Nebraska

I sit at my desk and I stare at a picture of my grandfather, who passed a few years ago. He is happy, waving to the camera. The photograph is sunbleached and fading and I wonder when he’ll wave his last goodbye.

Meditate on your work and what it means. Stuffed animals by a roadside, one of them reads Happy Valentine’s Day but it’s August right now. “I’ll love you till the cows come home” says a misspelled homemade and handstiched towel, threaded through a barbed wire fence. How old was she? Couldn’t have been more than 10 or 11 or 12. For something so sad it’s an awfully beautiful day out.

A telephone pole in the middle of nowhere has always been one of the sorriest sights. Someone is out here, still paying for landline, waiting on a call.

Highway Patrolman will always remind me of ten certain feet of cracked blacktop on a Nevadan country road. I think I listened to Springsteen’s Nebraska album 25 times on those summer afternoons and nights, making my way up 395 and over on 6 and back over on 50. I should really call my brother more often.

“After seeing these pictures you end up finally not knowing any more whether a jukebox is sadder than a coffin”, says Jack Kerouac in his introduction to Robert Frank’s Americans. The older I get, the more I understand it. These days a jukebox stands purposeless in the corner of an empty bar in an empty town, nowhere America, full of songs the kids don’t want to hear. Back then when people came in there was drinking and dancing and skirts inching up on the floor and boys dreamin’ boys’ dreams. And now there ain’t no one to play to. Damn if that ain’t sad.

Charley Crockett makes a lot of people unhappy and I don’t know why. He’s just himself, man - ain’t we all?

A Million Pebbles