rainysanctuary:

Bruce Springsteen (photo by Mark Seliger)

I’m a big Springsteen fan, have been since I can remember being old enough to use my brother’s record player. It wasn’t until I was on a trip from my Northern Minnesota rural hometown to visit relatives in Minneapolis that I was able to figure out why.

All I had was a handful of mixtapes, a janky knock-off walkman borrowed from a friend, and 7 hours stuck in an over-crowded back seat staring out the window, occasionally looking up and watching my dad’s reflection in the rear-view mirror. I remember him driving with the radio turned off while everyone else in the car was asleep. He suddenly looked very tired. It was the first time I can recall my old man looking “old.” There was an argument he and mom had about money as they were packing up for the weekend. It wasn’t the first.

My dad worked on the road doing construction, and my mother worked on an assembly line at a snowmobile factory. Right around this time the family was having some money trouble; namely not having any. I remember realizing that not only were we not a comfortable middle class family, but that our barely-getting-by blue collar clan (I was one 5 kids) was dangerously close to becoming legitimately poor.

I was watching the worry move around my father’s face when I first heard Bruce Springsteen sing “Used Cars.”

My little sister’s in the front seat with an ice cream cone
My ma’s in the black seat sittin’ all alone
As my pa steers her slow out of the lot for a test drive down Michigan Avenue

Now, my ma, she fingers her wedding band
And watches the salesman stare at my old man’s hands
He’s tellin’ us all ‘bout the break he’d give us if he could, but he just can’t
Well if I could, I swear I know just what I’d do

Now, mister, the day the lottery I win I ain’t ever gonna ride in no used car
again

Now, the neighbors come from near and far
As we pull up in our brand new used car
I wish he’d just hit the gas and let out a cry and tell ‘em all they can kiss
our asses goodbye

My dad, he sweats the same job from mornin’ to morn
Me, I walk home on the same dirty streets where I was born
Up the block I can hear my little sister in the front seat blowin’ that horn
The sounds echoin’ all down Michigan Avenue

Now, mister, the day my numbers comes in I ain’t ever gonna ride in no used car
again

Sure, I had listened to the song before, but that was the first time I really heard it.

Being a kid and hearing someone sing about what you are feeling - all the worry and shame and futile “I’ll show you” attitude -

Making plans about how it’ll never be like this when you grow up, but knowing it would take something as likely as winning the lottery to break free from that reality? Being young enough to dream of a better life but also being old enough to know it isn’t ever going to come true? That is truly powerful, heart-breaking stuff.  

Hearing that song through those nerf-orange spongy, uncomfortable borrowed headphones was the closest thing I can relate to having an actual revelation.

That first time that you hear, really hear, someone who sings not only to you but about you and for you - at 12 years old - that is something nothing short of awesome.