Bob Dylan According to Peter Max

When I was about fifteen years old, my older sister gave me the poster from her Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits Album, Pt. I.
As soon as I pulled it from the blue cardboard cover and unfolded the Peter Max Op Art poster, I pinned it to my bedroom wall, where it remained until I left home for my sophomore year in college at age eighteen.
Someone (no doubt, my mother) neatly folded it and placed it in a box that sat in our family's garage for many years. Then, fifteen years ago, I rediscovered it while unpacking some family mementos. A flood of so many memories and feelings rushed into my consciousness that I decided to resurrect the poster to its former glory.
Because it was more than three decades old then, the folds were indelibly deep, so deep it seemed likely that if I attempted to pin the thing up again, it would separate into eight squares and therefore be nearly impossible to restore. So, my wife Linda advised me to have it mounted on foam board in order to preserve it, which I did.
Around this time I returned to the classroom as an English teacher and decided to post Mr. Dylan's psychedelic image on one of my classroom walls. The four-foot-long, three-foot-wide beauty was assigned the top center of my back wall where only I could see it on a moment-to-moment basis. The thought of America's greatest modern poet looming above my freshmen, juniors, and creative writers as they toiled on their essays, reports, and poems seemed so natural to me that it remained there for my final ten years as a public school educator.
Today, whenever I spy this poster on my garage wall, I'm catapulted back to my high school years, more specifically the bedroom where I spent many evening hours my last two years of high school and freshman year of college. I remember Bobby D watching over my first girlfriend and I while we navigated the baseball diamond of teenage sex, including my first trip to home plate.
It's incredible how many stories, images, and sensations race into my mind whenever I simply give it a glimpse while entering or exiting my garage. So, in the interest of time management, I almost always avert my eyes when it appears in my field of vision.
This fifty-year-old artifact from my past is an icon, a symbol, and a metaphor for those growing years. It is composed of equal parts brightly colored details and blank whiteness. The fun times, of course, are represented by the former; and the lean times, especially in terms of friendship and romance, are represented by the white hair. Bobby's black physique and face stand for the mystery and confusion I experienced the years between my fifteenth and eighteenth birthdays. Puberty, hormones, my first hangover, sexual forays both at the local drive-in theater and my own cocoon of a bedroom, graduation from high school, registering for this country's last draft, and my subsequent move hundreds of miles away for my second year of college are only some of the landmark rites of passage I experienced while Mr. Dylan reigned in my open-beam room with the six-feet-tall panes of glass comprising the top half of the exterior wall.
The Bob Dylan poster has witnessed many people and events in its lifetime, yet stays as stoic and statue-stiff as ever. What he lacks in human personality, he makes up for in blasting me back to my past each time I gaze upon his Medusa-like locks, hook nose, and black-as-Johnny Cash's-clothes body. This is the only inanimate object I have ever thought to thank, but I know he already knows my gratitude and that realization makes me smile.

Forty Years Together (Mostly)

So, today (12/2/2018) marks the fortieth anniversary of the Saturday night I met my wife. Only a string of odd happenings I like to call little miracles could've caused us to meet, all of which were orchestrated by God. You'll see what I mean when I've finished (or at least I hope so).
About eight o'clock on that long ago Saturday night (December 2, 1978) I was settled into the comfy, probably orange, recliner in our family's all-wood-and-glass den as snug-as-a-bug-in-a-rug, to watch my beloved UCLA Bruins play some poor opponent in a game of round ball when my mother Margaret arrived home with her new boyfriend, some guy named Frank. (I think I'd only met the man once or twice prior.) Regardless, Mom began telling me all about their dinner at the Holiday Inn in great detail and went on and on and perhaps one or two more "ons" on about who was there - none of whom measured up in my mind or interest calculator with my Bruins. When Ma reached so far or leaned so low as to tell me some girl I hadn't spoken with since the fourth grade was at the "H.I.," I informed her I wasn't interested in meeting ANYONE at the Holiday Inn, much less some girl-now woman I'd spoken with last on the playground of Sage School in Palmdale.
To which she replied, "Look, I don't care WHERE you go, just go. Frank and I want to be alone."
So, within moments, I was dressed in who-know-what headed to God-only-knew-where so F & M could be alone without Yours Truly to chaperone. And, since the night before I'd sworn off going out to "meat markets" anymore, I had no clue where to go to kill a few hours before the love couple's alone time would expire. And, friends, since I had no imagination about where to go in Palmdale on a Saturday night in 1978, I went  to the ONLY place in town with live music; well, outside of the redneck country bars where I would've blended in like oil blends with H2O. That place, of course, was the Holiday Inn.
Not only was it an unprecedented occasion for my mother to kick me out of our house, it was also the first and last time I remember entering a bar establishment by myself. But... I soon had plenty of company, including my late brother Keith, his former band mate Tommy, and Tommy's mother along with one instrumental person. No, it wasn't the girl from fifteen years before who'd spoken to me once on the blacktop playground at recess. It was Ken, a man also by himself who decided to buy me a beer after I seated myself beside him. My brother actually gave up his seat for me and left for some unknown reason. Perhaps the Lord urged him to, but I'll never know.
So, Ken proceeds to leave my side to go dance with some chick. I probably spent the time conversing with Keith's band mate and his mother. About twenty minutes later, Ken returns. As he seats himself, I spy the woman with whom he'd been dancing - a beautiful blonde lady dressed much nicer than any of the Palmdalites in attendance. She returned to her seat across the way on this horseshoe-shaped bar, which allowed me a perfect obstacle-free view of her. Boy, was she pretty. I could spend the next several paragraphs describing her beauty and sexiness, but I'll leave that for tonight when I tell her in private.
After, oh maybe twenty more minutes, Ken says to me, "Well, shall I dance with her again or would you like to?"
I isolated that sentence in its own paragraph for a reason. Ken's statement was a TOTALLY unprecedented moment in the history of guys in bars. No guy, I can declare without doubt, had EVER turned to another guy and suggested that that other guy dance with a woman with whom he'd already danced. Guys make their mark on something they want and don't go back on it, ever. But, Ken was different. In fact, I'm not sure he was a man. Angel is the word that springs to mind immediately, but perhaps I'll never find out.
You'll love how I responded. "You don't mind, Ken?"
"Nah," was his response. "Go for it."
So, I did. I got up, thanked him, and wound my way around the curved bar in a counter-clockwise direction while the next song kicked in from the band in the corner. I leaned over her just enough for her to hear me, and guess what? The beautiful blonde accepted!
She followed me out to the area between the band and a glass window. I remember not knowing what to do but dance, so I did exactly that. And, since this was during the zenith of disco music's meteoric rise, the music didn't stop for probably forty minutes - one song blended into the next which segued into a third tune and so on and so forth. We didn't get to chat, but I felt so natural in her presence that I followed her back to her seat and proceeded to shoot the breeze with her for what I thought was a few minutes. The man seated next to her must've gotten tired of his close-up view of my rear parts because he stood and said, "Here, you can have my seat."
So, I sat and talked with this beauty from L.A. who was originally from the Hoosier State. We chatted about basketball, particularly John Wooden who hailed from her same little town of Centerton, before discussing auto racing, which was why she'd come to our little, backwater, forsaken desert town for one night. She, her best friend, and two underage women (Linda's sister and her friend) had traveled in two cars to see a male friend of theirs race the next day at Willow Springs Raceway, out in Rosamond. At any rate, I felt extremely grateful and fortunate that this angel with the spun gold head of hair, impeccable clothes, and sexy, sultry voice was even speaking to me, much less listening to my every word. Suddenly, without warning, the bartender yelled, "Last call!"
"What?!" I thought. "Why, it can't be past eleven-thirty." I checked my watch and saw it was 1:40 p.m. Amazing.
We decided that breakfast sounded good, so we rode together in Linda's bright yellow Fiat X19 to get breakfast. Not across the street at the only place open at the time for breakfast, Denny's by the 14 Freeway, but to a town twenty miles away down Hwy. 138, Pearblossom, that had a 24-hour truck stop cafe.
(To be continued on my next blog.)