The only certain freedom is in departure.
I don't know who said it, but I'm glad I heard it.
We listen to the stories of our friends in his songs getting out of dodge. We watch as they finally feel that it aint no sin to be glad you're alive. We watch, and sometimes, we go with as they leave in the middle of night to catch the sunrise that will determine their destination. These people leave, searching for that something that is bigger than themselves, and hope that this massive feeling of fearlessness will last forever as they step into the night.
But in those songs, what happens to who's left behind? Who did Rat leave behind before he got to Jungleland?
At 23, I find myself in a constant whirlwind of meeting new friends, and saying goodbye to the old ones. It feels impossible to have anything concrete in my life. I have my born to run poster that has planted itself on different walls of different houses over the years. The friends I had when I first put it up are 2,000 miles away. Some I don't talk to anymore, some I just reconnected with, one has a baby, another is getting married. I had a nose ring then and had just turned twenty-one. The crumby paint or tacky wall paper changes behind it and will continue to- but that poster is one of the few things that will remain the same. It's a reminder. When lost=look to the boss.
But friends are leaving, jobs are had and lost, and no one wants to commit. Commit to moving to one place, to staying in one place. Commit to being there until the end, because the end and the beginning are not defined. They happen at the same time every day when you're twenty-three. And maybe fourty-six. All the time.
I know I'm not the only one who thinks only about themselves when they watch their friends leave- about what life is going to be like without them near. How it's going to affect me. Once they're gone, the street to their house is only a street that goes somewhere you used to go. You can't go there anymore. I just moved here, and my best friend is leaving this city for four months. I've never done this city with out her. And I don't want to. She taught me how to do it. She showed me the right bars that have the best juke boxes, the best bartenders that will you give you free drinks, she gave me her friends, and her home anytime I needed it.
We all want to be supportive of our loved ones- and it might take a couple days or weeks, but she didn't need to say anything else other than "Wendy, I just need to do this".
And that's when I looked at her and said in my own words, "good luck, and goodbye".
Thanks, Boss.
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
For You
You know that summer feeling? The one that's sneaking up on America right now? After the long winter--cold and frozen for some, wet, dark, and dank for others like myself--the sun has come out and meant it, the flowers have bloomed, and the promise of long summer nights stretches on through to September. It's a feeling of renewal, of change, of something exciting about to happen. We've all been waiting for it, and now it's here.
Broad starry nights, campfires, for me an illuminated body of water: there's something magical about a summer night. The air is so clear, the feeling that a moment is here that promises to change you and your life. I can't remember how many times, as a farm girl growing up on the prairie, I would walk to the far corner of the pasture and look up at those stars and think about all the places I would go. I'd spin tales of my life to the sky, things that could happen, things that should happen. And as the years went by, those tales moved far away from southern Minnesota. They were about the places beyond the glowing horizon that encircled our little farm, places on a new map that I was drawing for myself. My escape was, as someone once sang, a long time coming.
Then some things came together. A year of harmonic convergences at sixteen years old. I got a driver's license, a car, and a ticket to a rock show. Early in the year, I passed the driver's test, successfully parallel parking my decade-old white Saab. That summer was my first of true freedom. Growing up on a farm, thirty miles from town, I had always been reliant on my parents' for any sort of social interaction. Surprisingly it wasn't the ability to meet up with friends for whatever escapades were brewing that made me fall in love with my car, a love affair that continues four vehicles later. It was the way I could create my own world within it's doors, much like my younger years when I was spinning tales out in the back pasture. But this time, my means of escape was at my command. It was now possible.
It must not have been a coincidence that my family got in the car for the trip that would really change things. Looking back now, twelve shows and nearly nine years later, I have come to recognize what a big day September 28, 1999, was for me. Truthfully, I don't know what I was doing, what I believed in, what I cared about, what I obsessed over, before that date. My dad took us--my mom, little brother, and me--to Chicago to see Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. We made a weekend of it, seeing all the Chicago sites since my brother and I had never been before. I went into that show having no clue what was happening and came out not exactly knowing what had happened. But the few months before the next show we went to in Minneapolis were nothing but driving around in the Saab, listening to Bruce on the cd player I had to have installed for just that purpose. Nothing has really changed since.
That show in Minneapolis came to be another huge moment in my life. My dad's good friend brought his family along, his girlfriend and his daughter who was a couple years younger than me. That daughter, Wendy, and I had known each other since she was born, but weren't really friends, just acquaintances. We lived in different towns, had different lives, and just hadn't connected. After that Minneapolis show in 1999, it all changed. She got it. She understood. And from that one crazy night in the Twin Cities, we started a friendship that never grows old, never tires.
Since then we've both moved to the West Coast for college, and then moved back to the Midwest, and for me, back West again. We've driven to shows together; we've driven from Seattle to our little Minnesota towns together; we've listened to hours and hours of songs together, applying their lessons to our own lives together; we've complained and agonized over love interests together; most recently, we've lost together. Always with our common bond playing in the background.
As this summer night unwinds out my window, the moon high and bright, I'm looking forward to our next big adventure together. We're driving to New Jersey this summer to see the E Street Band play at the Meadowlands, a kind of homecoming and pilgrimage all wrapped up in one. I'll leave Portland and pick her up in Madison a couple days later. We'll camp out under Cassiopeia, and we'll ride that road till dawn, and the highway will be jammed with broken heroes, and we'll be right here, recording it all. Those two lanes will take us anywhere. We hope you come along for the ride.
Abbey & Wendy
Broad starry nights, campfires, for me an illuminated body of water: there's something magical about a summer night. The air is so clear, the feeling that a moment is here that promises to change you and your life. I can't remember how many times, as a farm girl growing up on the prairie, I would walk to the far corner of the pasture and look up at those stars and think about all the places I would go. I'd spin tales of my life to the sky, things that could happen, things that should happen. And as the years went by, those tales moved far away from southern Minnesota. They were about the places beyond the glowing horizon that encircled our little farm, places on a new map that I was drawing for myself. My escape was, as someone once sang, a long time coming.
Then some things came together. A year of harmonic convergences at sixteen years old. I got a driver's license, a car, and a ticket to a rock show. Early in the year, I passed the driver's test, successfully parallel parking my decade-old white Saab. That summer was my first of true freedom. Growing up on a farm, thirty miles from town, I had always been reliant on my parents' for any sort of social interaction. Surprisingly it wasn't the ability to meet up with friends for whatever escapades were brewing that made me fall in love with my car, a love affair that continues four vehicles later. It was the way I could create my own world within it's doors, much like my younger years when I was spinning tales out in the back pasture. But this time, my means of escape was at my command. It was now possible.
It must not have been a coincidence that my family got in the car for the trip that would really change things. Looking back now, twelve shows and nearly nine years later, I have come to recognize what a big day September 28, 1999, was for me. Truthfully, I don't know what I was doing, what I believed in, what I cared about, what I obsessed over, before that date. My dad took us--my mom, little brother, and me--to Chicago to see Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. We made a weekend of it, seeing all the Chicago sites since my brother and I had never been before. I went into that show having no clue what was happening and came out not exactly knowing what had happened. But the few months before the next show we went to in Minneapolis were nothing but driving around in the Saab, listening to Bruce on the cd player I had to have installed for just that purpose. Nothing has really changed since.
That show in Minneapolis came to be another huge moment in my life. My dad's good friend brought his family along, his girlfriend and his daughter who was a couple years younger than me. That daughter, Wendy, and I had known each other since she was born, but weren't really friends, just acquaintances. We lived in different towns, had different lives, and just hadn't connected. After that Minneapolis show in 1999, it all changed. She got it. She understood. And from that one crazy night in the Twin Cities, we started a friendship that never grows old, never tires.
Since then we've both moved to the West Coast for college, and then moved back to the Midwest, and for me, back West again. We've driven to shows together; we've driven from Seattle to our little Minnesota towns together; we've listened to hours and hours of songs together, applying their lessons to our own lives together; we've complained and agonized over love interests together; most recently, we've lost together. Always with our common bond playing in the background.
As this summer night unwinds out my window, the moon high and bright, I'm looking forward to our next big adventure together. We're driving to New Jersey this summer to see the E Street Band play at the Meadowlands, a kind of homecoming and pilgrimage all wrapped up in one. I'll leave Portland and pick her up in Madison a couple days later. We'll camp out under Cassiopeia, and we'll ride that road till dawn, and the highway will be jammed with broken heroes, and we'll be right here, recording it all. Those two lanes will take us anywhere. We hope you come along for the ride.
Abbey & Wendy
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