Bruce Springsteen at the Altar of Life

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1xDzgob1JI 
Bruce Springsteen and I grew up together. We lived and loved in different parts of the country during those same decades that defined us.  During the flight across the sky that is our era, we got knocked around in some of the same turbulence, and yet, both of us landed gently enough to look backward with gratitude.

In the tradition of his Irish and Italian ancestors, Springsteen is both a storyteller and a cultural high priest. The kind of priest who is comfortable in a pub filled with hard working hand laborers of all sorts. As he shepherds us through the early years of his life and career, Springsteen confesses to us that he’s never had a job like those who inhabit the working class lives of his songs.  He explains he wrote his stories of laborers in the voice of his father, a figure so important to Springsteen that it cannot be overstated. His father, "with the legs and ass of a rhinoceros,"  held numerous factory jobs when he was well but suffered from depression. It was fascinating to watch Springsteen credit both his parents, two opposites, while giving careful consideration to the resilience and optimism of his mother who informed the artist's lifetime of energy, drive and commitment to his work.

Springsteen's story has taken him around the world several times over only to return to live 10 minutes away from where he started, the town of Freehold, New Jersey. His hometown is a major character in his life: its bars, factories, the neighborhood full of his relatives where he grew up and the giant tree in front of his home that was the center of his life.

I found in the songs and storytelling such love, humanity and a surprising lack of ego for a troubadour who won over the world while staying rooted in his hometown.  

The transformation I witnessed as Springsteen presided at his stage and altar, as he took us from his childhood to manhood, surprised me as it corresponded with my own growing up and maturity as a woman of Mexican heritage living in the U.S. I stood beside him as he described, with an Apostle's Creed cadence and the precision of a surgeon, his family's geography and the impact their lives had on him. With each story's turn, I saw reflections of my own story growing up to the same songs, TV and movies 1,911 miles away in South Texas' Laredo.  Watching him on his Netflix special, I'll bet I'm not the only Baby Boomer to imagine myself standing behind Springsteen as he performs, not as a backup singer, but as someone who mines the same territories of memory to make sense of family, fortune, loss and perseverance.  

Toward the end of the performance, which is based on his Broadway show, I had the same overwhelmed feeling I often get after attending High Mass and standing for more than two hours in an overfilled church. I had been taken on a holy journey. I turned off the TV set and stood up from the sofa exhausted, my thoughts and images still gelling from the immersive music and words that Springsteen performed with fearless grace and candor.