Dear Bruce,
We flew to Boston from Indiana for your book signing today because we’ve been trying for five years to find a way to thank you. We believe your music helped save our baby daughter’s life.
Juniper was born at the limit of human viability outside the womb – 23 weeks gestation – weighing one pound, four ounces. She was raw and red, her eyes were fused shut, and through her translucent skin we could see her flickering heart. She couldn’t see, couldn’t cry, couldn’t be fed or held. If we stroked her, they said, her skin could slide off. She knew nothing but needle sticks and isolation and darkness. But she could hear.
My husband Tom, who has followed you on tour for 40 years, put a tiny iPod inside the incubator to drown out the beeps and alarms. The first sounds our daughter heard were our voices mixed with yours. We had to build a world for her that was bigger than that plastic box. We read her the entire Harry Potter series, all seven volumes, for its messages of friendship and faith, and we sang to her about small things becoming big things, about not wasting time waiting, and about dogs howling in the night. We hoped that the joy and promise in your music would offer her some hint of a better world, waiting. Without that, why would she fight?
Is anybody alive out there? you asked her.
Can you hear me?
Don’t worry, we’re gonna find a way.
As you know so well, sound is a form of touch. We could see by the numbers on her monitors that your music calmed her when she was in pain and soothed her when she was upset. The monitors even told us that she had particular tastes. Her devotion to Tenth Avenue Freeze-Outnever wavered. When her father finally got to hold her, he sang to her about a screen door slamming and Mary’s dress waving in the night. That was the summer that Clarence died, and when the news reached us in the hospital, we played her Jungleland, because it was all we knew to do. She nearly died a million times, and when her heart rate bottomed out, Waitin’ on a Sunny Day always brought her back. She had never seen the sun, after all.
We promised her that if she made it out of the hospital, we’d take her to see you, and she could watch you slide across the stage. She was in the hospital for six and a half months – 196 days.
Juniper is now five, healthy and ferocious and lighting up kindergarten. True to our word, we took her to see you in Louisville, where she sang along to the River set and danced on her seat and kept asking me why I was crying. She was with me in line today at the Harvard Coop bookstore – in a sea of people who, I’m certain, were bursting with things they couldn’t say. All our worst moments, and our best, are tied up in your lyrics. Our story is tangled in yours.
“What do you want to say to Bruce?” I asked her as we inched closer.
“I love him, and I want Hermione to be my president.”
It was over in seconds. You waved at Juniper, and she waved back, and someone took a photo and I forgot to smile. We left you a note tucked inside a book that my husband and I wrote about all of this. It’s signed and illustrated by Juniper with sketches of you and the band. She wasn’t disappointed that the moment was so brief.
“He already knows me,” she said. “He sang to me all those songs.”
Please accept the book as our way of sharing our most desperate thanks. You gave us hope during the darkest and most difficult time of our lives. Your music promised us all that we would walk in the sun, and we have.
With love and gratitude,
Kelley and Tom French & Junebug
