Only a Dog Walker

I fell in love with Joan Baez in 2008. It was a two-step process, actually, with the spill-over occurring recently, as Robin Young interviewed her on Here and Now. After Baez described how a hawk from the 60's stopped her on the street to say how much he hated her back then, and how now he realized how wrong he had been, Young launched into a "my marine dad apologized to me about Nixon!" story that made Baez's eyes tear up. Young announced Baez's reaction with a version of OMG! Are you - Joan Baez - crying because of something I said? Getting the interview back on track, Baez offered simply, "I live my life like this. I think it's better to just go ahead and let the tears pour than try and stop them all the time."

Her comment connected with me, then shot me back to a time during the summer when I was stuck in a traffic jam on a highway. Just before dawn, a driver had tried to commit suicide by slamming the front of his car into the overpass wall. The only thing the driver succeeded in doing was driving fast enough to catapult his car over the embankment wall and down onto the multi-lane thoroughfare. The driver lived and no one else was struck by the plummeting car, but crews kept all oncoming cars at rest that morning. The delay gave me a chance to hear Bob Edwards interview Camile Paglia over Break, Blow, Burn, Paglia's collection of 43 poems that she considered the world's best. Paglia read the beginning from "Woodstock." Without the familiar music noise about it, the lyrics hit my ears and created a vivid image flow as if I heard it for the first time and it was on beyond powerful. When, several months later, I heard Baez accept an overactive emotional state that I was beginning to suspect most women have, I thought, this is why she is an icon and I was an idiot for not picking up on this sooner. Of course, Baez did not write "Woodstock." Paglia had spoken a truth that I did not remember: Joni Mitchell authored that poem, a factoid that must have gotten lost on me as I stared at all the radiator fluid and crankcase oil darkening a section of the white stone highway wall. But rather than allow this correction to diminish Baez's status, it brought both Mitchell and she up to sainthood, and I thought it was a such a shame that I spent most of the late 60's wondering why God made striped pants for my thick legs, and fighting with my brothers over wanting to be Davy, not Peter, of the Monkees in our basement band of cue stick guitars and tupperware drum sets.

I can't say now why we had those guitars. We didn't even have a pool table.

On the way home from an art opening, my eight year old, Edit, and I were talking about traffic pattern issues and how if I wasn't careful in getting out of a parked car onto a busy Elmwood strip, I could get killed. "You can't die," she responded instantly. "Who would walk the dog?"

There are women who have taken enough chances and sacrificed freedom and love in the name of truth and art and clarity. Then there are the rest of us: the table clearers and the dog walkers. In my next life, I'm coming back as a poet.