"Generosity can be as simple and sweet as a song worth sharing."
(quote from Sight Psalms)
The source for the photo is my sister in Mississippi who is a Methodist and sent me a link to Sight Psalms.
I remember the final Bob Dylan concert I attended in the late 1990s in a stadium in Vancouver, British Columbia. During what was to be the last encore, I was moved to get up from my seat, and I made my way down as close to the stage as I could get -- a long way from where our seats were. My friends remained seated. Bob Dylan was singing, "Girl From The North Country." Others had quietly left their seats as well, moved perhaps in the same way I was . As I recall, we were a small group of women, allowed to be as close to the stage as was possible.
Unlike the rest of the concert, the volume of the loudspeakers had been turned down to a level that was not excruciatingly painful to listen to. Bob Dylan began to sing clearly, unlike the way he had sung throughout the rest of the concert.
Bob Dylan would have been in his late 50s then. To my eyes, he was a surprisingly fragile-looking man. I was struck by a sense of the courage it took for him to put himself in such a vulnerable position. Then the words generosity and humility came to me spontaneously.
To me, in that moment, Bob Dylan was the embodiment of generosity and humility.
When I saw the above photo this morning, it occurred to me that Bob Dylan could have easily been that man at the piano in New Orleans except for a simple twist of fate. I see them as kindred spirits.
The gift of the encore for the last Bob Dylan concert I am likely to see has been a lasting gift.
If you have time and the inclination, listen to Bob Dylan in 1994 (a few years before we saw him in Vancouver), accompanied by the Tokyo New Philharmonic Orchestra.
"I met one man who was wounded in love
I met another man who was wounded in hatred"
(from "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall")
