"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!

"Recurring Dream" / 1967 -- 17 years old

... the door was locked to him from the outside when he lived within himself.

(page 15)





1967





A place to eat and read and visit with friends:

December 1966 -- 17 years old

p. 12:

"Imaginary Brother As Witness"
Pencil on newsprint
(1966; water damage in early 1980s)





1966






Looking northeast this morning after the icy fog lifted on Rosa Parks Day:






















"If you will protest courageously, and yet with dignity and Christian love, when the history books are written in future generations, the historians will have to pause and say, 'There lived a great people—a black people—who injected new meaning and dignity into the veins of civilization.'"
(Martin Luther King, Jr., 1955)

Introduction / Double self-portrait

INTRODUCTION

In December of 1966, I met R on the beach at Half Moon Bay, California. We had both just turned 17 years old, and we discovered that we had been born within 24 hours of each other. We both liked Bob Dylan's music. R loaned me his copy of the lyrics from the album "Blonde on Blonde," which had been released in the spring of 1966 ...

In January of 1970, he left for Vietnam, convinced that he could not obtain conscientious objector status and not wanting to go to prison or to Canada. We made a commitment to write a letter to each other every day and kept that commitment. He arrived home on December 8, 1970, in the early hours of the morning, but in some ways he never returned from Vietnam. We lived together for five turbulent and bewildering months and then separated, remaining friends. He asked to see me before he died in a VA hospital in April of 2008. It was 38 years after he had returned from Vietnam, 42 years after we first had walked together at Half Moon Bay. All of the following art work and poetry is, in one way or another, the result of R's presence and absence in my life.

(from page 10)





1966










1965










1965





Oboe next to laptop this morning:

Table of Contents: Pages 52 through 70

Beloved Person In Bird Costume, page 52.





1964






Blooming in late November:

Table of Contents: Pages 30 through 51

Woman Trying To Remember What She Is Trying To Forget, page 34.





1964






Rainy day window:

Table of Contents: Pages 10 through 29

Mona Lisa and the Clown And The Cool Rain Of The Law, page 28.





1963






Late afternoon on the day after Thanksgiving: