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.