Brucebumps

I sit shotgun as he drives the perimeter of the carrot rows playing “Into the Fire” and pointing out that Bruce makes art out of heartbreak. His songs, a salve of solidarity, of hope. He tells me that Springsteen is the soundtrack that winds through a decades long love story with his wife. Jim, the owner of the farm where I work that summer, blares classics like “Born to Run” from his truck and muses and pontificates with a fan’s devotion in between chores.

“You see that?” he says, pointing to his forearm. “Brucebumps.”

The term Brucebumps, though entirely original and ingeniously his, is a sensation I’ve certainly experienced. A Born in the USA cassette on rotation in my mom’s yellow VW bug. His gravelly solos in “We are the World” recognizable to my kindergarten ear. On bus rides to soccer games, in the private stardom of karaoke rooms. I’ve had Brucebumps. And while that Bruce is woven through the soundtrack of my 1980s childhood in New York, it’s Bruce Hornsby that plays prominently on the soundtrack of my heart.

The summer after I graduated from college, I worked as a program director at my camp in the Santa Cruz mountains. I’d grown up there among the towering redwoods. Found faith, felt home. It was my tenth and final summer, both a homecoming and a farewell tour. And Bruce Hornsby’s Here Come the Noise Makers was the soundtrack. 

I remember one evening vividly. Returning to camp from a day off, I drove the twists and turns of Highway 17 as the sun set in my rearview. Away from the life I was leaving in my college town, a relationship ending, a chapter closing. I could measure that drive’s distance in the number of times I played “Mandolin Rain” as it looped with my sinking heart.

I toted that same album with me to the Bahamas, where I moved a few years later. Where I found a different kind of love. Soaring and slow. A love that snuck up on me. Destined and unexpected. 

On the 19th of this month we will have been together for 19 years. Our love has grown and changed. We have grown and changed. A steady simmer. Space to stumble, to shine, to surprise ourselves and each other. The hard work of building and sustaining. The peace we make with and for each other. The well of love we share for our son. A young son who sat and sang alongside us on a summer road trip with Bruce Hornsby’s “Dreamland” weaving through the drive.

Last year, The Palace of Fine Arts filled with Hornsby fans, some younger, most older. The two of us somewhere in the middle. Certain songs transported me to that summer of a broken heart and a wide open future ahead of me. To a time when I thought I knew what love would look like, what life would look like. Neither turned out the way I expected. And though the songs took me back, they also left me where I was, where I am now. Where we are. Changed, changing. 

At some point in the show, Bruce moved unexpectedly from his piano to the middle of the stage and settled into one of three folding chairs. A row of dulcimers stood off to his right. To his left, the percussionist with spoons and a washboard over his front and the violinist with his body gathered around a mandolin. Played through different instruments and in new arrangements, old songs became new. Alchemy. 

As Bruce played the Appalachian dulcimer, we leaned into each other. My forearm resting on his. 

Brucebumps.

Dipping Lessons

I like to sleep. I like to be warm. I like to be comfortable and don’t seek things out simply because they are hard. I don’t dip because it is comfortable or easy. It is not. Sometimes the dark predawn stillness of my home envelopes me like a weighted blanket. Many mornings, I choose more sleep, more time in the warmth of my bed. But this is not about those mornings. This is about the mornings I go. 

Last spring, I had a spell of restlessness. An ambient, twitchy, consuming and confounding energy haunted my body, tugged at my spirit, and batted around in my head. An itch. A stuckness. A craving. To change the channel. To light a fire. 

I told a friend. She opened a door. Warmly and gently and with a touch of playful mischief, as is her way, she placed an invitation at the threshold. Join us. We are going tomorrow morning. That evening, as I dragged my feet and grasped for excuses, I noticed a new yet familiar giddy nervousness bubble to my surface. Like the night before a race or tournament, I didn’t know what the morning would bring. Just that I would wake up early and do a hard thing. I set out my suit and towel and layers and tea mug. I told my husband and son and set my alarm. There was no turning back. 

Remembering that first morning, I can see it. I just can’t feel it the same way in my memory, in my body. A body now changed by all of the mornings that have followed. I slipped out quietly, careful not to wake the sleeping creatures in my house. Driving in the dark, bleary and wide eyed, laughing to myself at the absurdity of it. Pulling slowly into the sandy parking lot as heavy fog muffled the breaking day and mist sat on the water. 

A small group shuffled towards one another, embracing in oversized hooded coats. Wide smiles. Warm greetings. Among them, teachers, mothers, daughters, childhood friends, water family. All strangers to me then, other than my friend. Spirited and supportive, they welcomed me into their fold. Into the water we waded arm in arm, the soft warmth of an old friend’s body by my side. As we stood up to our waists in the cold water, I fixed my eyes on another guide; she pointed to her nose with wide eyes and a serene smile as she slipped deeper and submerged most of her body. Breathe. In my own time, I too slipped in and under. I remember giggles and glee, shock and shivering. Wonder. 

I had imagined it might be a bit terrifying and uncomfortable and also thrilling and exhilarating. It was. What I hadn’t been able to imagine was that it would be spiritual. At that quiet hour, the water a muted pewter green, the bridge and the day ahead at a distance, a channel changed, a fire lit. I am wild and spiritual and strong. I can surprise myself. Still. There is no turning back.

It’s been three seasons since that first morning in the water, since I stepped through that portal and found on the other side a practice, a congregation, an anchor. The lessons emerge like the resolve that keeps me returning to the water. I don’t have to look for them. Mostly, I just go. I get in. I stay in.

Staring Down Uncertainty

I turned 42 this year. The age my dad was when we almost lost him to a heart attack. I was 7 years old when life inoculated me against the illusion that everything you love will always be there. I became familiar with mortality and the precariousness of life. That seismic event set our family on an altered course and underpinned our lives with a fear of loss, negotiations with fate, and a reckoning with control. As my strong, brave 40 year old mom single handedly lifted a living room sofa out of the way so that paramedics could work on my dad in the predawn of that October morning, we became acutely aware of the superhuman strength that crises, trauma and fear forge within us. Often, a byproduct of that combination of fear and superhumanity is a belief in a powerful myth: that, if we play our cards right, if we channel our mettle, we might be able to control…everything. That we can make the uncertain certain. That we will.

"Heart attacks are noisy” I wrote in the opening line of a poem in my second grade class later that week. Awakened by the doors and boots and voices and beeping happening elsewhere in the house, I had wandered sleepily upstairs toward the noise. I came upon a scene that set into motion a cascade of somatic sensations etched into the deepest layers of my nervous system to this day. My dad on the living room floor. Paramedics kneeling beside him, defibrillator paddles in hand, hovering above his chest. Spotted in my mom’s periphery, I was shuffled lovingly and urgently into the adjoining room, the door closing behind me as life itself hung in the balance on the other side.

The week that followed the heart attack, the local fire department visited our school in the high desert of central Oregon to teach us about fire safety. In the parking lot in front of our school, small groups of us took turns practicing crawling through a smoke-filled trailer in simulations of what to do in a fire. An abiding fear of fire ensued. I spent many wakeful nights playing over different escape routes from our house, wandering up to my parents room long after bedtime with the same refrain, “I’m afraid of a fire. What will we do? What will happen? How will we stay safe?” The fear, of course, was about more than the fire. Or possibly not about the fire at all. I expressed the fear I could understand on behalf of the one I couldn’t. 

My dad recovered. My family recovered. We adapted. Parts of us transformed while other parts seemed to petrify within us. My 10 year old sister holding me that night as we huddled together in the next room. My 4 year old sister waking the next morning to learn that her dad could no longer hold her. My mom held us together. My dad held on. We lived and loved. We held our breath.

When I was 26, my dad and I exchanged letters amid the aftershocks of another seismic event. We were shaken. Searching for scraps of certainty and solace in the face of the freshly reopened fear that his body would again betray him, that we could not save him, I urged us both to find a way out of the fear, but I didn’t know how. 

It took me time to understand that fear isn’t an impossible puzzle handed down by a cosmic scorekeeper that I’d yet to figure out. That pain can’t always be transmuted into a lesson. That there isn’t always a reason for suffering. That shame isn’t an escape hatch. That control is not a key. That we can’t solve for uncertainty.

The month before I turned 40, my family gathered in a hospital room. Our own children back at home, my sisters and I became our father’s children at the side of his bed. Standing at another threshold, my father faced an impossible choice between life on his terms, fraught with uncertainty and the likelihood that he would have less of it to live, and a decision that held a tenuous promise of more time but for the price of his sovereignty. My father stood steady. Full of grace and wisdom and courage, he stared down his mortality. My mother asked the unwitting palliative care doctor, “Why? Why do we pathologize death? Death is life.” Looking my father in the eye and shaking her head no when asked if they had any regrets, I saw my mother surrender and reveal a strength that did not require her to be a hero, to be superhuman, to hold in or to hold on. We opened the door we’d pressed closed with the weight of our bodies and our fears for so many years. I see you, death. I see you rage, terror, grief, loss. I see you, uncertainty. Come in. With my hand on my dad’s blanketed feet, a raw and aching heart, and a knot in my throat, I witnessed transcendence.

My son turned 7 during this pandemic. The age I was when we almost lost my dad. Life over the last two years has inoculated him against an illusion that the world is safe, that grown-ups have all of the answers, that everything you love will always be there. Vaccinated the week he turned 8 against a virus that has indelibly shaped this season of his childhood and the world in which he will grow up, he emerges from this experience a different kid. I am a different mom, a different daughter. No longer convinced of a myth that we can, must or will control what is uncertain. Life has instead forged within us a humility and a strength that comes from knowing that we can, must and will be with uncertainty itself.

Grace, wisdom, courage.
Standing with uncertainty.
How my dad faces death is how I try to live.