Lessons Learned From Bruce Springsteen

 I grew up on the east coast.  Weekends were spent in New York City, watching cover bands.  One of my favorite places to go was the Red Lion on Bleeker Street. There was this little guy who looked nothing like Bruce.  He would come out in a white t-shirt and leather jacket.  You closed your eyes and he WAS Bruce.  He disappeared.  Over the years, Springsteen cover bands would pop up, but they disappeared just as quickly as they came. I later learned that Springsteen had a zero tolerance for bands performing his music without paying a licensing fee. As a matter of law, Bruce was right.  He had every right to be compensated for the use of his music.  I still felt that he was wrong and that these bands were his ultimate fans, paying tribute to him.  They were not getting rich playing his music. 
I just finished watching Netflix’s “Springsteen on Broadway”.   Rumor was that all of his shows were sold out, and tickets were being scalped for $1,000.00 a piece.  That is if you could actually find them.  I found it ironic that tonight, I got to see Springsteen on Broadway for as close to free as possible.  More important than that, I learned things about Bruce tonight that I never would have imagined. 
More than twenty years after being a dad myself, Bruce shook me to my core when he talked about how parents would either be ghosts or ancestors in their children’s lives.  He said: “We either lay our mistakes, our burdens upon them, and we haunt them, or we assist them in laying those old burdens down, and we free them from the chain of our own flawed behavior.”  He told us about how right before the birth of his own child, his father had showed up on his doorstep and petitioned him to have an ancestral role after being a ghost for most of his life. It made me think, not only about my own life and my relationship with my kids, but also about so many of my divorce and paternity cases where parents all but forget about the effects of their behavior in court upon their children, effects that may last a lifetime.  Tonight, Bruce showed me that I want to be an ancestor.  How about you?
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