Another October 27th
Sorry, teacher, my homework is late, but I needed to get through Sunday before I could start writing this.
Last week was a big week for Springsteen fans. The documentary, “Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band” premiered on Hulu. This was accompanied by an ABC Primetime Special “Bruce Springsteen: Backstage and Backstreets.” Then Howard Stern had a fantastic two-hour in-studio interview with Bruce and the whole band. And as I write this, the tour has resumed in Canada, and I’m grateful to a stranger named Jeff Griffin for livestreaming the show. There are 198 of us on the stream right now and we’re grateful that Jeff doesn’t have the urge to sing, and we hope his phone arm doesn’t fatigue before the encores.
One of the highlights of Howard’s interview was when he asked Bruce if he knew when he wrote “Thunder Road” that it would be one of his greatest songs. Bruce answered “No. That is one of my great songs, if not one of my greatest. It still holds a very fond place in my heart.” Lukewarm praise, really, for a masterpiece.
I find that interesting because Thunder Road is not only clearly Howard’s favorite song, and mine, but in every legitimate survey of real Springsteen fans, the top two songs are always Thunder Road and Born to Run, in that order, even though Bruce ranks them the other way (or Born to Run first and Thunder Road....someplace else).
Born to Run is the song that unites all fans in the Springsteen experience. It’s a song that even non-believers know and respect. In concert for the last three decades it marks the point when the house lights come on and for the rest of the show you will be bathed in light and will see the faces of the other folks assembled with you in revelry. I go out of my way to notice, at the climactic count-off near the end of the song, that most fans fixate their eyes on Bruce at “One!” - even though we all know the cadence, no one wants to jump the gun – but by the time they get to “Four!” their eyes are back out in the arena, awash in the comradery, connecting with the faces of strangers sharing the experience. Born to Run is a community event.
But Thunder Road is a deeply personal experience for most everyone in the building. Yes there are sing-along portions, but they’re more hymnal than anthemic. Early on there’s a line that says “So you’re scared and you’re thinking that maybe we ain’t that young any more”, and the crowd croons the last three words in unison, usually while Bruce holds out his microphone in silence for them. You can’t escape the irony that many of those people have been crooning – and pondering - that line for almost five decades. There’s no “maybe” any more.
Most importantly, there are more tears shed during Thunder Road than at any other moment in the show, despite the fact that it’s inherently not a sad song. I think it’s because while Born to Run is the walk-up song to the happy place, Thunder Road is self-prescribed by most fans in moments of doubt, or despair. I’d this song has been the soundtrack for more climbs in off the ledge than all other Springsteen songs combined. This is the song, if you’re part of the Springsteen world, that has been there for you when you were a lovestruck teen who didn’t get the girl; when you graduated from whatever you were graduating from; when you started a family; when you mourned your last parent; or when you defied all reason and started a medical practice as most of your peers were contemplating retirement.
Now: look at the date on the top right hand corner of the Time magazine cover at the top of this post. One reason it’s important is that on that same date, Bruce also appeared on the cover of Newsweek magazine. He was one of the first performers to appear simultaneously on both without having died the week before. This happened despite the fact that he was still in his career ascent, and was far from a household name. The Time cover is depicted here, not just because it’s artistically more striking, but because the article heralded Bruce as a budding superstar, while Newsweek’s story painted him as a Madison Avenue creation. Time was right.
To me, there’s another reason date on the cover has significance. You see, October 27, 1975 was my fifteenth birthday. As such that cover was a birthday gift from the cosmos. I had been introduced to Bruce in the summer of 1974 by my sister, who spent that summer in Ocean City, Maryland and had the good fortune to be living next door to a couple of guys from the Jersey Shore. They had a copy of this album that my sister loved, and made me listen to when I came to visit for the weekend. That hunk of plastic accompanied me back to Baltimore when I returned home (“We know where to get another one,” the neighbors generously told me). That album was “The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle,” Springsteen’s second album
Critically acclaimed, sparsely played, meagerly sold, the album nonetheless pointed me, my sister and thousands of others on the journey of a lifetime, toward our own truth, our own code, and a community that is at once inherently communal and also deeply personal. For an awkward teen seeking an identity (doesn’t that describe most of us?), this became mine: I was the Springsteen guy. Throughout high school, I’d proselytize for the cult of Springsteen, when most people around Baltimore had never heard the name. I’d drone on, if you let me, about subtle lyric choices, and connections between songs, and about how this guy –and not Kiss or Aerosmith - was going to continue to create art and remain relevant for the rest of our lives. I was right.
So it was more than just a little important during the formative period of my Springsteen discipleship that this guy that I’ve been telling you about, and that you kept ignoring me about, is ON THE COVER OF TIME MAGAZINE!!! AND NEWSWEEK!!! ON...MY...BIRTHDAY!!!!
Other than that, I generally don’t get too excited about my birthday. What I mean is, I don’t go out of my way to make a big deal of it. No big party. No big birthday trips. Not much special attention.
But here are a few things about my birthday:
I share it with Teddy Roosevelt, John Gotti, John Cleese of Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Garry W. Tallent of the E Street Band. I admire three of those four.
This year was an exception, because it almost always rains on October 27. And not just a passing shower in the afternoon. It’s usually night all day, and wet the whole time, too. But since it never rains anymore, this birthday was dry.
The first time the baseball season reached October 27 was in 1985. I was always envious of kids with birthdays during the summer. They could have a party at Memorial Stadium, and get their name on the scoreboard. Not so when your birthday is chasing Halloween. But finally in my last year of medical school, baseball got there, and the Kansas City Royals beat the St. Louis Cardinals in perhaps the worst game 7 in sports history. The next year, the Mets and Red Sox finished on my birthday but only because of a rainout on Sunday. It let up enough to get the game in on the 27th. Nowadays since they’ve added more rounds to the playoffs, baseball will always be there to usher me to my next step toward the finish line.
And since I was born in a year ending in zero, my birthday doesn’t even serve the primary purpose of upticking my age. Since the math is so straightforward, usually by February I’ve already started telling people my new age. I’ve been calling myself 64 for 8 months now. Nothing changed on Sunday.
But while I don’t go crazy about it, I do appreciate that a birthday brings an annual reminder to mark time in a way that no other day of the year does, since all other holidays belong to everybody and this one belongs just to you (and, I guess, 1/365th of everybody else). This is the day that you can survey where you’ve been, where you are, and where you’re going. What you’ve gained, and what you’ve lost. Who has joined you on your journey, and who has left you, one way or another. And to take all that data and look not backward but forward, which is really vital when you reach a stage, as Bruce says in the concerts these days, when there are a lot more yesterdays and a lot fewer tomorrows.
A few weeks ago I attended my 50th gradeschool reunion. It deserves its own blog, but I’ll spare you that for now. I was reluctant to go, since I was kind of embarrassed to be starting a brand new practice when I guessed that half of the people there would be retired or about to retire. “So sorry, Pat. We kind of thought you’d be successful, but I guess not.” But the folks who attended – many of whom I hadn’t seen in half a century - were amazingly supportive. They remembered me as a kid who never thought of growing up to be anything but a doctor. Why would I ever, even at this age, want to be anything else? Somebody had our yearbook (which was a mimeographed tome, stapled into a yellow folder), and we went through everybody’s wish for what they would be when they grew up, and also the yearbook crew’s guess for what would happen to them. About 5 people said they were going to become a doctor (three would-be Pediatricians, none so granular as to say Pediatric Cardiology) but only one did. And the prediction for me, dull and predictable, was on target.
I’ve done a lot of challenging and satisfying things in my medical career, in addition to the medical care I’ve delivered to kids with heart disease and their families. There are always teaching responsibilities, administrative roles and all sorts of other tasks that punctuate the day, or the decade. I’m grateful for (mostly) all of it.
But if I’ve got another decade left, it made sense to cone it down to the puzzle pieces that bring the most joy, and essentially that’s the face-to-face, focused interaction with a child and their family (mostly) plus my role riding shotgun on the vast team that supports our Cardio-thoracic Surgery wizards at Cornell on Tuesdays. With any luck, joy will find me every day from here on out.
I did a lot of soul-searching with this decision and am somewhat proud that I have channeled what was best for the sexagenarian me. In reality, though, I think what really happened was that I finally heeded that teenage me and just took a step back to finally be the doctor I was meant to be way back when.
I don’t know if there’s a lesson in that. I doubt that any element of my formula is applicable to anyone who might read this. I’m not offering any recipe for satisfying life transitions, or for negotiating a successful way-past-midlife crisis (especially since we have no idea yet if “successful” will even be an applicable adjective here).
But maybe that’s the point. There’s no playbook, really. Some of our really big life decisions border on permanent but most of them can really only shape a day, a year, a decade or more. There’s always a chance to reverse fields, or at least bend in a different direction. Most paths are not dead ends. And while we’re older, wiser, have more answers at 64 than at 14, maybe the fabric that we’re made of doesn’t necessarily change that much. We can come a long way, and find our way back to the beginning.
Maybe the fact that we ain’t that young any more doesn’t need to be so frightening.
As Yogi Berra, who probably caught all the routine fly balls and probably wasn’t guilty of catcher’s interference at the very worst time (too soon?) famously said:
It ain’t over till it’s over.
~Patrick Flynn
