by Casey Jo Graham Welmers
I think it starts with Dylan, and it will probably end with Dylan. I have to turn back the clock a bit here, go back to when God and me were born. I have to let the song titles do most of the talking, because copyright laws around lyrics get murky. I can’t repeat quotations so you’ll just have to draw conclusions on the page. The words are still Dylan. Mine are still me. There’ve been other musicians along the way: a Rhodes scholar and a mailman and a kid from Asbury park. A Jamaican messiah, some shoegaze Stars and a Canadian brunette that once moonlit as God. A few kids from Seattle that reinvented the wheel and a skeleton crew from Haight-Asbury that claim this is all a dream we dreamed, but I’m in this dream, and Dylan is central to it, so here we are. This is my life according to Bob.
I have it on good cosmic authority that when my mom’s ’75 AMC Gremlin is smashed from behind “It’s All Over Now Baby Blue” is on the radio. She careens across the slick of Michigan’s winter roads like a hockey puck, her water breaking across the chilly driver’s seat. It is all over for me in that moment— my life in utero, anyways. I’m born blue, umbilical cord around my neck, face up. A stargazer. Yonder stands your infant with her strangled tongue. The doctor frees the umbilical cord without difficulty and I pull air, fill my tiny lungs, shriek to confirm my existence. I’m tiny and pink and premature, jolted into the world courtesy of ice and snow and the poor maintenance of rural roads.
*
I have a habit of playing with the carpet in our living room. I run my hands one way and then the other, against the grain, with the grain. This is my usual TV watching ritual, but one day in 1992 my hands sit frozen in my lap, the rug fibers momentarily undisturbed. I’m having a music related awakening. Richie Havens is covering “Just Like A Woman” for Bob Dylan’s 30th Anniversary special, performed at Madison Square Garden and aired on local PBS affiliate WCMU. My dad, seated nearby, just keeps saying oh my God, and in my mind Richie Havens is God—his voice is reaching inside me and his guitar is my heart, his fingers conjuring magic on the strings. I watch the entire concert, each and every performer. I don’t break like a little girl, but I do break—a visceral, ecstatic sort of cracking. The next day I ask my dad if we can watch it again. We watch so many times over the years that the VHS tape wears out and unravels from the cassette.
*
My mom has a vascular connective tissue disorder. We don’t know about the disorder until her carotid artery dissects, blood pools into her brain and she suffers a massive hemorrhagic stroke. I’m barely 20 and she’s 42. She tried to raise us Catholic, and because I feel like it’s what she would want, I pray nightly for her soul. I’m out of practice and winging the words, playing it fast and loose with ‘Hail Mary’s’ and ‘Our Fathers.’ I stuff her rosary under my pillow, squeeze my eyes shut, listen to “Knockin’ on Heavens Door” and “Tryin’ To Get To Heaven” back to back. Mama take this tragedy off of me. I have recurring dreams where she is trapped, some kind of ghost; dreams where we buried her alive in the backyard next to the family dog and she unearths herself, walks around the house covered in earthworms and dirt. I’m not clear on the specifics of purgatory, the status of Heaven’s doors. My mom once told me she wasn’t afraid to die, but I’m stuck on the terror of her in some kind of limbo. I don’t imagine she’d be okay having to knock or wait, caught between this life and the next.
*
I’m half asleep when my dad peeks his head into my bedroom, says an airplane just crashed into the World Trade Center. In my groggy state I assume it’s a tiny prop plane, spiraling, the pilot drunk. I picture it like a toy, something with a shiny red propeller. When the second plane hits he starts yelling in the living room. We spend the rest of the day lifeless, glued to Dan Rather. A month later my English professor assigns an essay on a song of our choice. I stay up all night listening to “Masters of War” and “License to Kill” worrying sour Skittles until my tongue is a shredded rainbow horror show. I write about death planes decapitating the Twin Towers and cowards hiding behind desks but mostly I write about this woman on my block who is homeless and mute; who I’m convinced is some kind of incarnation of the woman in the refrain to “License To Kill.” She just sits there, and if she had a voice I imagine her fixing her cataract eyes on my own, asking me, who will take away their license to kill? She is so clearly collateral damage to man’s destruction that I can’t help but project this ‘blind seer’ trope on her. My classmates stick to our era: “Heart Shaped Box”, “Fade Into You,” “Last Goodbye,” all artists I admire but trace back though some convoluted family tree to Dylan. Kurt to Neil to Bob. Hope to the Paisley Underground to The Byrds to Bob. When I try to connect Jeff Buckley there are no meandering arrows, just a solid line that runs through his father, through Dylan, straight to the edge of God.
*
I’m sliding off the tattoo table, covered in sweat. My ribcage buzzes under the needle and I verge on the point of passing out. I’d heard this about rib tattoos, thought stupidly that my high pain tolerance would protect me. Fool me once. My husband is getting tattooed on the ribcage as well, a chunk of lyrics in old English from “Shelter From The Storm.” We’re 6 days into married life, still riding the high of our wedding. We referenced it in our vows and played it at our reception and now we’re cementing the song on our skin in blue-black ink. I’ve never worn flowers in my hair, but I have worn silver bracelets, paraded around like some kind of bohemian deity. My husband has likely sheltered me from more storms than I’ve sheltered him, it’s honestly hard to say. We promise always to do our best by each other. We give our word. We slather A+D ointment to our sides and steal constant peaks at our oozing, sacred pact.
*
I cover my palms in chalk and my arms in tacky goo, haul atlas stones onto platforms and carry heavy awkward objects specific distances. I ask the promoter of one particular Strongman contest if they can order a t-shirt for me in XS. They laugh and tell me that’s a first, but are happy to oblige. I deadlift a car but skip the squat event, knowing I can’t hit the weight. The following summer I honor my Scottish heritage, don a kilt with the family tartan and walk-on to compete in a farmer’s carry event at the local Highland Games. The audience titters, they think it’s a joke, like get a load of this chick, no way she can lift 100 pounds in each hand, let alone walk anywhere with it. In my head I hear “The Mighty Quinn.”
Yeah you ain’t seen nothing.
I haul up the handles and gain distance and the laughter turns to screams. They’re on their feet, going wild for the scrawny underdog. This is, by far, my favorite party trick.
*
I don’t want to work on the farm no more. I don’t really work on a farm, I work in a hospital. Patients throw prosthetic limbs at me and reach out to pet my hair after their hands have explored the warmth of their bare and unwashed nether regions. So I hum it, “Maggie’s Farm.” I don’t want to work for the physicians no more, the managers, the administrators in the C-suite that come to the floors in designer suits, looking starchy and crooked next to the staff in their scrubs. One executive wears heels that we can hear clicking down the hall well before she manifests at the nurses station, a spiky haired haint. She brings us pizza, would probably prefer that we sing while we slave. I don’t eat any but I stay at the farm. I transfer to the operating room. No one can hurl fake feet while propofol runs through their veins.
*
I pull over my car because the sobs racking through my chest are uncontrollable, tears choking my vision. I’m a hazard to myself and others, collapsed on the steering wheel, “Forever Young” blaring through the speakers. My 40 year old sister is dying from cancer and I want her to stay forever growing older, with me, but she won’t be. Everything about her will remain arrested and unchanged, and I’m not sure how I’ll navigate my years ahead without her. I would build a ladder to the stars to reach her. I’d climb the rungs ‘til my hands failed, my fingers bled, a million splinters embedded in my desperate, tortured palms.
*
Is this Dylan? There’s no way, there’s no way this is Dylan! I’m sputtering in the passenger seat next to my dad, dialing up the knob on his car stereo to better hear the song coming through the public radio station. It is Dylan, singing “Death Is Not The End.” My sister has just died, not even a full day earlier. This is a Dylan song we have never heard. This is a Dylan song we will never hear again, at least not at random like this. I am shook at how literal this sign is, how crazy. My sister is spelling it out for us as easily as she can, knowing my dad, in his full blown atheism, will be the hardest to convince. She hits him over the head with the message. She hits hard. I’m agnostic, but there’s no way this isn’t her. I believe in synchronicity. I believe in this.
*
One day I will die, too. I don’t know where or when or how, but it’s inevitable. In between will be all the crushing and brilliant intricacies of life, hundreds of Dylan songs sung by Dylan and hundreds of other performers one hundred different ways. But when I am gone, and the people I leave behind are forced to pull themselves together and throw a banger of a death party, they will play “I Shall Be Released.” I want the Chrissie Hynde cover, the one she played in Madison Square garden at the concert with Richie Havens that pulled me into this whole world.
I’ll see my light come shining.
It’s hard to say what direction it will come from—could be the east onto the west. I have no way of divining the particulars. I like to think that I’ll know who the light will be, who’s blinding spirit will be arcing toward my own.
Casey Jo Graham Welmers was named after a Grateful Dead song, so maybe this IS all a dream we dreamed. Find her most recent words in Stanchion, BULL and Pool Party, and more at https://caseyjo.carrd.co
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