Tangled Up in America
The door opened to the tiny mom and pop thrift store in Estacada. On the street, several people who had waited inside various battered vehicles they were clearly using as housing emerged and headed inside to shop for whatever they needed to sustain life inside their cramped mobile domiciles. One of the people was a first or second grader who probably should have been in school on this weekday morning.
I never fail to visit tiny independent thrift stores when I cruise through Oregon's small towns. They are legion, they are wonderful, and they often serve as the only social service agency assisting the homeless.
Shopping was well underway by the time I stepped inside and customers had to step around and over one another to browse the wares. Some soft 70s soul music played through speakers. One man checked out tents. The kid wanted a toy. I looked at the books and handled a hardback Irving Stone novel that I knew I would never read. I also struck out prospecting for corduroy pants and vintage stationery.
CDs beckoned next. Hell yes! Ultimate Waylon Jennings and the two-volume Essential Bob Dylan. A quarter each! A quarter for 30+ Dylan tracks spanning his entire career up to this release, a decade before he won the Nobel Prize for Literature that earned him scorn from all the good gray (academic) poets who write poetry that nobody in this thrift store would read, let alone understand, but they sure as hell would get “Masters of War,” “Maggie's Farm,” “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35,” “If Not for You,” “Serve Somebody,” “Not Dark Yet,” and “Tangled Up in Blue,” arguably my favorite Dylan track and not because a student played it live and flawlessly in front of me and his peers in a classroom 31 years ago hoping to earn extra credit. (He earned it.) It was because of that verb: tangle. A great underused verb, but Dylan employed it in this song like no other songwriter had before.
I bought the CDs and paid a buck apiece for them. The owner thanked me. I slapped the second disc of Dylan in the CD player and headed back to Portland.
Fifteen minutes later, “Tangled Up in Blue” came on and it occurred to me that I hadn't heard the song in ten or 15 years. I drove a river highway, listened, and felt astonished to realize I was hearing the greatest American song ever written about how the loss of a great love almost ends in homelessness for a man. At every point in the story, the narrator manages to find a place to crash, a cafe, a region, a job (just outside of Delacroix) and manages to regroup before he moves on again, always moving, (keep on keeping on) verging on something or nothing, still in love or at least Dylan's version of still being or not being in love. One never knows if you listen to his songs (e.g. “It's All Over Now Baby Blue.”)
The song ended and I played it again. I asked questions: can you be without a home and not homeless? Can losing the love of your life make you end up homeless? And that verb tangle, that phrase, tangled up. Why are so many Americans tangled up in their country with the result being their homelessness in all its various forms, and why are some of these people stuck perpetually in that entanglement or disengaged from it and quitting American life altogether or at least the American life most of us live, meaning not in a tent under a freeway overpass or in a busted RV adjacent to sewage treatment plant? And why aren't there any good gray poets to comment on that. Not even Dylan has written a song on the subject and that deeply disappoints me. The last big song he released a while back was about the assassination of JFK. Who gives a shit?
Where is the new young Bob Dylan to write songs exploring the subject of the homeless and become the troubadour this crisis so desperately needs? I bet he or she or them is already out there strumming a guitar or squeezing an accordion, with a dog howling backup, perhaps uploading some songs to the cloud, and we haven't heard a damn thing about it. Or at least this singer exists in my fictional mind and I might as well write a tale to make it all come true. (I've already started.)
As I write this, a homeless woman right outside the window of the coffee shop I am sitting in drinking coffee, is tangled up with America and tangled up in blue. She is of indeterminate age and mental stability and has been living across the street from the coffee shop for six months, sleeping under the awning of a real estate office. She drinks coffee and smokes cigarettes all day. She keeps her area tidy. At this very moment, she happens to be wearing a makeshift puffy coat sliced up and stitched together from a blue nylon sleeping bag.
It is a tangled up in blue Bob Dylan never imagined and it's happening six feet away from me.