Americana.

NPR has always had a central spot in my commuting entertainment. Since I'm no longer driving and don't own a radio, I've turned to downloading podcasts. What began with a few NPR programs that I would update each week, has now turned into a dozen NPR podcasts I update almost daily, stretching back into the archives and keeping the voices of Terry Gross* and everyone else smoothly passing through my ears.

Last week I caught an older interview with Bruce Springsteen, the news preparing for the hype of the Super Bowl performance. The interview was from far before the Presidential Inauguration and concert, for which were still very vivid in my brain. Springsteen with his guitar cocked, his breath visible in the cold, his hair disheveled, backed with a choir on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. ...Come on rise up... streaming through my brain, clenching my chest, tightening my throat. The honor and importance of the song, the image. The time.

I'm not a Springsteen fan. I've never really listened to his music seriously, though I can sing along with a handful of his songs because I was exposed to them via radio and tv. I remember liking the theme he wrote for the movie Philadelphia, owning the cassette single, but never buying any actual records.

Yet, as he spoke and laughed and the song clips played, I couldn't help but feel my arms run cold, my breath grow hot and my eyes well with tears. There was such an incredible nostalgia associated with that voice, with the guitar, with the ramble he sometimes has as he tells his stories. I was torn between the iconic vision of Springsteen in a tee-shirt and jeans, an American flag bandanna hanging from his pocket and the image of him in a woolen coat, singing for the pride of our nation, for the hope and potential that I never really heard in his songs until that moment.

For the first time in my life I felt an overwhelming amount of patriotism, love for being American, and heart-warmth for the message of the middle class. After having decided the American Dream was perhaps the biggest fallacy in the last century, I felt for just a second that maybe I had gotten it all wrong. ...Come on rise up... as a call to arms, to hope and change like we had invited on Election Day.

My temples tight, I took to the cold of the street and walked from the bus. Trying to hold back the tears, I lamented that I couldn't share this moment with anyone. Couldn't describe it later. Couldn't make sense of it for the life of me. As I rounded the driveway of my job I felt defeated and invigorated at once, devastated that the moment was to be swallowed into my everyday, but touched that for those minutes I had a connection with someone new, that a message from years ago, decades ago, still applied. That I was getting older and wiser. That I understood better than anyone, at that very moment, what was in Springsteen's heart.

Approaching the time clock I said goodbye, wiped my eyes, and put my headphones away. With a deep breath it was all packed away. Forever.


*Bonus Trivia: Terry Gross's husband is jazz critic and journalist Francis Davis, who just won a Grammy for the liner notes in Miles Davis 50th anniversary edition of “Kind Of Blue." No wonder she can interview musicians and talk the talk!

Sardines.

Why I Am Not a Painter

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."
"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's SARDINES?"
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.

--Frank O'Hara (1971)

Our evenings are typically lackluster. The day of work is so demanding that come time to be home together, we fall apart on the couch and pretend the next day won’t arrive.

I’ve had the flu for three days, homebound. The TV and I have reaffirmed the relationship we developed twenty-some-odd years ago, the warm hum keeping me secure and entertained. Cable has become an outlet almost as strong as alcohol. I can scroll ahead, remind myself of programming, play the field. Watching garbage that quiets my brain and makes time pass quickly (which isn't easy when you can't breathe, cough or eat).

Stuck on the couch, the dog laying across my lap, I came across How Its Made on the Discovery Channel. Sardines! They were going to show how they packed sardines. I exclaimed this to the boy across the room and he actually had a bit of excitement, too.

Yet as we watched we were thoroughly let down. Why were they so big? No, I can't tell which have been scaled. How could they cook them with the cans open? What was that red sauce? I began to fill in the gaps with personal story telling, my experience with sardines.

It only created more gaps. When was it that I bought cans of sardines and shredded them on salads? I remember where I lived, with whom I lived, but not what had inspired such an unlikely purchase and creation. Toted in my lunch to work like a napalm bomb in reusable plastic containers.

Like many of the stories I open my mouth to mention, I realize that I no longer remember the details. The moments. The reasons. I forget that, though the boy and I have forged a great, new future together, that our past is essentially our own and alone. Memories packed like sardines, washed away with brine and full of sharp bones of reality.