Remembering the Years of Springsteen
My son likes to call me, “old man shaking his fist at the sky.” I do my best not to be the “hey you kids, get off my lawn,” guy. The past week I watched the Bruce Springsteen movie, Deliver Me From Nowhere. There is a sepia-toned scene where we see young Bruce, maybe ten years old, sitting in the backseat of the family car looking pensively at his parents in the front seat. Past and present alternate in the movie, between the “present” of the movie and the past that haunts Springsteen.
Getting older, we can become lost in the funhouse mirrors of remembrance, but the flipside of that is that as we age, synthesis becomes easier for us. (Up to a point, and then it starts to decline.) It is the only thing that old people are better at than young people, but it’s a good trick. I wanted to be in the room with the kid in the back seat. Springsteen was 32 when he was working on the album Nebraska, which is at the center of the film. I wanted to talk to the young adult Springsteen in a way that I never did when I was a young adult myself.
My point in bringing up this whole thing is that youth (or relative youth) is a time when our potential is greatest. Time has an absolute limit on what can actually come of our efforts and choices have to be made, but as we make choices, we whittle away at the range of our potential accomplishments. This is a time in life that can be exciting and terrifying, and as the saying goes, “results vary.”
Springsteen found things challenging. (You watch the movie, or read his book. I won’t ruin anything for you.) He was functioning then in a time where opportunities in America might have been fading for some, but he was able to see that things were still easier for him than they had been for his parents. I remember those years. For me, the election of Ronald Reagan was a turning point. It started to become clear that the momentum in this country had turned. We weren’t going to be about trying to make life better for everyone anymore. It was everyone for themselves, and that amounted to a steady slide with the winners taking more and more for themselves, leaving the rest of us struggling just a little bit harder every year.
I hear about the way that many younger people are despairing of reaching the traditional benchmarks of stability, like marriage and owning a home. I hear about social isolation and depression. Some of this is sympathetic and some of it is just judgy. I see it in the experience of a lot of the younger people who I talk to regularly. It is anecdotal evidence of whatever it is telling me, but I trust in the details. While Der Nister is not a “Young Adult” organization, it is a place with a lot of appeal to young adults. It is a place where they can be together and with people of other ages. I would really like to know better what is happening for you.
The takeaway: if you are at that inflection point in your life, trying to turn potential into a life, please give me an email (boychik@hollanderbooks.com), a call (415-407-1498) or come and visit, so that I can hear how things are going.
