When the kid got off the phone with his agent, he was an old man. Whole life, he’d been waiting to get discovered. Only discovery? Nobody was looking for him.
Took a long, long, long time to figure that out. I always figure things out, he’d heard a pathetic blowhard blurt. The key really is timing.
The old man had actually been told while working for a top shoe company based in Beaverton, “Great idea. Why didn’t you have it sooner?”
There was this mythic notion, quite aptly described by Leonard Cohen. And reported in The New Yorker: “He always imagined himself as a writer, ‘raincoated, battered hat pulled low above intense eyes, a history of injustice in his heart, a face too noble for revenge, walking the night along some wet boulevard, followed by the sympathy of countless audiences . . . loved by two or three beautiful women who could never have him.’
That’s the mythic notion and one the old man had bought into, oh, about the early Sixties. He dreamed of being a literary celebrity.
Here all this time, he thought he wanted to be a writer. The old man wished that had been true long ago.
Writers write.
Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Bob Dylan. To be honest, the old man did not see that coming.
So, there’s still hope.
The first one now will later be last.
All I can say is, I am glad my mother didn’t live to see this day. I was the first kid in town with Dylan’s first album. Which I played non-stop for days until Norma pleaded from the hallway: “Jack, honey, I’m begging you. My ears are about to bleed.”