The Man in the Rain

If you know me at all, then you know that it's pretty much an absolute certainty that, if Bruce Springsteen is playing anywhere within a 50 mile radius, I'm going to do my damndest to be there. And so, on Monday night, I headed up the road to the Greek Theater with a friend and sat, stood, and sang for three hours of fine entertainment. The concert was as fantastic as can be expected, and I may write about it further at some later date, but that's not what this is about.

At one point during the evening, as we all sat there, nestled in the wooded hollow of the Greek, Bruce began playing "Bring 'em Home," a poignant plea of a song (which you can feel free to listen to here), and I looked up at the dark sky and thought of Alec Wilkinson's recent, moving New Yorker article about Pete Seeger, the inspiration behind Bruce's current album and tour. In particular, I thought of its closing:

Here is a story told to me lately by a man named John Cronin, who is the director of the Pace Academy for the Environment, at Pace University. Cronin has known Seeger for thirty years. "About two winters ago, on Route 9 outside Beacon, one winter day, it was freezing—rainy and slushy, a miserable winter day—the war in Iraq is just heating up and the country's in a poor mood," Cronin said. "I'm driving north, and on the other side of the road I see from the back a tall, slim figure in a hood and coat. I'm looking, and I can tell it's Pete, He's standing there all by himself, and he's holding up a big piece of cardboard that clearly has something written on it. Cars and trucks are going by him. He's getting wet. He's holding the homemade sign above his head—he's very tall, and his chin is raised the way he does when he sings—and he's turning the sign in a semicircle, so that the drivers can see it as they pass, and some people are honking and waving at him, and some people are giving him the finger. He's eighty-four years old. I know he's got some purpose, of course, but I don't know what it is. What struck me is that, whatever his intentions are, and obviously he wants people to notice what he's doing, he wants to make an impression—anyway, whatever they are, he doesn't call the newspapers and say, 'I'm Pete Seeger, here's what I'm going to do.' He doesn't cultivate publicity. That isn't what he does. He's far more modest than that. He would never make a fuss. He's just standing out there in the cold and the sleet like a scarecrow. I go a little bit down the road, so that I can turn and come back, and when I get him in view again, this solitary and elderly figure, I see that what he's written on the sign is 'Peace.'"

And it could have been the setting, or the song, or the thought of that solitary man standing in the rain still, after sixty some years, trying to make the world a better place; but whatever it was, it moved me, and it moves me still.