Rainey Blogs on Some Days

The other day, as I prepared for my 30-minute commute to my office, I let Spotify pick a playlist for me and off I went to work. You may remember in recent years, I commuted in an older car , a 2002 Mercury Sable with a few quirks that made life interesting. But now I have a 2016 Honda Accord with Bluetooth. It starts all of the time, doesn’t break down and require towing, and this means I have to look for other forms of excitement while commuting. This newer car also meant my music went from cassettes/CDs to Spotify Bluetooth in a remarkably short time, so I’m sticking my hand deep into the musical candy jar each day with Spotify (yes, I heard about it from my children). On this chilly April morning, a few songs into my Daily Mix 1 playlist, Robert Plant , the former lead singer of Led Zeppelin , came on singing the lyric, “Satan, your kingdom must come down . . . Satan, your kingdom must come down . . . I heard the voice of Jesus say, Satan, your kingdom must come down.” I had list...

“I woke up this morning to an empty sky.” (Bruce Springsteen, “ Empty Sky ,” The Rising ) As we neared the ninth anniversary of 9/11 this week, I pulled out Bruce Springsteen’s tribute album to 9/11, The Rising. In “Empty Sky,” he perfectly captured the sense of direction the twin towers gave us here in Northern New Jersey and New York. On a clear day, you could see the towers from twenty miles or so away, and for those living in the metropolitan area the towers marked our proximity to home. Whether we were coming up the Turnpike from a short trip to the Shore, or returning from spending the holidays in Illinois, the first sight of the towers meant we were almost home. Still, to this day, I look for those towers when I see the New York skyline, but the sky is still empty where they used to be, and we all know how that happened. We have picture of my Mom, Marcia, Alyssa, and me sitting at a window inside the South Tower observation deck on the 107th floor, looking back waving. Beh...