It was August of 1963 I had just graduated from high school and in a month would be getting on a train heading west to go to college in Iowa. Both were some form of a miracle in my mind then,..how after failing so many times in high school had I passed enough classes to graduate? And how given that performance had anyone given  me a shot at a college  education?

But the real miracle of that summer was that I had found my first true love….Lenore . We had worked together for the past year at the town library. She was two years younger than I and would head back to high school in the Fall, while I went West.

After school got out in June I spent as much time with Lenore as I could, usually walking the mile between her house and mine. On this warm August night I had gotten tickets to a Joan Baez concert at the old Forest Hills Tennis Court. I could only afford the cheapest tickets and when we found our seats we were at the very top row, as far as you could get from the stage and still have paid an entrance fee.

Joan Baez sang for about forty five minutes and then stopped, stood up and said “There is a young folk singer I would like you to listen to named Bob Dylan. In the next hour, listening to his music and words I had what some folks would classify as a “Coming to Jesus” moment.

I was totally captivated. I had never been so deeply affected by a set of songs. 

“How many roads must a man walk down, before you call him a man?” “You’re the reason I am traveling on,Don’t Think Twice it’s all right.” “Oxford Town, around the bend, Two men died neath the Mississippi moon. Somebody better investigate soon”

As soon as I could find it, I brought his album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. There on the cover was Bob Dylan  walking down a snowy street in New York City with a beautiful young woman her arms wrapped through his. It could have been Lenore and I, no it was Lenore and I at that moment.

Less than a month later, I pulled a steamer trunk onto a Chicago bound train and headed off to college with the The Freewheelin Bobby packed safely inside.

During those early weeks in Iowa, my life was full of new people, new sights, new challenges. I was in college, I was on my own and I had never felt more alive.

In the evenings, I either sat down and wrote Lenore a letter or called her on the public telephone that stood in the hall near my dorm room. I told her how much I missed her, which was both true and not true, I told her how much I loved her, which was true.

Always nearby, playing in the background was Bob Dylan’s Freewheelin album….. in the evening, thinking of her, I would listen to “ Girl of the North Country”….

 “Please see for me if her hair hangs long, If it rolls and flows down her breast. Please see for me if her hair hangs long,That’s the way I remember her best”.

During the day I was more likely to listen to those songs that stirred my sense of justice or injustice like A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.

“ I’m going back out ‘fore the rain starts a falling”

I’ll walk to the depths of the deepest dark black forest 

Where the people are many and their hands are all empty

Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters

Where the executioner’s face is always well hidden

Where hunger is ugly, where the souls are forgotten

Where black is the color, where none is the number.”

It was hard to match the boy who sang along with the words of Dylan that Fall with the same boy who a year earlier had love to sing along with a favorite album of “Al Jolson’s Greatest Hits” and who two months before graduation, donned blackface and sang “Mammy” at his high school talent show!

By the middle of October, the letters from Lenore became more infrequent and when I got her on the phone we did not have much to say to each other , other than increasing feeble and inauthentic statements of “I miss you.”

It was ending, she knew it way before I did and again I turned to the playing of “The Freewillin Bob Dylan” for comfort.

“I’m a-thinin and a-wondrin all the way down the road,

I once loved a woman , a child I’m told

I give her my heart but she wanted my soul

But don’t think twice’s its alright”

I played that album over and over and over that Freshman year of college, It got so badly scratch and damage, I had to buy another copy over Christmas vacation.

In the years ahead it stayed locked up in my parents house while I went to the Philippines , when I came back it came with me to South Carolina and then Vermont.

That vinyl record has long disappeared into some trip to the junk and I have moved on to having owned it as a cassette, a disk and now downloaded onto my computer.

But I will always cherish that first album as a “guide” “comforter” and in moments of doubt or loneliness… a very good friend!