Sometimes an apology fails rational criteria and yet manages to do the job.

SorryWatch was reading Born to Run, Bruce Springsteen‘s excellent autobiography, and came across such a case.

As described in the book, Springsteen’s father was a hard man to grow up with. He drank heavily, regularly. “He was our own one-man minefield, filling our home with the deadly quiet of a war zone as we walked on point, waiting… waiting… for the detonation we knew was coming. We just never knew when.”

He showed distaste for Bruce. “I was an intruder, a stranger, a competitor in our home and a fearful disappointment.” In an evening ritual, his father would down a six-pack, and call the kid over. “…it was always the same. A few moments of feigned parental concern for my well-being followed by the real deal: the hostility and raw anger toward his son, the only other man in the house. It was a shame. He loved me but he couldn’t stand me.” The father was appalled that his son appeared “soft.”

Things were not improved as Springsteen grew older, wore his hair long, and became obsessed with playing music. “I can’t wait ’til the army gets ahold of you,” his father would say.

Didn’t help when Springsteen sneaked out early, took a bus to New York City, and skipped high school graduation. He probably didn’t explain to his parents that, at a meeting about the ceremony, the principal had said Springsteen’s hair made the class look bad, and that… someone… should… do something… about it. Wary of “meatheaded vigilant[ism],” Springsteen took his hair elsewhere.

His parents wanted him to go to college (professional musician? Yeah, sure), and insisted on enrolling him in community college. On the first day of classes, Springsteen again fled to NYC.

Springsteen persisted with the music thing. When he was 19, his parents moved from New Jersey to California, and there were fewer occasions for strife. Some years later, the elder Springsteen was given a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia.

Also with passing time, Springsteen made a living at music. He became quite successful, then hugely successful. You might not need SorryWatch to tell you that.

Eventually Springsteen told his parents that he and his wife Patti Scialfa were expecting a child.

“One morning… my dad showed up at my bungalow doorstep in L.A. He’d driven down from San Mateo [a drive of many hours] and ‘just wanted to say hi.’” They sat at the kitchen table with beers. Conversation was awkward, as usual.

“Suddenly, he said, ‘Bruce, you’ve been very good to us.’ I acknowledged that I had. Pause.

“He continued, ‘…And I wasn’t very good to you.’ A small silence caught us.

“’You did the best you could,’ I said.”

Springsteen’s analysis: “That was it. It was all I needed, all that was necessary. I was blessed on that day and given something by my father I thought I’d never live to see… a brief recognition of the truth. It was why he’d come five hundred miles… He’d come to tell me on the eve of my fatherhood, that he loved me, and to warn me to be careful, to do better, to not make the same painful mistakes he’d made. I try to honor it.” Springsteen had a lifetime of mind-reading practice, so he understood what his father was ‘telling’ him.

SorryWatch’s analysis: This fails on so many points. No ‘sorry,’ no ‘I apologize.’ Utterly vague! Though the kid understood what was meant, how much better it would have been if the father could have said it. But it worked.

In a later passage, Springsteen writes “The morning of my dad’s visit… stands out now as a pivotal moment between us. He had come to petition me, to settle a new sum from the dark and confusing elements that had been our lives. He had some faith that it could be done, came searching for a miracle whose embers he felt stirring in his own heart and that he hoped was burning and buried somewhere in the heart of his son.

“He was asking me to write a new ending to our story and I’ve worked to do that, but this kind of story has no end. It is simply told in your own blood until it is passed along to be told in the blood of those you love, who inherit it.”

It works because of context. Springsteen knew how hard it was for his father to speak. Yet the scant apology was directly spoken, from father to son. Not a third-party ‘your dad feels bad about the way he treated you’ thing. The gesture of the long drive showed how much the father felt the need to speak, even though he got so few words out. The timing was meaningful in conveying ‘I don’t want you to make the mistakes I did,’ which of course conveys ‘I know I made mistakes.’

This wasn’t their only crypto-sorry. Springsteen won an Oscar for “Streets of Philadephia,” written for the movie Philadelphia. He traveled to his parents’ house in San Mateo, walked in, and plunked the Oscar on the table.

His father said, “I’ll never tell anybody what to do ever again.”