Life, Death, My Dad, and Bruce Springsteen
“I’ll see you in my dreams, we’ll meet and live and love again, I’ll see you in my dreams…”
I am spinning Letter To You for the first time tonight, because I heard he was pulling from it rather heavily this tour, and I wanted to know the songs when I see him perform them. I don’t know why it matters, but it does, and anyway it’s an excuse to hear some new-to-me Bruce. For all the love I have for Bruce Springsteen, there’s actually an awful lot of his work I haven’t heard. I get in a rut; I get stuck playing Darkness on the Edge of Town, or Live in NYC over and over and over. I can sing along with the saxophone solos on Born to Run just as easily as the songs, I can sing along to the guitar solo on Youngstown, the way they played it live that tour; I barely recognize the album version when I hear it. And there’s something about watching that man sing, something about what he gives to you, what he lets you take away, he must get something back from that or he’d be translucent by now, it’s give and it’s take, and it’s really, really beautiful. He looks an awful lot like my dad.
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“I’ve got your guitar, here by the bed, all your favorite records, and the books that you read…”
When I was 18, I worked at a toy store on the main street of the small town I grew up in, and as interesting as it seemed like it would be, the reality was that very few people in that town could afford to shop there, so my job was actually quite dull. I used to wait impatiently for my Dad to come through that door, coffee in hand (hazelnut, black), smile on his face. I miss that, I miss when I didn’t know him the way I do now. Sometimes I wish I hadn’t seen that darkness, but the heart knows what the heart knows.
After work, he’d sometimes drive me back to his house, in that fire engine red Pontiac Vibe, and I’d sit on the old Texas pine couch my parents bought when I was a baby, drinking cheap beer and watching Bruce Springsteen, Live in NYC. Dad would be in the kitchen, making dinner for us. The dogs would be underfoot, their fur thick on carpets he would pile up, one on top of the other, instead of replacing the vacuum cleaner that had given up a few months before. What’s a new area rug? Literally hiding the dirt away, keep it like a secret, a secret of devils and dust and giving up, a secret I knew so well it lived in my bones. I’d give up before I even tried; I didn’t really know how to try. But I did know that sitting with my Dad, watching that man sing those songs, matching tears in the corners of our eyes, was special. We bonded over the despair he wrote so eloquently of, we bonded over a mutual sadness that we both wore like a cape, hid behind, treasured. But when it came to the redemption, the hope, the resolution, that Bruce is known for, that’s where we separated. I think the idea of hope scared my Dad, I think the idea that it could ever get better scared him more than living within that darkness for the rest of his life.
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“I’ll see you in my dreams, yeah up around the riverbend, for death is not the end…”
By the time I was 19, he was becoming different. There was an anxiety that pulled at him, he’d chew on his fingertips when he drove me home, he was more distracted. The thing with ghosts like his is that they’re inside, and because they’re inside of you, you can’t actually hide from them, at least not for long. They catch up every time. They catch up every time.
I remember one fresh June day we decided to drive to the mall, to go to the old record store where we used to spend so much time. It was a safe place for us, we liked to do the same things over and over. He was always stuck in a rut, like me, showing me the same songs: “Have you heard this one yet?”, “Yes Dad, I’ve heard this one before.” It didn’t really matter though, because I’ll listen to the same song a hundred times if I listen to it once; once a song gets into my soul like that, I can’t ever really get tired of it. But he was different that day. He wanted to find poignancy in every little thing, like he was trying to remember it all, like he was studying my face to try and memorize every micro-expression. I couldn’t put my finger on why it felt so ‘off’, and my stomach swelled with melancholy for what my heart must have already known; it has been studied that the human heart has the ability to predict the future, and I know mine did that day.
As we were leaving the record store, having failed to uplift ourselves with the usual suspects (I guess grunge wasn’t ever really intended to be uplifting, and we were deep in a grunge phase at that time), he stopped by the new release rack. It was Bruce Springsteen, The Seeger Sessions, that had stopped him, and he picked it up immediately: “I’m going to buy this for you, you have to hear Shenandoah, you just have to”. “Ok Dad, let’s listen to it on the way home.” And we did, and he was right, and I still love that version of that song.
When he stopped the car outside of the building where I lived, I felt like I couldn’t move. I sat there for a long time, we both did, and when he hugged me good-bye that day it felt like Good-bye. I walked away, up the two flights of stairs to the apartment I shared with my boyfriend, feeling like I would never see my Dad again. I pushed it aside, but it wouldn’t really settle. The heart knows what the heart knows.
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“…when all our summers have come to an end, I’ll see you in my dreams.”
One night, when my youngest child was two, I found myself sitting on the floor of the basement apartment we were crashing in at the time (yet again) and rocking him, while he flailed with sleepy-rage, singing Thunder Road at the top of my lungs and praying it would be enough to put him to sleep. It always worked with my girls, they would fall asleep while I sang to them night after night, year after year. Finn was different though, it was a challenge for him, be louder than Mom. As I sang to him that night, my oldest (now 10) crept up next to me and laid her head on my shoulder. “I love this one Mom, I remember it”. And that was the moment I realized it had worked. I never knew before that day if they remembered the songs I sang to them over and over, nights turned to years. It was one of my most poignant childhood memories, my Dad singing to me, and I hoped more than anything that my kids would remember it like that. The warmth, safety, and comfort of those memories is something I now struggle to reconcile with truths I learned when my childhood was well gone, but they nonetheless fill me with evening light, soft, amber, a bit melancholy, reminders of the linearity of time. I am so glad that my children will remember the sound of my voice when I am gone.
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“…and though you’re gone, and my heart’s been emptied it seems, I’ll see you in my dreams.”
I did see my Dad again, but I will never know if he intended for it to be that way or not. I will never know if I want to know or not. All I know is something fractured then, something fractured that would never really heal. It took me years see the damage it had done, at first I was just happy to hear his voice again, happy that they had found him before it was too late, but as I grew older I wondered, would I ever be able to live with myself if I had put my own kids through something like that? Did the burden of knowing that we knew, knowing that we could never forgot for the rest of our days, lay heavy on him that way? Did he know what he put us through? Could he? Or was he too broken to know? Brokenness is funny like that, it makes you retreat inside, throws you into survival mode. And even when he was so far gone that “survival mode” took him to the very edge of the cliff between time and the beyond, I will always wonder if he was actually able to conceive of what that meant to us. Did he know what he meant to us? You have to believe you’re worth something to believe in a really knowing kind of way that you could matter to someone else. That you could matter so very much. I think about my own feelings, when my kids recognize the songs I sing for them, I see my worth in their eyes, I recognize that I mean the world to them. I wonder, did he ever feel that way? I wish that he could have, because I think that it may have saved his life. Because although his life was saved, I don’t think he ever really came back. I’m not even completely sure he was here to begin with.
And tonight, in the boatyard, as the sun begins to set, I see a seagull flying towards the moon; I see my Grandmother. I see a flying machine on a path to cross in front of the moon; I see my Grandfather. I see the moon herself, so capable of changing everything, if only I would let her in. And I see my Dad, so taken by the ghosts inside of him, living still inside of me. I hold him in my heart, and perhaps, in that one place, warm and soft, perhaps in that place, he is at peace. The heart knows what the heart knows.
“…and I’ll see you in my dreams.”
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