Thursday following Tuesday

I’ve been thinking a great deal about “Bob Dylan’s Dream,” a song to which I have been listening for almost fifty years. Dylan wrote the song when he was yet in his early twenties, but there is in the song an awareness that the romantic innocence of youth has no future, that its loss is sad, even tragic, but that its loss is inevitable. “We thought we could sit forever in fun/But our chances really were a million to one!” Eventually, we'd have to leave that room or the world would enter it. Its possession is priceless--“Ten thousand dollars at the drop of a hat, I’d give it all gladly if our lives could be like that--” but that innocence can not be long held.  

And I am mesmerized how a man so young as to be still in the throes of that innocence, could know so wisely how ephemeral the experience of it is, and understand how perfect life then seemed in that room where he and his friends weathered many a storm. How wise to have known that the room was not occupied by adults but could only be viewed by them.

The election results makes me long for that room, but I wish, I wish, I wish in vain . . .