The River

8:35pm Starbucks in Poughkeepsie.

Last Sunday I spontaneously decided to drive home to Connecticut for the day. It was a beautiful sunny morning and I’d awoken early to drive a friend to the train station, so I just grabbed some clothes and kept going. My father had a gig playing guitar at a local restaurant so I stopped in. And while I was there, he played me a song.

“The River” by Bruce Springsteen is a song that’s recently grown close to my heart. Despite its notoriety, I never noticed this song until I heard my father play it one  rainy night last summer. I sat quietly in the dim bar, mesmerized by the lyrics, the haunting melody, the heartbreaking story of a man who falls in love so young and has to grow up so fast, yet, he always recalls the passions and dreams of his innocent youth.

The man in the song isn’t me but this past Sunday, as I listened to my father play that poignant melody and tell that story, I couldn’t help but reflect. I thought about my own dreams and my own ideas of home. That is, Home with a capital “H,” the idea of home, the feeling I feel when I’m home rather than some specific place. There have been times I’ve thought that people were Home to me. I had dreams and aspirations and ideas about our future and those notions too, were Home to me. Sometimes I even allowed myself the comfortable belief - as long as I’m with this person, I will never feel a deep longing for home because they will be my Home. Perhaps the collapse of that idea is this week’s, maybe even this year’s lesson to me. Just as the world turns, rivers dry up, trees grow and places change, so do people. So do I. It makes you wonder what you can count on if everything is changing all the time. If you can’t count on your places, your people, your ideas or even yourself to remain the same, what then can you really count on?

Isn’t it awfully frightening? It grabbed hold of me like an unyielding current when I heard those Springsteen lyrics insisting on the fallibility of the dreams we hold so dear.

I’m recognizing how deeply I’ve clung to those aspirations, those expectations of myself, of others, of my world, of my relationships. And I’m recognizing that as heartbreaking as it may be to release these expectations, as vulnerable and emotionally naked as it might leave me, perhaps it’s best. Life will dash our expectations and all of those other things we cling to whether we are prepared for it or not. As the song incants, “Now all them things that seemed so important, well mister they vanished right into the air.” It’s so uncomfortable to let go. I do not like to let go. I do not like to feel set adrift. I miss my life rafts – that my home wouldn’t change, that my friends wouldn’t change, that my relationships wouldn’t change. I long for the naive state of being I once occupied.

Yet, at least for right now, I am lucky enough to live on the banks of a river. Like the man in the song, something (some force of God I imagine) often “sends me down to the river.” To remember the ever changing nature of the world, to feel my own smallness and to once again, as many times as I need to be reminded, stand in awe of it all.

Maybe Home with a capital “H” has to remain just that – a concept. Maybe we can’t cling to it. Maybe it changes just like everything and everyone. Maybe our peace can only be found in the recognition and acceptance of its change as we remain awestruck by whatever it is that continually sends us “down to the river.”

Thanks for the song Dad.