paulmuses

It was a cold, blustery March day in northeast Iowa for No Kings 3. I had returned in time from my 7th Bob Dylan concert with my son, Ben. What keeps us coming back to Bob are the words. Always, the words. What keeps us marching are the lies, always the lies.

Ben discovered Dylan at 14 and reintroduced him to me. Twenty-three years later, we’re aging together, the three of us. I wish I could show you a photo of him on stage in his white hood, but they lock our phones in a soft bag, unlatched as we leave. The main purpose of this phone-free atmosphere is to experience the songs in the moment.

So as to relive later.

Number three on Friday night’s setlist was All Along the Watchtower. Like many of Dylan’s lyrics, it was made famous by another artist. In this case, Jimi Hendrix.

Someone once said the Dylan version is best in the morning, and the Hendrix cover around midnight. The links let you decide, very democratic, like a protest.

As I marched down Decorah’s Water Street in the 3rd iteration of resistance to the lawlessness, corruption, and incompetence of the Trump gang, I thought of these words from the Watchtower that my son repeated on the way home.

There are many among us who feel that life is but a joke

But you and I, we’ve been through that and this is not our fate.

So let us not talk falsely now.

The hour is getting late.

And when I took the photo, the sky reminded me of another poet-songwriter, Leonard Cohen, and of these words from Anthem.

Ring the bells that can ring.

Forget your perfect offering.

There is a crack in everything.

That’s how the light gets in.

Finally, I will leave you with the words from another lyricist popular in this Lutheran community.

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I don’t close cupboard doors, vacuum my car floors, sit in a kayak with oars, or speak the language of the Azores.

I did, however, enjoy listening to Brazilian colleague Pedro speak Portuguese.

Just as I love watching and listening to murder mysteries in Spanish, Italian, Finnish, French, Norwegian, Russian, Polish, Italian, Romanian, Icelandic, Arabic, Czech, Slovak, Hebrew, and Navajo with English subtitles. Never, under any circumstance, dubbed in English.

My favorite early-teen pop song, which I first heard in 1963 on my tiny orange transistor radio, was “Sukiyaki” by the Japanese singer Kyu Sakamoto.

So too, I’ve seen the complete listings of Akira Kurosawa’s Japanese and Ingmar Bergman’s Swedish films.

Sadly, I know, at 76, I’ll die monolingual in a multilingual country and world.

And I hope you won’t.

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My mother let the cup of coffee cool in front of her. She had forgotten how much she loved this drink that she first tasted on the knees of her father.

This was one of a hundred sad images from her two years in a memory care facility at 95.

My father, who loved and appreciated well-prepared food like no other member of our family, lost his taste buds to radiation treatment for sinus cancer.

For Pat, my youngest brother, who died of liver cancer last fall, the worst symptom, by far, of the six tumors and the chemo, was the unfathomable deprivation of energy.

My remaining brother, Peter, on the day of his death in January, told his caregiver he was going to see his wife, Pamela, who had died five months earlier.

Subtraction, from the 4th grade onward, was always more complicated than addition.

Today, it’s natural.

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Grey-haired, stooped Mrs. Thompson always wore a dark sweater when she gardened in the summer. I wouldn’t have noticed except she occasionally retrieved a “foul” wiffle ball from her garden’s crocuses and peonies, with never a scold.

Her backyard bordered the driveway we shared with our neighbors, the Bartoski’s, with their garage serving as the backstop and our garage the pitching mound. An ancient, bowed wire-link fence served as the left-field foul line.

Like many major league baseball players in the fifties and sixties, I had an off-season job as a newspaper carrier for The Daily Times. Mrs. Thompson was one of my 44 customers, which meant on every Thursday evening, I would collect a weekly sum.

As a proper business boy, I carried a small three-ring notebook with a page for each client, containing perforated stamp-sized receipts. For change, I attached a coin changer to my belt.

Collecting gave this impressionable 12-year-old access to the early evening lives of adults other than my parents. Most invited me into their living rooms, including Mrs. Thompson. As far as I knew, she lived alone. My mother told me her husband had died years earlier.

I remember her front room was always warm and dark, with the shades down on each window. Once, it must have been late summer, early evening, she took me through the house to her kitchen in the back, with side and back windows that looked over the garden that bordered our play area.

I don’t remember what she said or what kind of cookie she offered. But I do recall the openings with rolled-up blinds that overlooked her backyard and our ballpark.

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The only square inch of territory Emmy Lou didn’t snuffle was next to the red-topped fire hydrant. She snifaris to the spots less traveled.

As to Benji, when we visit during the winter, and his paws get cold, I’ll pick him up. Sort of a Footprints in the Sand deal, except he’s Jewish.

Rebecca’s son, Jonathon, and family live with Emmy Lou in St. Louis. A daughter, Emily, plus clan are in Marblehead, Massachusetts, along with cats Wilbur and Orville. They adopted Benji after husband Aviv’s mother died last year.

The household of Rebecca’s oldest, Libby, in Washington, DC, lost Flash, an ancient Beagle, last year, who, unBeagle-like, allowed me to lead.

Another venerable hound, Sam, helped raise my two brothers and me. We discovered him in a turkey box under the Christmas tree in 1955.

One Saturday morning in 1971, our dad took Sam away.

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Last night, Rebecca’s son-in-law, Jonathan, came into the house with a photo he had just taken of a beautiful sunset. I set aside Why Bob Dylan Matters by Richard Thomas and hurried outside to capture my version. Something about twilight broke the spell of my nestling in.

Picture 11,687 lay fallow overnight until early this morning, when I read this terrific story by Maria Rattray about growing old that included the idiom ‘at the end of the day.’

Half-light, aging, day’s ending, I know what you’re thinking. And you are right. I’m 76. Sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar. But that’s not the end of the story.

I stole everything for this essay except for itself.

Even the last line, which I purloined from Mr. Dylan, that concludes the aforementioned book.

Try to create something original, you’re in for a surprise.

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My mother let the cup of coffee cool in front of her. She had forgotten how much she loved this drink that she first tasted on the knees of her father.

This was one of a hundred sad images from her two years in a memory care facility at 95.

My father, who loved and appreciated well-prepared food like no other member of our family, lost his taste buds to radiation treatment for sinus cancer.

For Pat, my youngest brother, who died of liver cancer last fall, the worst symptom, by far, of the six tumors and the chemo, was the unfathomable deprivation of energy.

My remaining brother, Peter, on the day of his death in January, told his caregiver he was going to see his wife, Pamela, who had died five months earlier.

Subtraction, from the 4th grade onward, was always more complicated than addition.

Today, it’s natural.

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When I walked into a start-up yesterday, KD Refillery, I discovered a new word, adulting.

Merriam-Webster says it is “The act of attending to the ordinary tasks required of a responsible adult” and has been in use since 2013.

As I walked through the door, I heard the voice of Father Eugene Harrison.

“Paul, please use adulting in a sentence.”

“Paul committed an act of adulting today by looking up a word he did not know.”

“Very good. Now, use this new word as a gerund in a sentence.”

“Adulting is very hard work for Paul.

“Why do you think so?”

“Because Rebecca wants me to do the laundry, the yard work, and clean the toilets, when all I want to do is look up and turn words into sentences.”

“Father”

“Yes, Paul.”

“Why is adulting so much harder than teenaging?”

“You want hard? Try priesting.”

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Means I will die a child of the sixties

Some things change, and some things remain the same. This is me, fifty-six years ago, protesting Richard Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia and the killing of four students at Kent State University.

Last April, clad in my protest uniform, I was with hundreds more at a No Kings resistance day.

The past curves back, more spiral than arc.

What remains is war. Always war. And stupidity. And blindness. And greed.

King Don is only the latest!

For you and me, it can feel hopeless. Unless someone offers us words that express what we feel. Then, we feel less impotent and alone.

In Why Bob Dylan Matters, Harvard Classics Professor Richard Thomas puts it this way:

It is through song that we give depth to the sentiments for which mere speech is at times insufficient…Poetry and music are compensations for the pain that comes along with the human condition, and they are what can help us along.

Master Dylan adds this

It doesn’t really matter where a song comes from. It just matters where it takes you.

Where do these words, written so long ago, take you today?

The words for Dylan’s “Masters of War” came to him and to us in 1963.

Come you masters of war
You that build the big guns
You that build the death planes
You that build all the bombs
You that hide behind walls
You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know
I can see through your masks

You that never done nothin’
But build to destroy
You play with my world
Like it’s your little toy
You put a gun in my hand
And you hide from my eyes
And you turn and run farther
When the fast bullets fly

Like Judas of old
You lie and deceive
A world war can be won
You want me to believe
But I see through your eyes
And I see through your brain
Like I see through the water
That runs down my drain

You fasten all the triggers
For the others to fire
Then you sit back and watch
When the death count gets higher
You hide in your mansion
While the young people’s blood
Flows out of their bodies
And is buried in the mud

You’ve thrown the worst fear
That can ever be hurled
Fear to bring children
Into the world
For threatening my baby
Unborn and unnamed
You ain’t worth the blood
That runs in your veins

How much do I know
To talk out of turn
You might say that I’m young
You might say I’m unlearned
But there’s one thing I know
Though I’m younger than you
That even Jesus would never
Forgive what you do

Let me ask you one question
Is your money that good?
Will it buy you forgiveness
Do you think that it could?
I think you will find
When your death takes its toll
All the money you made
Will never buy back your soul

And I hope that you die
And your death will come soon
I’ll follow your casket
By the pale afternoon
And I’ll watch while you’re lowered
Down to your deathbed
And I’ll stand over your grave
’Til I’m sure that you’re dead

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I’ve definitely got a life to recall. It seems aeonian, but it’s only been 76 years. And will soon end. Soon, in relative terms, perhaps twenty years at most.There’s still work to be done.

Sadly, we aren’t here very long, are we? So we’d best not waste time.

It was only yesterday when my brothers and I were playing wiffle ball in the backyard, trying not to knock our mother’s Monday washing off the cotton ropes strung diagonally from the garage to hooks in the maple tree growing up through the lower-level concrete-block patio our dad rebuilt every few years.

Now, Dody, Pat, and Peter are gone. So is Paul, Sr, who took this photo, and who reminded us every Monday morning to help our mother hang the clothes before the first pitch and to ‘be careful of the clothes line.’

That leaves me to finish the game.

Peter died two months ago, and I’m his only surviving relative and the executor of his estate.

He and his late wife, Pamela, have left their money and property to the Sisters of Charity (BVMs), the religious order of our late aunt and Dody’s sibling, Sister Marilyn Thomas.

My task is to make sure this gets done.

It’s the latest clothesline.

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