Dear Bob Dylan,

I’m studying philosophy.

So far, all I’ve learned has taught me:  a question will always remain a question.  And so I face the times before me and those beside me and read the current realistic approach.  I proceed slowly, take one aspect at a time, try to grasp my own humility.  So, even if I don’t agree with some current or past philosophical view, to keep an open-ended mind.  To question myself.

As for life…..dear God, mine is half over at least and still I find myself falling backward.  Into standards yet unknown to me, the terminology of philosophy stuns me as much as any question itself.

I can’t tell you how much I adore your Christmas video.  I’ve watched it at least three dozen times.  My daughter and I go around singing it, linking arms and high-kneeing it through the kitchen.

I try to have clarity.  I try to merit my ideas of you and your music & words into something substantially significant.  I’ve learned while learning, to talk myself into believing in you.  I, for one, don’t dream in reason.  I dream the impossible and conceive with each dream a new impracticality.  I used to wake up happy.  Now I just wake sore, tired.  As though I never slept at all.

I am returning to school in the Fall.  Forty years old and I’m returning.  I’m challenging myself to learn from others.  To quit accepting my and only my point of view, to think I could learn new things simply by studying new things.  I need a personality different from my own.  A wise old owl of a professor telling me things and showing me days I never knew.

I won’t continue on this rhetorical path of writing.  I’m still a pre-student.  I have so much to learn.  I picture myself as a young child, mousy brown hair, bangs cut to the quick of my forehead, striped hand-me-down t-shirt.  Funny I don’t have a thumb in my mouth.  Father off shooting tin cans, mother collecting cartridge shells.  Brother pissed at having to spend so much time with the family.  Sisters galloping like gazelles through the hills, their images like the philosophy of aesthetics.  Their limbs in mathematical harmony with nature.  Jennifer’s long wheat hair.  Tori’s tiny frame imitating the architecture of stone.

Your Christmas album is insanely brilliant.  I’ve neither dreamt nor imagined it.  It’s really real and really wonderful.

Dear Bob Dylan,

Sharp, cool and unafraid, still the winter night detonates me.  Imagine this:  seven days of melancholy for seven straight and upset days, twenty four hours apiece, each hour melancholic, every minute afraid.  And here I state:  sharp, cool and unafraid.

I have not written a word since your appearance here in Arizona.  I’ve meant to many times.

You were magnificent.  At one point I had my hands upon my knees but felt I was clasping my heart.  Which means, my heart was in my knees.

Sir, nameless Sir, much of my happiness ended long ago but seeing you that night, my daughter beside me, all of that returned.  The feeling smothered my sadness, crushed any sob my throat might have held.  Extinguished all conscience thought of everything amiss.  Dear heart, when it rains it pours.  Like a London rain here lately.  Each drop equals a thousand more.

And so, what’s a girl to do?  I let the water sizzle me.  I sit and blink and stare at the stars thinking they all look like silk flowers with pinched smiles.  The war inside my heart ended years ago so why does every God given impusle happen now?  If my son feels thunderhead blue, if my daughter thinks she is a shaken coin dropped carelessly into these hands (mine), if in elfish light I once held grace but now hold flakes, I look to the sick rose of heaven and pray the prayer of a sick man, trails of hair and poetic eyes or not, we’re all the same.

So, life be damned.  You were great.  You drove us all into an embrace that never happened.  Still.  We all ran into your iron gate.

In all fairness, I’ll be as white as I can with the truth, you are not a toy, a thing we can all boast about observing, but then again, there you are.  Right in front of us.  Mister Legend.  Mister no more sixties.  All them feathers are alike.  Not you.

I’ll take my sweet babe pilgrimage of a life and live it.  You will always be to many something we can never solemnly grace or call our own.  You make a million happy.  I’ll say no more.