I've been reminded over the past few weeks just why Bruce Springsteen meant so much to me. Listening especially to his second album, “The wild, the innocent and the e-street shuffle”, and these two bootlegs I've just got. There's a pure meaning and emotion in his best songs that in the right mood just stops me dead, wanting only for the song to never end. Man, such feeling and I'm not even drunk!
So in the last two months I've become a father for the second time and turned 40. And for the last 5 weeks or so I've had this terrible hacking cough. It's not quite the flu — I haven't had that achy, week feeling you get — but I've been coughing up phlegm and hacking away. It's surely not a sign of my imminent dotage? I've been so tired at nights. Slipping into bed after a hot lemon drink. Half asleep as I get Joshua up out of his cot for a feed, or go in to cuddle Matthew back to sleep after a nightmare. At least Debbie is back sleeping in our bed. The touching of a foot at the bottom of the bed, a hip curled into my groin, the soft smell of her hair as my arm reaches over her shoulder — all things missed, almost forgotten over the past few weeks.
I've got an office now. A garden shed at the bottom of our property, now transformed into a fully functioning cyber-shed. Wired to the world, cable modems do rock! It's lovely. The walls painted a soft bluegreen, and the ceiling an off-white. I've got a corner desk and a good chair. I look straight out the window onto the sea, watching now as the lights shimmer across the water. It's calm down here. A place to work and think.
We sat down last night and wondered where the two people had gone who met that night in London 16 years ago. What had happened to them, why they'd drifted apart, where their dreams had gone. It's so easy to slip into a kind of existence where familiar is a virtue to be aimed at, and habit the best way of getting through a day quickly and without fuss. It's so easy to not do something today, or this week, or this month, and then you realise the whole summer's gone by and you never did go camping with your son, or take your wife for the picnic down on the beach.
We're the same people we were all those years ago, but we're different beings. I want what we were, what we saw in each other to be more than memories buried in seldom shown photos. I want that spark recaptured. I want us excited at the start of each day by the sheer joy of still being together and the mystery of what lies ahead.
That's not too much to ask of life is it?
last | nextLink of the day
The Bruce Springsteen bootleg CD I'm listening to
Very, very cool!
Journals and blogs that I read regularly
Raising Hell
Feral Living
Hippycritical
Udder
My Life in 12 Point Font
Journal of a Writing Man
Some Jingle Jangle Morning
The Last Girl Scout
Potatoe.com
Journallife.com
Window to my Soul
Chickybabe
Sorabji.com
Yesterday's Makeup
Fifteen Milliliters
Fly Away
<
#
made by mom
?
>
Registered!
The Ageless Project
«
?
Blogging Mommies
#
»
Photo of tunnel copyright Bernd Klumpp, available from istockphoto.com