No one should be able to do anything for five hours straight except sleep, but no one told Bruce Springsteen that. It’s eleven o’clock at night and I am sitting up at a blue-painted metal table on the food court level of the baseball stadium because my feet can’t take it anymore. We've been here for three hours and it's only just getting started. Below me, the stadium rattles with noise, cheers that rise like a wave breaking and then returns to a reverent, humming almost-silence. The music starts up like a car, not like that’s a metaphor but rather that the music has been practiced and tested to make sure that it sounds exactly like a car when it starts up. If I sit up straighter than I want to on the blue plastic bench at the picnic table, I can watch an undulating field of faces washed with pink-red light, moving as one, driven by the figure on stage. Down there somewhere in that massive sea of faces is my dad, who is the one who wanted to come to the Bruce Springsteen concert. He will emerge another hour and change from now, when it still isn’t over, grinning like an overjoyed surfer emerging from a day in gigantic waves, at sixty-six with more energy than I can imagine summoning for just about anything. If it wasn’t for me, we would stay until one in the morning, until the end of all the encores and then lingering at the side of the venue, my dad making friends with other radiant dads in their white-and-grey gym sneakers and their t-shirts with their adult kids’ alma maters’ names on them. “Bruce” they all say, giving the word six or seven or twenty-five syllables. Everyone refers to Bruce by his first name. Bruce is someone we know. Bruce would be your friend and come hang out and grill with you in the backyard on a Sunday afternoon if Bruce weren’t so busy, but Bruce wants to be there and he wants to know you because Bruce is, essentially, just like you. Bruce doesn’t think your problems are small because for all his fame Bruce’s life is just like yours. Bruce has never met your kids but Bruce wants to know how your kids doing and he cares about the answer. The dads are here for Bruce; the dads hold these truths about Bruce to be self-evident.
Bruce
Bruce
Bruce
No one should be able to do anything for five hours straight except sleep, but no one told Bruce Springsteen that. It’s eleven o’clock at night and I am sitting up at a blue-painted metal table on the food court level of the baseball stadium because my feet can’t take it anymore. We've been here for three hours and it's only just getting started. Below me, the stadium rattles with noise, cheers that rise like a wave breaking and then returns to a reverent, humming almost-silence. The music starts up like a car, not like that’s a metaphor but rather that the music has been practiced and tested to make sure that it sounds exactly like a car when it starts up. If I sit up straighter than I want to on the blue plastic bench at the picnic table, I can watch an undulating field of faces washed with pink-red light, moving as one, driven by the figure on stage. Down there somewhere in that massive sea of faces is my dad, who is the one who wanted to come to the Bruce Springsteen concert. He will emerge another hour and change from now, when it still isn’t over, grinning like an overjoyed surfer emerging from a day in gigantic waves, at sixty-six with more energy than I can imagine summoning for just about anything. If it wasn’t for me, we would stay until one in the morning, until the end of all the encores and then lingering at the side of the venue, my dad making friends with other radiant dads in their white-and-grey gym sneakers and their t-shirts with their adult kids’ alma maters’ names on them. “Bruce” they all say, giving the word six or seven or twenty-five syllables. Everyone refers to Bruce by his first name. Bruce is someone we know. Bruce would be your friend and come hang out and grill with you in the backyard on a Sunday afternoon if Bruce weren’t so busy, but Bruce wants to be there and he wants to know you because Bruce is, essentially, just like you. Bruce doesn’t think your problems are small because for all his fame Bruce’s life is just like yours. Bruce has never met your kids but Bruce wants to know how your kids doing and he cares about the answer. The dads are here for Bruce; the dads hold these truths about Bruce to be self-evident.