Unresolved

Friday night

I was seated in a diner in New Jersey, where two tables had been added, end to end, to a booth. Bruce Springsteen and his friend, Southside Johnny Lyon, were also sitting there, among a group of ordinary working people and regular customers. We were all there to listen to a guest speaker, who was leading a discussion about being healthy in middle age. The speaker began, "We can't do anything about the past. How do we move forward?" He wanted everyone to think about what he said as they ate their meals, and there would be more discussion later. I looked down to the end of the middle table (where it butted up against the booth) and saw that Springsteen was standing up, hunched over, signing an autograph for someone. I figured that this was my chance to ask him a question about one of his songs that had always puzzled me. I walked over and stood across from him, with the table between us, and said, "Can I ask you a question?" He said, "OK, but quickly, because I have a lot I want to say [to the group]." I leaned closer and looked him in the eye, with my hands on the table for support. I said, "Reason to Believe..." He looked a little exasperated, as if he didn't have time to go into great detail, and he cut me off. He said, "It's Luke. It's LUKE." Undeterred, I began to quote the lyrics: "Take a baby to the river / Kyle William they called him / Wash the baby in the water / take away little Kyle's sin / In a whitewash shotgun shack an old man passes away / Take the body to the graveyard / and over him they pray..." "So," I said, "Is the old man who dies Kyle William, or is he someone else?"

I woke up before he answered.

*****

This question didn't originate with me. Gordon and I were talking about Springsteen years ago, and he said that if he ever had the chance to meet him, he'd ask him about that song. I must have filed it away. I was thinking about Gordon yesterday, about time, distance, friendship.

I'm assuming that Springsteen was telling me that there's a passage in the book of Luke that inspired him to write, or would explain, "Reason to Believe." I'm not sure where I got that idea. Then again, I may have been thinking about my nephew Luke, back in Virginia.

The speaker's statement echoes something my mom said to me in 1996: "What is in the past you have no control over; it's done. There's no point in regretting it, although I know some of us do. You can't help it. And we don't know what we have tomorrow, so we ought to deal with today the best we know how. But I think because we have such a sense of time and our own immortality, that we may not always use it to the best advantage."

Lord, won't you tell us / Tell us what does it mean / At the end of every hard earned day people find some reason to believe