It’s been a long time since I’ve accepted that a lot of stuff happens to me that I don’t think should be happening. In writer’s group a couple of years back someone called me “the girl whose life was one long emergency,” but believe me, by then I was was slowing down and thinking things over before taking action. You’d have to go back when I was in my twenties to find me amidst a chaos that seemed to reign supreme. The phrase stuck with me, though for a while I couldn’t remember where it came from. I knew it was a song, just couldn’t remember which. But then just this morning I dragged it out again on YouTube, somehow, without even meaning to.

The original song is For You, by Bruce Springsteen. I don’t listen to Springsteen much nowadays — among other things, Dean hates him and always tells the most unflattering stories about The Boss’s personal life if he hears his music — but I have, always, had a soft spot the tunes nevertheless. I was listening to “For You” this morning before the boys left for school, and one of them asked

“What happened to his voice?”

“He’s from New Jersey.”

“Yeah but — that raspy sound. It’s horrible.”  And this wasn’t even the infamous rendition of “Santa Claus is coming to town.”

Well, you either like that voice or you don’t, you either accept his music style or you don’t. But what does the song mean? Looking at the words, they’re even less coherent than “How Does it Feel” by Bob Dylan but the overall sentiments are the same: there’s this girl, she’s messed up, she’s trouble, she doesn’t like the guy too much but he loves her anyway and he wrestles down his feelings of rejection by pointing out her vulnerabilities.  Some of the song is made of lyrics that Dean, the opera buff, would call “throwaway” such as “my electric surges free.” Now what does that mean? But other lines are pure genius. Even at the age of 15 I was struck by the image of the girl being carted off to Bellevue, which is the mental hospital, and the guy wanting to rescue her himself. It’s a repeated theme in literature, the story of the crazy girl.

I’m pretty sure I’m not as deranged as the original girl whose “life was one long emergency.” Nevertheless, I have felt that sense of continual emergency at times. I have overstated my own importance, too, I’m sorry to say. And overall, looking back, I feel a certain poignant sense of recognition when I hear this song.  There’s so much of youth and confusion and desperation in there, it makes it pretty nigh on to universal.