Bo-Bo Knows "Dancing in the Dark"

I'll admit that I've had Oldies 103.3 as a radio preset as long as I've owned my car (2003). I'll also admit to tuning in and motor mouthing to whatever surprise I found there when NPR took a turn down a story alley I didn't feel much like following. But today it happened. The oldies station has finally caught up to my childhood: 103.3 played "Dancing in the Dark."



"Born in the USA" wasn't my first album. It wasn't even my album. My sister was the one who bought that glorious square of man butt posed before an American flag. But the summer that record came out, I was 9-years-old, she was 6 going on 7, and albums were rare enough in our house that mine felt like hers and hers felt like mine. So we spun that one over and over and over again, singing at top volume to lyrics we didn't understand:

• "Born in the USA" was just its anthem of a chorus;
• "I'm on Fire" was a pretty lullaby; and
• "Glory Days" and "Dancing in the Dark" were just as happy as their bouncy guitar riffs and upbeat drums said they were supposed to be.

What did we know?

Since that time, I've laughed at myself--and Ronald Reagan--for how wrong we all were about that album. I've become aware of the creep in the bad desire, recognized the clarion call in "Glory Days," and appreciated how "Dancing in the Dark" is really about climbing the walls of your life. But I'd never really felt those things until the song slapped at me through my shitty car speakers today. Exhibit A and B:

"I ain't nothing but tired, man I'm just tired and bored with myself.
Hey there baby, I could use just a little help."

"They say you got to stay hungry.
Hey baby, I'm just about starving tonight.
I'm dying for some action.
I'm sick of sitting round here trying to write this book."

I've long believed that old age isn't about chronology, but state of mind. This is why an eighty year old who shows off her neon pink tennis shoes is in fact younger than her 18-year-old great-grandson who won't dance with her at a wedding because he's afraid people will laugh at them. We're all Merlin's that way, if we're lucky: age makes us bold and boldness keeps us young.

So why is it that the line about being tired and bored with myself popped out at me? Why did I hear the lyric about being sick of my book? Why did I feel the twenty five years between that summer and this one like vertigo? Why did I for one fleeting, but painful, minute feel about my life that crush of let down you get when you reach for the door to some restaurant only to see you've missed the closing by five minutes or so? Why indeed when I have so, so, so much to get grateful for?

No idea. But I'm comforted by the questions.

Regret may be an inevitable part of life. There are too many choices--big and small-- in this life to ever hope we'll get them all right. Tonight at dinner with friends I was talking about the one and only time I was in a restaurant ritzy enough that the desert menu offered chocolate souffle on the menu, but I passed. To this day I've never tasted a souffle. Not the world's largest regret, and completely fixable. And truly, if I come to the end of my life without ever trying a souffle, I'll live. Well, actually, I'll be dead, but you get my point. Or maybe you don't because I'm only just now getting to it myself.

The point, I think, is this:

If I listen to a lyric about being tired and bored with myself and that resonates with me, I better damn well be asking myself some hard questions. If not I really am sitting "around getting older; there's a joke here somewhere and its on me."