new dad, this time second time around, in relatively good shape myself, albeit nothing like the newly, sexily buff Springsteen; a year or two later and I remember, as if it were yesterday, the day I bought that boxed, three-CD live set at the Book Annex in Alexandria, Virginia, with that album, if memory serves, the incentive for buying our first CD player; come the 1990’s, and I’m pretty much cruising at 40 and steering beyond, my compass not then set on the Boss, with family, life and a writing career tugging my needle from the due-north of E Street; by 2001, and the unhappy inspiration for The Rising, I’m in med school, all ears when it comes to the Boss’s message, but all broke when it came to ever hitting a concert.
But just four years later, in the fall of 2005, at a solo concert in Madison, Wisconsin, a concert that was for Karen and me a celebration of our 25th wedding anniversary, Bruce and I had at last and again hooked up. And if Bruce didn’t know it, I certainly did. Entire decades had come full circle, I was for a moment that comparative kid again in Richmond, Virginia, and the world, apart from the devils and dust of our collective nightmare, was for that same moment, not the complicated place which Karen and Bruce and I otherwise inhabited, but for she and he and me a renewal of sorts, and, for Karen, in particular, a first chance to put flesh to the other love of her life.
But, for Karen, alas, that love was unrequited.
Sure, this was Bruce, but only Bruce, just Bruce, no E Street Band, and so Karen felt somewhat short-changed by what was a comparatively low-octane Springsteen gig. Fast-forward two years, though, and the Boss is again hitting the boards, this time to push a new album, this time backed by the E Street Band, and, with anniversary 27 in the offing, I, as a surprise to Karen, snagged tickets for two to Bruce and the Band at the United Center in Chicago.
If Springsteen was great that night, and he was, the concert was all the better for giving me the chance to watch Karen shed her middle years and dance that night in the dark, each lick of the Boss’s guitar cranking chords of memory as much as music: “Born to Run,” and, Karen, our own meanderings — 19 moves in 28 years of marriage — leapt that night immediately to mind, even as the Boss belted words I’d so often said in other words, “Someday, girl, I don’t know when, we’re gonna get to that place where we really want to go…but till then…tramps like us, baby, we were born to run”; “Thunder Road,” and, who’s kiddin’ who, we’re as scared as we’ve ever been, “that maybe we ain’t that young anymore,” with the ghosts of our own twined lives haunting all those decades lost to parenting and med school and residency, no less, beautiful Karen, than the ghosts of “all the boys you sent away,” like those of Springsteen’s storied Mary, haunt the “dusty beach road” of your own young life; and, don’t you know, dear Karen, that when I hear “Out in the Street,” that you, you, my own and much loved Karen, are that girl again, the girl I knew back when we first met, walking the way you wanted to walk, talking the way you wanted to talk, wha-oh, wha-oh-oh-oh-oh.
But if there is Bruce solo and Bruce with the Band, there is also Bruce as he can only be experienced from the pit, surrounded by fans of fellow deep persuasion, an experience that was then still unticked on Karen’s life list.
So, come this last March, there Karen and I were again at a Springsteen concert, this time in Omaha, this time right there on the floor, close enough to imagine what it was like, all those years ago, when a younger Karen, a younger me, might have rocked to a younger Bruce, right there on the floor, with everyone around us, then as now, writhing in unison, thousands of arms pistoning air, thousands of hips pivoting as one, thousands of mouths mouthing words long ago tucked into memory.
Am I going somewhere?
“You bet,” in the vernacular of this, the Midwest of my long-ago youth.
Because a couple of weekends back, back in those dying days of August, Karen and I motored to Milwaukee, where Bruce was the closing act for Harley-Davidson’s 105th Anniversary. It was, in addition, the last stop on the Boss’s latest tour, a tour begun about a year ago, a year that had also marked the loss of one of the members of the E Street Band, dead these many months ago to melanoma. Time, it seems, had caught up to the Band, as much as it had caught up to me, who in E-Street years, had already counted the loss of both parents and all too many friends and relatives, and to Karen, whose own father was among those more recently fallen behind, his hand slipped suddenly free of his daughter’s, his life lost, as Bruce, singing alone to Karen, might have sung, “in the shadow of the evening trees.”
But on that night, time, and loss, and memory, were one.
Because there Bruce was, his arrival announced, loudly and in total darkness, by the vroom-vroom-vroomvroom-vroom-vroom- vroom of a Harley, even as the audience, 50,000 or more shadows on the lawn of Milwaukee’s lakeside Veterans Park, Karen and me among the shadows, scanned a darkened stage, all of us fully expecting the Boss to power-drive the stage, only to have the lights light to reveal Bruce, not astride, but striding toward the stage, band members already at their stations, the opening lyrics of “Gypsy Biker” even then filling the black and starlit air. Minutes later, that song done, and with no breath between, the Boss declared his intention to have fun with “Out in the Street,” leaping, almost immediately from the main stage to the catwalk beyond, sprinting up and down the ramp, his free hand grabbing strangers’ hands, his back suffering unnumbered, anonymous pats, and, once and then again, flinging himself to the mosh pit of the audience, fans’ hands offering him to the gods of the black Milwaukee night.
Now, I’ll admit, that I was hardly enamored of the crowd around me, most of whom subscribed more to the Harley fetish than they did to Springsteen: leather, both thin and thick, fringed or not; denim shirts snipped short at the sleeves; cigars, sported as much by women as men, and, if not cigars, cigarettes seemingly touched one to another; weak-ass Miller slapped back at $5.75 a slap, and we’re talking beaucoup slaps, with the expected wobbly results in a standing-room-only crowd; and, dare I tell, those baring the most skin, men oddly more than women, were those who should most have covered up.
Still, fists pumped humid air, feet sprang, hands clapped, hips swayed, and I’m only talking Karen. And, song after song after song, the Boss played on, until more than three and a half non-stop hours later, after two concert-tested, half-hearted entreaties to band member Stevie Van Zandt, “ What time is it, Steve?” and the equally concert-tested, half-hearted response, “It’s quitting time,” even the Boss himself, now on the far side of midnight, finally had to call it quits, this after 31 songs, a record for the tour; after repeatedly throwing himself to the mercy of the chosen, wrist-banded 3,000 nearest the stage; after knee-sliding the catwalk; after glad-handing God-only-knows how many fans, suffering Lord-only-knows how many touches here, there and everywhere; and after making the night memorable, not just for Karen, but also for one very much younger face in the nearer crowd, who, echoes of Courtney Cox all those decades ago, suddenly found herself on stage sa-shaying hand in hand with the Boss to “Dancing in the Dark.”
Admittedly that night, some lines rang all the more true, if only for me.
In fact, all those decades ago, back in my once loved and still lamented Vermont, back in the days when I made my living as a full-time scribbler of words, I was known to play Springsteen, loudly, and I mean loudly (just ask the kids), to sparkplug the day’s writing.
To this day, I still joke that those lines in “Dancing in the Dark” — “I’m sick of sitting ‘round here trying to write this book…I need a love reaction…come on, baby, gimme just one look” — led, for this freelance writer and his all-too-available lover, in all-too-bucolic Vermont, to five children. And you can’t know how often in how many places since I have thought, like Springsteen, that, “this town is full of losers, and I’m pulling out of here to win.” And, I’ll confess, even now, even as recently as Milwaukee, wanna-be-adventurous me bellowed along with the Boss (just ask Karen), “I ain’t nothing but tired, man, I’m just tired and bored with myself,” even as I looked beyond the here and now of the here and now, “I ain’t getting nowhere, I’m just living in a dump like this.”
Whatever, as I’m too often wont to say, too often to the irritation of those around me.
But with Milwaukee behind us, both Bruce and I now get to motor on, he to home and New Jersey and whatever lies beyond, me to whatever waits beyond this specific moment, this particular place. I look forward, as does Karen, to whatever moves the Boss to make music, and hope, on behalf of Karen and me, that time and health, things all of us, Bruce included, had to take for granted when younger, conspire to allow future tours. As for Karen and much older me, we’ll keep feeling our way forward, too often blindly, so rarely with anything resembling sure-footedness, knowing nonetheless and all the way, “the night’s busted open, these two lanes will take us anywhere,” and, more important, that even at this late hour of life, “we’ve got one last chance to make it real,” (even as Karen reads this and thinks, oh, God, hold on and hold on really tight, ‘cause here we go again!).
And, yet, I confess yet again, the life I’ve lost ‘til now.
Spent, too late at mid-life, were those two years in grad school at beloved Notre Dame. Spent, too, even later, were four more years in med school and three years in residency, not to mention two more years along the way doing all those pre-med science courses. And all along, all the time I lost with Karen, with our children, years I can never have back, years that can never fully be justified on the profit-and-loss statement of life, no matter how many meaningless letters of however many worthless degrees get tacked after my name. Bruce, too, I’m sure, has paid the price for all his years on the road, but you can’t help but think that his lost years bought joy, while mine bought only security and, even on the best of days, mere contentment.
But, oh God, what I would give for joy.
Bruce, in parting in Milwaukee, vowed he’d be back. “We’re only getting started,” he promised the hungry of heart still begging for more deep into that August night. And, Bruce, buddy, I’m gonna have to hold you to it. After all, “There’s something happening somewhere,” both us spinning to sixty know, “even if we’re just dancing in the dark.”
© 2008 by Dónal Kevin Gordon
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