How Bruce Springsteen Got Me Ready For the School Year

I have been back at school for two weeks now, but doing meetings and conferences instead of teaching. Tomorrow the students arrive. Even after over twenty years in the classroom, I still get butterflies and can’t sleep on nights like this. I’ve often thought that if I stopped having these feelings, that would be the sign it was time to quit because it meant my heart wasn’t in it anymore.

As much as I love being in the classroom, I dread the ten-megaton stress bomb that gets dropped on me during the school year. My kids have their first day tomorrow, too, which means juggling the demands of my intense job and brutal commute with increased parental responsibilities and worries for the next ten months. It’s quite a daunting endeavor. At the end of the school year, I always look back with satisfaction and bask in the warmth of graduation and seeing off young adults into their future. It’s easy to do then, with the whole summer stretched out before me. It’s a little more challenging in the dark days of February on a freezing train platform dealing with a delay that will nuke my whole day.

This year I lucked into uplifting inspiration for the school year: I saw Bruce Springsteen live. It was my birthday present, one of the best I’ve ever had. In anticipation I listened to all of his albums in chronological order and wrote about it on my personal blog. I started to wonder if I was building it up too much. After all, the Boss is 73 years old. He had to cancel some recent tour dates due to illness at that. The local paper here in Jersey wrote a critical review of his most recent show.

It turns out I had nothing to worry about, and Springsteen exceeded my expectations. I stood up for most of the show, not just because my whole section did, but because I needed to. It was like going to rock and roll church.

After weeks of feeling worn down by work and the anticipation of the school year, “Night” hit the perfect tone with the second song. Springsteen’s songs connect with me like few others, and I think I finally figured out why. We all have our own individual emotions we lean on, and longing has been a particularly strong one for me. It was honed growing up as a misfit in a small town, yearning to get out. Hearing “Thunder Road,” “Born to Run,” and “Badlands” live with the tens of thousands of people singing along touched those primal memories of my frustrated youth and salved them with the balm of belonging and connection. I’ve grown up, but those feelings have and never will leave me.

Springsteen’s special talent is to articulate in song those longings we have that get keyed up to the point of emotional insanity. As teenagers we feel them more intensely, but it’s also socially okay to act them out publicly and get them out of your system. You can’t do that as an adult, and thus must carry those feelings with you without an outlet. They might no longer consume your soul in a raging fire, but they are still a slow burn that never gets put out.

I felt this most strongly hearing “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” a particular favorite that Springsteen did not sing at his other Jersey concert dates. It’s the song of a man who has lost his job and his wife, staring at the wreckage of his life. Despite all that has gone wrong, he has resolved to survive and “stand on that hill.”

So what does this all have to do with the school year? Years ago I was a very unhappy academic living in a small town in Texas with my wife 1500 miles away. I felt trapped, and I would indeed drive out to the darkness on the edge of town and think about what the hell I was going to do. I ended up leaving my old career behind and became a high school teacher in New York. As demanding as the job might be, I am far, far happier than I ever was before. Sometimes, in the midst of my kvetching, I need to be reminded of that.

Beyond the songs, I drew even deeper inspiration from the performance itself. It was amazing to see a 73 old man play a three-hour concert with such brio and energy even if he was no longer jumping around the stage. I remember so clearly seeing the smile on his face, and his obvious satisfaction and pride in what he was doing. Even though he had been doing this for over fifty years, he was still great at it and obviously still loved doing it.

I first entered the classroom as a grad student TA in August of 2000. I’ve witnessed plenty of people get worn down by this point in their careers. Seeing Springsteen take such joy in doing what he does best after all these years gave me the boost to do the same. If I can’t do that, what’s the point of living, anyway? Time to get back out there on that hill.