Contemplating Going to See “A Complete Unkown”

My fascination with the poetry and music of Bob Dylan began in earnest when I flew to Chicago during the school break in 1972 to visit my sister and supervise her kids while she worked when they visited her from military school for a few weeks.

Sis had migrated north from Missouri in the mid sixties when her then husband separated from the Army and moved to Indiana to work at the sprawling U.S. Steel Plant in Gary. In a few short years Sis was trapped in an abusive marriage with two young boys to take care of and was seeking a way out.

Her opportunity came when she was befriended by another waitress and was introduced to the proprietress of an Italian Restaurant which operated in Chicago. Her benefactor, after meeting the boys and falling in love with them, offered her a job at her place in Chitown and arranged a place for her to stay while she got on her feet.

By the summer of ‘72 sis had waited on – and fallen for – at her new place of employment, a bar and pizza joint owner of Italian lineage who lived in the heart of downtown Chicago over his tavern, and a new romance bloomed. Tony was not keen on the idea of fathering her kids however, hence their consignment to the military school.

A novel could be written detailing the repercussions of that decision but that would be beyond the scope of this missive.

That is how I came to be flown into Chicago in the summer of 1972 to babysit her two sons, now six and eight years old, and having my pockets lined with the proceeds of selling beer and shots and the best pizza I have ever eaten to keep them entertained.

Tony and sis picked me up at O’Hare in his Cadillac and took me to a fine dinner of Chicken Vesuvio at her former place of employment, and we then proceeded to a theater on State Street where a new movie -which you might have heard of – The Godfather” was screening. The aroma of garlic filled the Caddy as we drove.

The next day we picked up my nephews at their school and brought them to his place on Wabash and Roosevelt streets – where Trader Joe’s is now located – and, after Sis had put on her work shoes (she was now employed at a coffee shop around the corner on Michigan Avenue) and given me some money, we set off up Wabash to catch an El to Wrigley Field to see the Cubs play.

Along the way we passed a Record/Book store where I use some of my newly won babysitting lucre to purchase two items which, perhaps more than any other cultural touchstones, save the music of the Beatles, shaped my thinking to this day – a shiny new copy of Abbie Hoffman’s “Steal This Book” (for which I dutifully paid $1.95 plus tax if memory serves) and Bob Dylan’s “Greatest Hits Volume I”.

More so even than life long complaints I heard about from older nephew about the severe sunburn he suffer that afternoon at Wrigley (he was ginger), Dylan’s songs were to become a constant in my life.

I spent the rest of the the day shepherding my newly acquired prize possessions until we returned to Tony’s place that evening… possibly to the detriment of my nephew’s sensitive epidermis.

Listening that night on my sister’s Hi-Fi I realized that I’d heard most of the songs before, but one that I hadn’t left me transfixed- the beautiful and ethereal “I Want You”:

And today, mourning the twilight of our democracy as the seditionist’s calamity of an electoral victory is confirmed, I wonder what Hollywood and the handsome and no doubt well meaning Timothée Chalamet can inform me about the rather gawky young man who grew up hard by the shores of cold Lake Superior listening to Delta Blues and Western Swing in the bedroom of his father’s home, and would grow up to scathingly rebuke crooked politicians, war profiteers and the murderer of “Lonesome Hattie Carroll”.

I decide probably not much.

I think I will give it a pass.

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