Soon, one of the many kind and compassionate medical assistants who work in this clinic called my name and accompanied me to an examination room where she asked questions, listened to the story of my lingering cold, weighed me and then took my temperature and blood pressure. While she was entering information into a laptop on the counter, I suddenly became aware of the words "the lost horse" on the narrow spine of a book that was mixed in with a stack of magazines next to where I was sitting. Reaching up, I fished for the book and found it to be what I had guessed it might be -- a children's book:
What I hadn't counted on was that it was by Ed Young, a children's book writer I am familiar with for his book titled Voices of the Heart:
The medical assistant, having completed her duties, let me know that the nurse practitioner would be by shortly. She left the room, closing the door.
Already familiar with the Chinese folk tale which begins with the loss of a horse, I quickly read the story (take a look inside the book for a glimpse of the story, if you'd like) which does not contain the traditional Chinese moral that a loss may turn out to be a gain and a gain may turn out to be a loss. Instead, it shows a young man and his father continuing to be open and conscious of the changing nature of life.
A few minutes later, the nurse practitioner knocked on the door and came in to ask more questions and examine me. To my great relief, she didn't automatically prescribe antibiotics, and she said that chances were pretty good that my cold would go away on its own.
On my way home I stopped at the Community Food Co-op to buy some food and continued on home to take a look at Vania Heymann's video "Like a Rolling Stone" which I hadn't been able to access earlier that morning because of internet slowness. As with some of my many experiences with Bob Dylan's creative offerings over the years, my first impression was bewilderment. I felt annoyed and couldn't roll along with it at all, but then there was that decisive moment of shifting consciousness where I suddenly remembered "TV Talkin' Song," followed up on that thought, and then returned to play with the interactive video with its many "channels." My favorite channel so far is the one with rapper Danny Brown. I'd never heard of him before. Because I don't watch TV, I don't have a clue as to the identities of most of the people who lip-sync "Like A Rolling Stone." It turns out that channels will continue to be added, and it appears that a channel was added not long before the video was released. It contained recent devastating world news items in a surreal and unsettling way.
On the other hand, although I don't watch TV, I'm sitting in front of a computer screen for much longer periods of time than I ever sat in front of a television and for years I was paid to sit in front of a computer screen for a good part of my day. Can I really say that I am not attached to something even more compelling than TV ever was? Who am I fooling?
While playing with the channels on the video, a memory came to me from the early 1970s. I can recall walking from the outdoors into someone's living room and hearing Bob Dylan's voice coming from a record player and completely filling the smoke-filled air. There was a TV turned on for all to see, but the sound was turned off. Bob Dylan's music was the soundtrack for whatever was on TV, some of it inane, some of it devastating.
This morning I came across these anonymous words:
"You never let me forget that this is a life-or-death situation, but paradoxically, you showed me how to laugh and have fun."
Just now I remembered another lost horse story. Odd how creativity and illness are intertwined for me.
Time heals, after all -- although the clock that marks that kind of time has no hands.
(Suze Rotolo, from A Freewheelin' Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties)
