AD's Journal 2024

    The Dylan movie still haunts me. Maybe it's because I always wanted to be him, or to live the life he lived. As with the Beatles, his music made up the sound track of my life. I didn't like his first album, but then, I suspected, neither did he. But Free Wheelin knocked me over. I was 13 years old, living in my grand parent's house, not yet knowing that I already had history with Dylan since my mother was in Graystone Park during Dylan's visits to Woody Gutheri – and it is possible I passed him during many visits to see my mother without knowing it. When I heard Dylan's music I convinced myself that I might someday become a folk singer, and tried my best to learn the songs on Free wheelin on my uncle's jumbo Guild guitar. In those days and up until the early 1970s, no coffee house performer could avoid doing Dylan's music – or for that matter many of the other performers that once made up the heart of the Greenwich Village scene in the 1950...

  The snow came later than expected, yet ended sooner with less accumulation than many of the masters of our universe predicted. Still, we got the deep chill, freezing the remnants so that where we failed to shovel turned into ice. The storm did not stop me from the sunday night ritual of chinese food, a place called Yummy on 48 the Street a block up from Broadway – which we frequented even during the year of COVID. That was early in the storm. But the panic had already set into the populas. On saturday, hundreds of people crowded the shopright, leaving long lines as they stocked up for the end of the world. Sundday, midday, the panic was worse as the first flakes struck, a bumper car ride might have reflected the kind of mania people displayed wheeling their catts down narrow ailses. But by evening, when I took my keep-warm bag with me, the streets were mostly emply of cars and pedestrians, and I strolled over the gradually covered sidewalks to the shop, and then back, feelin...

 

   Perhaps it was Paulie's last joke from beyond the grave I had planned to spend the day the library he directed while I waited for my kitten to get neutered   I'd even checked the library website to make certain of the hours then after dropping the kitten off I killed time revisiting the old library building and the island where Paulie had lived finally after going the wrong direction in search of the new library building I also briefly went to the old library building where Paulie had started his career and then took pictures The police sign above the downstairs door had faded since they had also moved the police headquarters to a new building elsewhere in town I also briefly paused near the bar where Hank Paulie and I had gotten drunk back in the 1970s well in search of a house where Rick lived on the lake and where Paulie would eventually move into well he was director and of course it would have the ominous name of 13 Willow Lane Although the amusement...

   I can't recall exactly the last time I came here before 2010 for sure since the library was still a library then this aside from our magical mystery tour last year when we paid this part of the planet a visit though Paulie with long gone by then Back the last time I came here, when Paulie was still alive, he was still director though he no longer lived in the house on the lake We came for Memorial Day at the firehouse in 2002 when he, John and Garrick played and then again two years later for the picnic outdoors with a full band -- that later played the gig at the grasshopper in cedar Grove before the band broke up again for the last time as it turned out This building, the old library,   when it's still served as the town's library, also served as a police station in a town that has since outgrown the old library and old police station, still small when Pauly moved to this neck of the woods in 1985 A tiny building that at the time with Police department on t...