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by the time of the albums’ release, Springsteen was the father of two, resettled in California.
    Springsteen worked painstakingly on Human Touch over a period of about a year, recording in concentrated bursts with a group of Los Angeles session musicians. The album was ostensibly finished in early 1991, but Springsteen felt he needed one more song. Instead, he wrote and recorded an entire second album in a matter of weeks at his home studio, then decided to release both records on the same day.
    The first song he wrote for Lucky Town, the bridge between the two albums, is “ Living Proof .”
    The song chronicles the building of a family from the ashes of Springsteen’s personal struggles, his negativity and despair. It’s definitely post-therapeutic, and it marks the next stage in the story, his hard-won “close band of happy thieves,” after Tunnel of Love ’s relentless questioning and the very personal tests of Human Touch. It’s profound and stirring.
    And it starts on a summer afternoon, with the birth of a child.
    THE CLAIM borders on cliché: “The only pain worse than a kidney stone is labor.”
    That assertion is also fundamentally wrong. I don’t have firsthand experience, lacking both calcium buildups and ovaries, but I’ve seen both in action. I’ve held the monitoring strip in my hand.
    That’s jumping ahead, though. We need to go back a year or two from August 26, 1999, for the context.
    Cori and I knew from the beginning that we were going to be parents. But it was a matter of timing. We had a pregnancy scare early on—midway through our second year at UVic—and after that we were very careful. We wanted everything to be just perfect: we wanted to have our degrees behind us, own a house, have steady jobs if not actual careers. We wanted everything to be as stable as possible before we had kids.
    When we hit that point, we started trying.
    Anyone who’s had a scare can tell you how easy it is to get pregnant. But until you’re actually trying you don’t know just how tough it can be. 4 A few months went by. Months of furious and frequent lovemaking, of cautiously raised hopes and cyclical disappointment.
    We did everything right. Not only did Cori eat better, and eliminate potential trouble areas like caffeine, but I, concerned about my contribution, 5 started exercising, cleaned up my diet, and cut out coffee, alcohol, and my couple-of-times-a-week cigars. No sacrifice was too great.
    And we kept trying. 6
    I took a break on my birthday, November 25, 1998. I’d booked the day off work, and when I woke up I pressed myself a carafe of coffee that, after months without, tasted like heaven. I sat out on the front porch all day, drinking gin and tonics and smoking cigars. Cori and I went out for dinner to celebrate, breaking every single one of our self-imposed rules.
    A little less than a month later, Cori gave me an early Christmas present: a calendar for 1999. It took me a while to notice that she had marked a page in mid-August with a tiny strip of thick paper with a blue stripe at one end.
    When I looked at her, not really believing what I was seeing, she smiled. “I washed it,” she said. “And dried it carefully.”
    Cori had a great pregnancy. We walked to work together every day, and went to prenatal classes, and decorated the baby’s room. She was never sick, her energy was high, she hit or exceeded every milestone.
    It’s no wonder the baby didn’t want to leave.
    Her due date came and went, without a sign of a contraction. The baby was big, and content to remain within. A day passed. A week.
    Nothing happened.
    Finally, ten days past the due date, we went to a doctor’s appointment at the hospital. Cori’s fluid volume was low, and it was time to induce. That was the twenty-fifth of August.
    We got her checked into the hospital, got her comfortable, and they gave her an injection of