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relationship he had with his father, so it’s easy (and, given his use of the first-person narrative voice, fairly compelling) to speculate.
    3 . Jon is very polite, and very good with people, especially people with gardens. He brought home basketfuls of flowers.
    â€œPeople just gave you these?” I asked, incredulous.
    â€œMost of them,” he said, cutting stems over the sink.
    â€œWhat do you mean, most of them?”
    â€œWell, if somebody’s gonna be an asshole, they don’t deserve to have such pretty flowers, do they?”
    It took a moment for it to sink in. “You committed misdemeanors for décor?”
    He patted me on the cheek. “It’s your wedding day, big brother. Of course I did.”
    4 . That ritual viewing of snl was not without its risks. Dorothy was fine with bawdy, frat-boy humor, but we were watching the night that Irish singer Sinead O’Connor tore up a photograph of the Pope while crying out “Fight the real enemy!” as the climax to her cover of Bob Marley’s “War.” Dorothy’s reaction was . . . intense, to say the least.
    5 . A decision we now both regret, though it made sense at the time.
    6 . Though it’s certainly open to agnostic, atheistic, or interfaith diddling. I’m partial to “man plans, and the universe mocks,” because that’s how it feels some days.

Living Proof
    Album: Lucky Town
    Released: March 31, 1992
    Recorded: September 1991–January 1992
    I LOST SIGHT OF Springsteen for a while there, from about the time Cori and I moved in together up to the reunion tour of 1999–2000. A decade or so.
    I use the term “lost sight” in a relative sense: I bought the three new studio albums that he released during that time. I bought the import edition of the xxPlugged CD, and the Tracks box set. I followed newsgroups and listservs on that new interweb thing that everyone was talking about. I was, even in what I think of as my disconnected years, what most normal people would consider a zealot.
    It didn’t feel that way to me, though. In the throes of finishing my degree, 1 working full-time, and starting married life, Springsteen wasn’t speaking to me in the same way any more. He wasn’t important.
    I liked the records, but it didn’t go much beyond that. Greg still has, in his collection, an unused ticket from a show at the Tacoma Dome in the early nineties that was supposed to be mine—he mocks me with it about once a year. I regret not going, and I kick myself, to this day, for not going to one of the solo acoustic theatre shows on the Ghost of Tom Joad tour, but at the time it didn’t really seem to matter all that much.
    Looking back, I can see I was in an in-between space as far as Springsteen’s music was concerned. I had outgrown the youthful anthems of escape, and I was too contented then to connect with the post-therapy albums Human Touch and Lucky Town, released on the same day in 1992.
    That changed, though.
    Now those two albums, with their songs of deep soul-searching, speak to me more directly than any Springsteen work before or since. 2 They are albums of hard-won domestic happiness, with just enough self-effacing humor—in songs like “57 Channels (And Nothing On)” and “Local Hero”—to keep them from being nauseatingly saccharine. 3
    As I mentioned earlier, Springsteen found happiness in the arms of his longtime back-up singer, Patti Scialfa, after the breakup of his first marriage. They married in 1991, when Patti was pregnant with their second child, their daughter, Jessica. (Their eldest, son Evan, was born a year earlier.) Rumors about his divorce— which was sealed up tight in apparently bulletproof nondisclosure agreements—claimed that one of the reasons for Springsteen’s unhappiness with Phillips was that he wanted a family, and she wanted to focus on her acting career. Whether this is true or not,