Dossier, Volume 14 #1

The Right Question at Exactly the Right Time

It was the Monday night of the Labour Day weekend and I had just returned to Toronto after being away all summer. Now I was crossing Mount Pleasant Road, coming back from Murray's pool hall with my two best friends. For years we had been the inseparable triumvirate and now we were locked in a silence we had never known and could not understand. I didn't know who they were, these slouching, now softly whiskered boyhood chums, and worse, I had no idea who I was to them. And as we walked this new awkward silence together, on that last day of summer, it seemed that everything was different, that everything had changed. I realized I was going back to a house that had stopped being my home. I was sick at heart.

Stepping onto the curb I saw an older teenager standing under a street lamp. I noticed his long hair, faded jeans and boots with heels, and I suddenly recognized him. He had once been a friend of my sister's, a folksinger who had worn black turtlenecks and sung Kingston Trio hits sitting on the new blue broadloom in our den as my parents smiled their approval. But now he looked so different: the long hair, the boots, the small, knowing grin and slight nod of the head that came in silent response to my "hello." I passed by, and a moment later I heard it. From the transistor radio on the sidewalk beside him came a sudden single shot from a snare drum, followed immediately by an organ, and then the music flowed down the street towards me.

My companions and I walked on, heads down, listening. I stopped. I thought I had heard the strange, unfamiliar voice in the song singing something about the Rolling Stones, so I turned and walked back into the street light. The older teenager's grin had grown into a wide smile. He looked over at me, pointed to the radio on the sidewalk and said a single word. "Dylan!"

I stood listening and then, moving with an authority I didn't know I possessed, I picked up the radio and put it inside the open Globe and Mail box on the corner. I had learned as a paper boy that it made sound louder and fuller, and I knelt down in front of the box to listen. My mentor knelt beside me, then without a word leaned forward and put his head right inside the box. I followed his example and put my head inside next to his. The rays of the street light slanted in from behind us, turning the inside of the box golden and beautiful, and he reached in his hand, turned up the volume of the radio and said to me: "Listen. Just listen to this." And the voice sang out:

You used to be so amused
At Napoleon in rags and the language that he used.
Go to him now, he calls you, you can't refuse.
When you ain't got nothin', you got nothin' to lose.
You're invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal.

And then that question! That question that was better than a thousand answers. That question no one had really asked me for such a long, long time. The right question at exactly the right time.

And I knew somehow that I had changed. It could not have been otherwise. It was the last night of summer in 1966 and I had just turned sixteen.

"Like a Rolling Stone" is still one of Robert Morgan's favourite Bob Dylan tunes. He has taken performances of this and other Dylan songs from his bedroom in his parents' house to the main stage of the St. Lawrence Centre in Toronto as part of his show "The Heart of Mine Tour."