My Hometown (Introduction Part 2) - Live at the Walter Kerr Theatre, New York, NY - July 2018

My sister and I, we'd pick up the thrown rice from the weddings,
Oack it away in small brown paper bags and take it home and save it.
Then run up the street and throw it at the next wedding
And the next wedding, and the next wedding.

We also had front row seats to watch the townsmen in their Sunday suits carry out an endless array
of dark wooden boxes to be slipped into the rear of the Freeman's Funeral Home long black Cadillac
For the short ride to Saint Rose Cemetery Hill on the edge of town.
And there, all our Catholic neighbors, all the Zirilli's, all the McNicholas's,
All the Springsteens who came before,
They patiently waited for us.
On Sundays, as my mom tended to our graves
My sister and I, we played hide and seek amongst the gravestones.
I gotcha.
Now when it rains in Freehold,
When it rains, the moisture in the humid air blankets the whole town
With the smell of moist coffee grounds wafting in from the Nescafe plant from town's eastern edge.
Now I don't like coffee.
But I love that smell.
Was comforting, it united our town,
Just like our clanging rug mill, and a calm and sensory experience
There was a place here.
You could hear it. You could smell it.
A place where people made lives,
And where they worked, and where they danced,
And where they enjoyed small pleasures and played baseball and
And suffered pain,
Where they had their hearts broke,
Where they made love
Had kids
Where they died
And drank themselves drunk on spring nights
And where they did their very best
The best that they could
To hold off the demons outside and inside
That sought to destroy them,
And their homes and their families, and their town.

Here we lived in the shadow of the steeple crookedly blessed in God's Good mercy one and all
In the heart-stopping, pants-dropping
Race-rioting, freak-hating, soul-shaking, redneck
Love and fear-making
Heartbreaking town, of Freehold, New Jersey