Kingdom Of Days

I spent the holiday this year, as has become my custom, at home with my family. This wasn't always my way. In my younger days, it was an excuse for much ballyhoo and merrymaking. There was much libation and carrying-on into the wee hours of the morning. Our downstairs neighbor was terrified by the pounding on our floor/her ceiling to the beat of our national anthem, "Born To Run." This year, Bruce Springsteen's birthday passed with a fond memory and a song or two.
The Boss turned sixty on Wednesday, and U2 had the good taste to take a moment from their stage at the Meadowlands to sing "Happy Birthday" along with their crowd loud enough for him to hear it somewhere in the swamps of Jersey. This weekend, scholars from around the world got together to study a man who "learned more from a three-minute record than he ever learned from school." University types with real-life credentials and power point presentations. There were field trips to the Stone Pony. There was plenty of high-minded discussion of the poetry of Bruce Springsteen, and the charitable work he has done over the past four decades. There is a reason they call him The Boss, after all.
Me? I couldn't make it. The event took place across the country and I had to work that day and I don't know if I could compete with some of the fanatics who showed up to the symposium. I've got a ton of stories. How Bruce Springsteen saved my life. A couple of times. The way his music has accompanied me through my youth and into a middle age that still allows me to turn the radio up loud, when my wife lets me. And I remember that night in Mile High Stadium, the day he turned thirty-six. That was the big blast of "Born in the USA," and all my best pals were there to soak it up. Two nights later, in a freezing rain that kept him from playing the night before, it was just me and my best Bruce Bud. We shared a lot of schnapps with a little hot chocolate, and Bruce rocked just a little harder, perhaps to keep us all warm. We stopped at the Denny's on the turnpike on the way home to break down the show, song by song. We weren't talking about the literary allusions or the psychology of the night. We talked about the way the hair on the back of our necks stood up when we heard a certain chord, or the boundless energy that man seemed to pour out into that great big football stadium. How did he do that, night after night?
Now, twenty-four years burnin' down the road, he's still rocking the house. Sure, the three hour shows top out around two and a half, and Clarence needs a little help getting from here to there, but the magic is still there. It's still here, in my heart and in my mind whenever I hear that sound, the one that rips the bones from my back, the one that makes me feel the boardwalk beneath my feet. It's a happy birthday.