Born to Run

Bruce Springsteen is 60. I am almost 50. Yet it feels like 1975 all over again.

They say as part of life's continuum there comes a time when the children parent the parents. I am, not surprisingly, there. To steel myself for the challenges ahead, I have been running, 2010-style, iPhone in hand, ear buds in place, iPod shuffle mode on, and only a phone call or email away from anyone who needs me at a moment's notice.

Sometimes these runs are Rage Against the Machine stress burners and sometimes they are Grateful for Seattle Sunshine and All That I've Got leisurely jogs. Even when I don't have the Genius feature turned on, my iPod somehow selects the appropriate soundtrack to fit or shake me out of my mood.

How did it know that Yesterday, Blue and Trouble would match my feelings of self-pity or that Hard Rain, Walking on Sunshine Shiny Happy People and Born in the USA wouldn't allow me to wallow for too long? I don't remember feeling so connected to music and its ability to soothe my savage breast since I was a teenager.

And in some ways I've reverted to that time. A kaleidoscopic parade of people from the past has emerged to help, like characters from a Springsteen song. Unbeknownst to her strict stepfather Fred, my friend Chris and I used to sneak out of the house, pile into our friend Elaine's tan VW bug and drive all over the Jersey Shore to watch the Rocky Horror Picture Show, Elaine's Jimmy Carter peanut roach clip at the ready. Now Fred, who I haven't seen since I left for college, sends us daily email affirmations because his family has been touched by cancer. Chris, who I saw last year for the first time in 27 years, will spend a day in Florida with my mother and me, helping us sort through her lifetime of papers.

My mother's friends call me and their voices are shaky with age now. Old friends of mine are in touch and they tell stories of caring for their own aging parents. We look at each other's Facebook profile photos and laugh at how much we all resemble our mothers.

I saw Bruce on Elvis Costello's Spectacle, talking about his struggles with his teenage son. Last year, he was on the cover of AARP magazine.

The last leg of my 4-mile run grazes a bluff overlooking Puget Sound. There is a steep stairwell with 78 steps and at the top, because this is Seattle, there is a coffee shop. When I was a mother of young children, yearning for escape, I would run and when I reached the stairwell, just above me, there would be an old man handing out peppermints and three middle-aged women talking. When I reached the top of the stairs, I would head to my car and emerge with two sippy cups, which I would fill with cocoa from the coffee shop, balanced atop lattes for my husband and me. It seemed like such a precarious balance, yet the middle-aged women, emerging with their single containers of coffee, would smile at me nostalgically.

I haven't seen the old man for a long time and I worry that he is gone. And now when I run, I look down and see young women with dogs and babies in jogging strollers struggling to navigate the stairs. Maybe they are looking up at me and think that I am unencumbered. But we're all just in different places on the stairwell of life, and as Bruce would say, sometimes life takes you one step up and two steps back.