Present (V)

 

       I was waiting. I waited for several days, many days, I lost count. From my caravan, I would see them go in and out of the house, open windows at noon and turn on lights at dusk. Dylan would arrive in his car and stay mostly in the living room for a long while, typewriting. Then he would go down to the basement with the others and I would hear them play from the outside, me sitting beneath the windows to the right of the house. The sound coming through them breathed as a living being, smelt like a plant under water and flowed like dance steps executed forward, backward and to the sides. Five musicians together enjoying his greatest achievement: the stopping of time. Nothing else, no one else; just me, unseen on the other side, listening and waiting.

       Now, nearly five decades later, I place myself on this side to tell the tale. The memory of the hopeful expectation of those days has given me back a feeling for life that had blurred with the passing of the years and the inevitability of the losses. On my desk sits the brown notebook that Dylan gave me the last time I saw him at Big Pink. I open it at random -a folded sheet, only two lines separated by a chasm of blank page:

           I know it because it was there.


               But I'm not there, I'm gone ...