Green Day Boulevard

I was in Stonestown shopping for thermal clothing. We were in the midst of a cold snap, it was down in the low teens and we didn’t have a working heater in the house so, layering was the name of the game. I was inside Macy’s, and the pop song, Boulevard of Broken Dreams wafted from the speakers as I was shopping in the boys section. 

Now Green Day was not my musical genre, I’m much older than that. The musicians of my era were The Animals, the Rolling Stones, and Van “the man” Morrison. But the lyrics caught my attention. I walk alone, I walk alone. Yeah. I totally get that as I was a returning student to San Francisco State, picking up the lost threads of my old MA, and isolation seemed to be the name of the game. 

My partner was taking teachers courses and rapidly entering a world of pedagogy while I was reinventing myself in the English Department. There’s a peculiarity that happens when you go back to school as the greater student body renders you invisible. Call it ageism if you must label it, but it goes much deeper than that. It’s as if one were an oil slick surfacing on a turbulent sea. You can’t get a hold of yourself and all your anchors are gone, your identity along with it. 

As I held up the furry sweatpants that would keep us warm during the freeze, I was walking my own street of broken dreams, trying to pick up the pieces of the past. It’s odd as you step out of the comfort zone and begin to grow in other directions, picking up the shards of broken dreams and rearranging them, there are bound to be razor cuts. 

Black ice on the parking lot had me scrambling for balance and I realized that this balancing act meant I had to let go of so much of the past—call it self identity—in order to not lose my balance in the tenuous new direction. 

A few days later, Green Day lead singer Billie Joe Armstrong pulled into my cousins café on his bike for a coffee. The road to Lagunitas from in town was long and all I could think of was there he was, the lead singer standing on the controversial boulevard that dissects our county. He smiled at me, and shoved off, his tires were singing a broken song on the gravel as a sudden chill filled the air.

1/20/22 Mill Valley Library non-fiction workshop with Sarah Broderick