"Awake" / 1967 -- 17 years old

Toward the afternoon sky, the dream soared like a child's runaway kite ...

(page 17)





1967





Fifteen years ago, on the morning of December 3, 1994, my mother died suddenly and unexpectedly of a massive heart attack in Gualala, California. I remember driving around in a daze punctuated by waves of tears, listening to Bob Dylan's tape, "Oh Mercy," over and again. My mother loved "Ring Them Bells" from that tape. She loved that he sang, "Ring them bells so the world will know / That God is One." Although she didn't like Bob Dylan when I first began playing his albums in my bedroom in the summer of 1965, she did begin to like Joan Baez after Joan's only son was born. She related to Joan as a mother relates to another mother. In later years, she thanked me for introducing her to Bob Dylan's music. This is for you, Mom, with all my love:



Still makes me smile to remember that my mother liked "Ring Them Bells" so much that she wrote the lyrics out as she heard them and showed them to me. She wore a hearing aid and heard "lilies that bloom" as "sillies that goof."

Ring them bells St. Catherine
From the top of the roof
Ring them from the fortress
For the sillies that goof

My guess is that my mother would have loved the video of Bob Dylan singing "Must Be Santa." My guess is that Richard would have, too. I can see and hear them laughing together.

May there always be laughter and sillies that goof!