Lucky

I spent the week writing and looking after my dog. Saturday morning I hauled myself up from the pad in the living room where Dot and I slept during the week. I’m a light sleeper and I can hear when she starts to lick her incision. I ask her to stop and she usually does. Her surgical wound looks good now a week out from the operation, so I think it’s been worth it.

I made a big cup of coffee and I listened to my news programs, then I asked my robot machine to play all of Bruce Springsteen it could find. Dot sat at my feet and after a while we went for a walk around the block. When we came back we kept listening to Bruce and Dot seemed happy.

I remember liking Springsteen when he appeared on the covers of Time and Newsweek on the same week. But it was in the summer of sixty nine I had my Springsteen moment.

My parents lived in Atlantic Highlands New Jersey that summer. It was the only summer I didn’t work in the Cascade mountains. I read all the books on my schools reading list: Cannery Row, The Great Gatsby and Jude The Obscure, are the ones I remember. Though, the only thing I really remember about Jude The Obscure was that a girl named Jane Marie said it was her favorite book. I had a serious crush on her and I always regret that the book didn’t make a bigger impression on me. Every two weeks I had to take the bus into Manhattan to have my blood drawn mesureing my recovery from mono. From that summer I remember the moon landing, Doc and the boys living the life in Monterey, , and sleeping almost all the time.

I also remember meeting a girl on one of the bus trips back home. She had long brown hair and she wore some kind of colorful vest. She was coming from Manhattan on her way to Asbury Park. She made belt buckles and hash pipes out of antler horn and she was going to Asbury Park to sell some of her goods and she told me she was going to “Check out the scene around this far out band playing on the board walk.” She was about my age and she had a plastic soap case that was stuffed with marijuana joints. I assumed she was going to sell those as well. She asked me if I wanted to get off the bus with her in Asbury Park. She gave me a joint that I ruined in the pocket of my jeans. So frightened that my parents would find it on me, I just left it there until it disolved. I was a nerdy kid and not a free spirit. So I declined her offer to go check out the scene on the board walk of Asbury park.

I don’t even know if Bruce Springsteen was even playing there that summer. Its a detail I could probably check out on the web but I don’t want to. I only have to listen to one measure of the E Street Band that I don’t think of that girl and what might have happened if I had gone with her. I don’t check out that detail because I want to believe that we ended up in a nasty boardwalk club listening to Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, and then smoking her pot with Steve Van Zandt under the board walk.

That summer I was thinking about running away from home, but I was afraid of getting drafted, being repressed as I was I didn’t really want to run to Canada nor go to Jail. I mostly wanted to smoke pot with a pretty girl who appeared to be a free spirit.

But I didn’t get drafted and I didn’t run away. I went to college and got a degree in English and then a certificate from a Farrier’s college in Wyoming. I did have a liaison with a Lakota woman who claimed to be running guns to Wounded Knee. I did have some adventures in my life. All of these things come back to haunt me when I listen to Bruce: the draft and the boy I might have become. The truth is I’ve been extraordinarily lucky in this life I actually have had.

Here I am seventy years old, sitting with my black dog: a mid to lower list writer supported by adventurous women who I went with and many others I let step off the bus.

Here is poem I wrote about my good luck that doesn’t mention belt buckles, hash pipes or plastic soap cases full of pot.