Sitting in the waiting room at Jiffy Lube, reading Emily Dickinson and watching a rerun of Matlock, I realize that my life is exactly like this moment, when Andy Griffith turns to the jury, beaming his most grandfatherly, country-wise smile, ready to unmask the killer, and says—and says—well, they’ve cut to a commercial, I don’t know what he says.
But then it wouldn’t be much of a mystery if I did.
Anyway, I am old enough to know that guilt and innocence are relative virtues on daytime TV, and that even the present instant, with its brash odors of coffee and newspaper ink, its flocculent light, even this empire of the senses is an abiding enigma.
If I should live to be one hundred, in the year A.D. 2062, I will have seen the 200th anniversary of the annus mirabilis in which Emily Dickinson wrote three hundred poems while the Civil War raged at its most horrifying intensity,
and my own birth, half a century ago, will mark a fulcrum between those time-vaulting poles—
between the bloodletting at Shiloh and Antietam,
while Emily, in her solitude, penciled stanzas on scraps of wrapping paper and torn envelopes, cuttings from a landscape of fertile ingenuity, a marvelous mental garden, the undiscovered continent of the self—
and the imponderable far-off future,
when new technologies will empower us and new populations seethe with needs and the oceans shall have risen to consume this fragile sandbar on which I have injudiciously staked my claim,
and if so, this moment, right now, would mark a similar midpoint in my own life, though five more decades seems unlikely,
and I am old enough to know that I will never be Emily Dickinson.
I am old enough to recognize that justice is a prime-time fable, that the moon smiles down upon the savage and the merciful alike, old enough to understand that I will never live in the desert, which makes me sad, though I fear the desert instinctively and would never want to live there.
Still one takes comfort in imagining the contours of a life in Arizona, a life of Franciscan austerity in Bend, Oregon.
One imagines all the barrier islands and beach towns up and down the East Coast swallowed by the tantalizing waters of the Atlantic Ocean, all the taffy shops and nail salons of the Jersey Shore, the skate punks in the parking lot of the convenience store and the headbanger at the register of the convenience store and the buying of condoms and six-packs of Smirnoff Ice, a place so inimitable and ass-kicking I can already hear the pulsating guitar-and-glockenspiel intro of “Born to Run” unrolling its red carpet to my heart, a song that remains a primary text of American male identity, like The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, and being hokum, being a confection of swagger and tattered glory, subtracts nothing from its legend, and when I think of Bruce Springsteen’s improbable rise to eloquence, his silent and bitter father, his bantam insecurities, his boardwalk voice and secondhand guitar, I am reminded that no act of self-expression is unrealizable here, and when I think of him now, defanged but uncorrupted, chugging through soggy Dust Bowl ballads—
as if New Jersey were not the mythic equal of Oklahoma, as if “Atlantic City” were not a folk song as potent as any of Woody Guthrie’s—
well, I guess we all lose our way, sooner or later, in America,
even Bruce Springsteen.
Oh, but there was a song sung, wasn’t there, eight maids a-milking and a bobtail nag, the morning after Thanksgiving and all the middle-aged stoners calling in to Z104 requesting REO Speedwagon?
There was a mystery solved, a day lived through, all sugar and oil, all lips and wind, a hat, a rabbit, a magic word.
Praise the sun’s masons assembling the sensorium from photons and scraps of subatomic shadow!
Praise images that leap from the mind like ninjas!
Praise Emily Dickinson’s folk-strumming daughters and Walt Whitman’s fuel-injected sons—forth-steppers from the latent unrealized baby-days!