Bob Dylan was Saturday music. Often we had chores to do; I remember shoveling out the fireplace on an April day, working on a poem in my head, with “Tangled Up in Blue” coming from the living room.
Things like that lay the groundwork for all the creative work you’re going to do later. You just don’t know it. You might try to plan it differently, if you knew; but there’s no way to predict what will be the triggers, what will lay down the pathways in your brain. You don’t even find out until much later, when you hear a song and you recognize something and it hands you the missing piece to a story.
This is part of my father’s legacy to me: a childhood of music, and embedded in it, a library of sensory details and emotional states.
