Religion and Tom Waits

I don’t talk about religion, or spirituality, often in public.

I’ve done it once before here getting into family history and all but that’s it. In that post, as an aside really, I wrote this:

Strictly speaking it was 1994, leaving Boston for NY on a Peter Pan bus as the sun just started to rise over the Mass Pike, with Tom Waits’ ‘Ol 55 blasting at unsafe levels on headphones. That was my moment of spirituality.

I figured as we slide past the 50^th anniversary of the release of Closing Time (March 6, 1973), the Tom Waits album the song comes from, I’d unpack the story a bit more.

At the time I lived in Boston and found myself needing to go back to New York something close to every weekend. This was, as you can imagine, disruptive, but necessary for family reasons I won’t go into here.

Money wasn’t free-flowing, and I couldn’t (and still can’t) drive, so I took the bus instead of a train each way. Only one tiny problem – I get car sick if I try to read in cars or busses. The bus ride is roughly four hours long each way. Boredom loomed.

Not really, though.

My trusty Walkman sat in my bag at all times, as did a number of tapes. I could, if nothing else, listen to music and just focus on the music and the view, for hours at a time. That’s the opposite of boredom, for me.

Would it have been nice to have other options? Sure. But I wasn’t mad at the lot I found myself cast into, either.

Wanting to avoid traffic, and thereby reduce the travel time, as much as possible, I would leave Boston on the first bus each Friday I needed to be on my way. That meant a 5:30 or 6am bus.

Not many people would be on the Peter Pan bus system, out of the old South Station bus terminal, around then. Got to know the drivers, over time, and everything was good. But that’s not why we’re here.

I’d just been introduced to Tom Waits’ music (through Bone Machine) and had picked up Closing Time at the store a day or so before, but hadn’t found time to listen to it yet. So, sitting there on the bus, the sun just starting to threaten to rise, I put in the cassette, and hit play even as the bus lurched forward to the on-ramp to the highway.

Piano started softly, and I cranked the volume a bit more.

Well, my time went so quickly
I went lickety-splitly

That felt…right. I nodded as the song continued to find it’s groove.

Now, the sun’s coming up
I’m riding with Lady Luck
Freeway, cars and trucks
Stars beginning to fade
And I lead the parade
Just a-wishin’ I’d stayed a little longer
Oh Lord, let me tell ya that the feeling getting stronger

Yeah, this was me, right then.

And it’s six in the morning
Gave me no warning
I had to be on my way

I got chills. Corny? Maybe. But as the sun came up for me, it came up for the song. Everything built, Waits’ voice, then still so much smoother than it would become, but still catching the sadness, and resolve, of the moment and I felt something odd click in my head.

This was what that dumb Catholic School had tried to impress on my young brain all those years. This was, for me, spirituality, if not religion. A connection to the wider world, the universe.

And not just that things, and people, were connected at a base level, but the gut feeling that if we twist this way the world might twist with us, and when the world twists that way we can as well, if we want, for good or ill.

That we each have a responsibility to each other to shift in ways that make the world a better place for all of us, not just one of us. Choices add up, lives spiral in paths no one can see from a sky level because we’re too stuck on the ground so it’s up to us to decipher and huddle together to correct the way forward in smart, careful ways.

And the more Waits I listened to, the more I understood that he grasped the same concepts, but obscured them through his stories, which is, of course, the way of all great stories.

All this from a Tom Waits’ song.

The song lives in my soul to this day, I figure it always will, if I’m lucky. If I hold it there.

And I intend to.