Present (II)

 

I had settled in that caravan shortly before spring '67. Luck and a good relationship with the owner of the house allowed me to stay in the shadow of Big Pink, in the rear, when it wasn’t yet called that or in any other way, because its name is its own history and it was just beginning to be written in those days. The owner was the same friendly and confident lady who told Rick about that home while he and Richard were still living in a motel in Woodstock that she also owned, and eventually rented the house to them. My intention, unknown to anyone, was to start writing Dylan's biography, for which I had collected materials for a couple of years. I also wanted to get new and update information to write about his life during that high-spirited period at Woodstock and its surroundings, in respect of which he seemed to be reaching outside voluntarily.

 

     I accumulated these materials in a huge notebook and I alternated them with personal reflections, impressionistic and sometimes banal notes on the everyday life in that pink island in the Catskill Mountains. I would never get to publish them as soon after I decided to finish the first volume of the biography with the date of the accident, July '66, and since then, I have not been able to complete the following next. For decades, this voluminous notebook, along with a smaller paperback diary-log, in which some goodbye stories gradually emerged, shared with Dylan’s brown notebook the narrowness of an exiled suitcase in a damp attic with no windows. I kept them together, his present, my memory, and the pain of incomplete goodbyes, as the three relicts from '67. Over time, I did not even realize how stems and roots started to grow and joined them as convergent branches of the same trunk.

     Meanwhile, my life was deflecting paths that had little or nothing to do with the dreams and ideals of whom, during the "summer of love", had rented that caravan to be near Dylan, the artist that drove many of them.