Last night...

Dear deep womb swimmer,

You were probably wondering what that commotion was last night, shivering through your amniotic space. That was your first rock concert.

Before you heard the clip above, you heard a band called My Morning Jacket (not quite as loud as we were standing farther away), this was followed by one of your mother's favorite bands Wilco (more on them later).

The clip above? Well, you may never be impressed by this bit of information but let me tell you, it's pretty amazing: your first concert was with Bob Dylan! Dylan is a man who (as of this writing) has been writing, performing and recording music for half a century. (Remind me to tell you the story of hearing him do "Leopard-Skin Pillbox Hat" four decades after performing it at the Royal Albert Hall in London.... Come to think of it, don't bother. I'll probably have bored you with the story dozens of times before you're able to read this blog.)

Listen carefully to this clip, my child. If you've listened to his music before, you may not recognize this version of the song, but it's one of my favorites of his:  "Tangled Up in Blue". 

When I was a kid, my mother would say: "You'll understand when you get older." That phrase always bugged me. It seemed to imply that I was too DUMB to understand whatever the issue/song/idea was. But there are some things in this life, that you sort of wish your child will avoid, like the heartache that Dylan writes about in this song. Both the "tangled" and the "blue" part.

If you listen to the lyrics I've captured here, he has met a woman who takes him back to her place. In the original version, it's "a book of poems/written by an Italian poet from the thirteenth century". (I always wondered if that was Dante (maybe La Vita Nuova, which is a lovely (and true) love story (please read it) (or maybe it was Petrarch, who I know less about, but wrote love sonnets in the fourteenth century, I dunno.))

But if you listen closely he seems to have changed the lyrics slightly, but brings us to the same place he wrote originally:

"And every one of them words rang true/And glowed like burning coal/Pouring off of every page/Like it was written on my soul from me to you/Tangled up in blue."

My prayer today is that this song, these lyrics -- or others by Mr. Dylan -- will glow like burning coal, like they were written on my soul from me to you.