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.
