An American Story

A dream that has lost its way finds hope in the newly born

Early morning, I was driving northwest. Alone. Cool air coming through the cracked-open windows on my way to my son’s house to help him and his wife with last minute preparations for a homecoming, a secret homecoming.

The clear morning gave up a water blue sky. Low light and shadows draped over everything. Golden is how it all looked, the golden of spiritual royalty. My heart was alive. This day would be perfect, I simply knew it.

Songs filled the car’s cabin, a playlist produced by an algorithm, one that astonished me in its perfection. How does it know? I sang along, soaring in the moment, rolling along on the highway with nothing to slow me down.

I hadn’t heard it in many years. “Oh,” I said aloud, “what a great song.” So much time had passed, but still I remembered the words and I sang along. It was at the second verse that I began to cry.

And I don't know a soul who's not been battered
I don't have a friend who feels at ease

Paul Simon is the son of Jewish immigrants. The longing for the American dream shows up in his music a great deal. But in “American Tune” he is mourning.

I don't know a dream that's not been shattered
or driven to its knees

The song was written, Simon has said, when the Vietnam War raged on, protests filled streets, segregation and discrimination held on tight. It was a time of upheaval and turmoil, of dreams lost written more than fifty years ago.

For we've lived so well so long
Still, when I think of the road we're traveling on
I wonder what's gone wrong

With my eyes still on the road, I titled my head back and wiped at my tears. Simon had written a hymn with the melody borrowed from Bach to a bruised and broken country, a crushingly divided America. One scarred and wounded. The words were familiar enough for me to sing along through my cracking and trembling voice, not because it was a memory of a song I had been moved to recall, but because it was a song that remained devastatingly relevant. It could have been written that morning. We are unbalanced, unsettled, suspicious of one another, untrusting, angry, unkind, and influenced by ignorance. That’s what America has become. Maybe we have always been this and only now the shroud has been lifted.

My heart fell.

In a few hours, my son and his wife would bring home their baby girl, the once five-pound miracle born seven weeks early, the little “nugget” delivered by C-section as her brave and courageous mother fought through a rough and tumble, even dangerous pregnancy. Few knew of the homecoming today. It was designed as a surprise, one wrapped in joy and celebration. And now a twinge of sadness had come over me. Into this off-kilter world had come my granddaughter. This is not the kind of America I wanted for her, one clouded in distress, drowning in societal combat.

Still, I sang on.

But it's all right, it's all right
You can't be forever blessed

And it was that lyric, the one Simon sang several times in the old song, played only on his acoustic guitar accompanied lightly by strings that lifted me.

But it’s all right, it’s all right.

One can’t forever be the beacon for the world. But it’s still all right.

Tomorrow's going to be another working day
And I'm trying to get some rest

Another day will come and all of us will have the chance to make it all right. We will carry on in our lives and, with rest, find a better day.

***

That afternoon, when the secret was out, I sat alone holding Saige in my arms. I whispered how I loved her, how beautiful she was, how she was and would always be a blessing to this world, how she was going to do good and great things in her life, how she had the power to change everything. I thought about her blood, how it contained mine, and her father’s—my son’s. Through her tiny veins flowed the hopes and dreams of those who came before, links so dense that science could never explain them. Only art could do that. Only watercolors, poetry, and song.

After a long period of eyes closed, Saige’s eyes opened, revealing irises of smoky-blue. Her mouth opened in an oval shape and her tiny hands reached toward me. I had not cried since the early morning on the highway and the song in the car. It didn’t happen in the moment when Saige first arrived home, not when her grandmother erupted in tears at the shock of her unexpected arrival, not when my wife caressed her delicate head, not when my son held his baby girl against his chest in the kitchen of the home where he grew up. My emotions had been too complex to produce tears. But now, holding my granddaughter, just the two of us, her eyes on her Papa, the salty sting returned, and it was then that I knew, as Paul Simon had sung, it was going to all right.

---

Photo: Matt Hardy from Pexels