Happy Birthday, Bob

Happy Birthday, Bob

 

Today is Bob Dylan’s birthday. And today he is 65.

There will be many stories and newspaper articles and radio show tributes that will mark the day in their own way. But I cannot let the day slip by without my own tribute, insignificant to the world as it might be.

 

I was introduced to Bob Dylan in the 5th grade. I was 10 years old.

It was a dark, cold, wintry New England afternoon.

My fifth grade teacher was a hippie who had just returned from the Peace Corps. She introduced us to all manner of exotic things including her water pipe collection. She was the only teacher I’d ever seen strike a student. (Joey Rousseau, you deserved it).

 

One afternoon, she made us move all of our desks to the perimeter of the room and sit in a circle in the center of the floor. She had borrowed a small, red “record-player” from the Audio-Visual Room (which then, contained only this little record-player, a filmstrip projector and an overhead projector). She placed the record-player in the center of our circle creating (what I now recognize as) sacred space. Then, like a call to prayer she said, “Listen to this,” and she played his first LP, “Bob Dylan,” straight through.

 

And on that afternoon, she set me up. She made it impossible for me not to fall in love. (Thank you Miss Dalton, wherever you are).

 

And the love affair continues. It is the longest love affair of my life.

I take out the songs over and over again and listen to the words like an old lover reads her letters and to the new songs with amazement that the beloved still writes.

I remember places and times associated with certain songs. I remember crying with some, and smiling at others and raging against the wind to others; standing in my pink bedroom in the early 70’s belting out “Positively 4th Street” at the painful, enraging betrayal of a friend; laughing my ass off at “Leopard Skin Pill Box Hat” (and still am); knowing who “Just Like a Woman” was written for, because it was written for me; aching at the tenderness expressed in “Girl From the North Country,” and my obsession (yes, obsession) with “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.” ALL of the women in my life were the sad-eyed lady. And one day, in tribute to them and in gratitude to Bob I had an Arabian drum tattooed on the back of my right shoulder.

 

And when I was in the 9th grade, on one extremely hot Rhode Island summer day, I played "Rainy Day Woman" at full volume lying on my bed with all the windows open. My father walked by the door and said, "Louise, the windows are open." I said, "But DAD, it's BOB DYLAN." He said, "Louise, the windows are open."  "Aw...Daaaad."  That moment marks my own personal definition of the term "generation gap."

 

When I was no more than a child and knew that there was something wrong with the world, he gave me the words to know what that was.

When I was a teenager he gave it all; words of tenderness and hope and love and outrage and pain.

Now that I am a woman, and have put away childish things, I know that I do not have a love affair with Bob Dylan. I know that he doesn’t write for me. I know that I do not know him. All I know is that his music and lyrics stand in my life as something solid, something sure, something that never disappoints, something that I always love and for which I am forever grateful.

 

Up until New Year’s Day 2005, I had never made New Year’s resolutions. But in both 2005 and 2006, I did. The first thing I wrote on both lists was the resolution to, “Kiss Bob Dylan.” There is no lust there. It would not be a lover’s kiss. It would be a kiss of tenderness for the gift that he has been and continues to be in my life. It would be a kiss of gratitude.

 

In Hibbing, Minnesota they will bake cakes and celebrate today.

Perhaps, I too will bake a cake

And I’ll blow a kiss to Bob.

And Miss Dalton too.