“All I can do is be me, whoever that is.” ~Bob Dylan
My son Joel, was one of those people with very strong opinions. It really didn’t matter to him whether or not he knew what he was talking about. At least it didn’t when he was talking to me. I’m not certain if he displayed this endearing personality trait with anyone else. As I look back, I think he was convinced that I wasn’t very intelligent. At that time, I don’t think I was. Joel’s behavior had become so of out control, Steve and I had to make the excruciatingly difficult decision to send him away to an Academic Institute for Troubled Teens in a very small and remote village in Montana. I had been so overwhelmed, over medicated so and terrified of Joel, I was somewhere in the middle of a complete nervous breakdown. It’s a bit difficult to be intelligent in circumstances such as those.
After Joel left for Montana, I started becoming fascinated with Bob Dylan.
Not just his music and of course his amazing lyrics, but also with him as a person. I began listening to his music probably every day. And I would think about the meaning of his songs. When Joel was still at home before his year away, he was into identifying with a current teen fad. These kids called themselves “EMOs.” The EMO movement was similar to the earlier fad of “Goths.” The strange EMO lifestyle began with a certain genre of music and evolved downward from there. Joel referred to it as this music as “heavy metal.” But to me, it was something way worse than that. This music was very spiritually dark, sexually explicit and death obsessed. Drug abuse, suicide, walking zombies, twisted heads and the like were common themes in the lyrics. That is, if one could make out these lyrics, sung in a strange combination of screaming and growling.
Joel chose to come home — his first home visit from The Institute, to celebrate his 18th birthday together with his twin sister, Heather. Their shared birthday is October 1st. His visit would be for a week. While he was home, he was expected to remain within the boundaries of “the program” at The Institute. This meant he was not to see any of his former friends, or listen to any unapproved music. That, of course would exclude any of his horrid favorites. Besides, I had boxed up his music and removed it from our house. It was outside in our garden shed along with his other objectionable possessions. It was my desire for him to be the one to go through his former belongings, as he was now examining his former life, and make his own choice to throw away the destructive junk he had surrounded himself with and let permeate his mind and his spirit.
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But returning to the importance of Bob Dylan. One morning during Joel’s visit, I was in the kitchen cooking and listening to Bob Dylan, yet again. Joel walked into the kitchen and immediately said (in his very loud voice), “Oh my God Mom. Who is that? Turn it off. That guy’s horrible. His voice sucks!” I laughed and said, “That’s Bob Dylan. He’s a poet, not a musician. You gotta listen to the words.” Joel retorted, “That guy’s singing is so rank, I can’t even understand the words.” As he started to walk off, I said, “Joel, there’s one song on this CD that I listen to a lot. It’s called ‘Forever Young’. Every time I listen to it, I think about you. I’ll write out the lyrics for you.”
And with that, he was out the door.
That night, I sat in my studio at my art table, thinking about the lyrics of that song and how meaningful they had become to me. I had been struggling through each day my son had been away from me. It had been a tortured 9 months. I wanted him to grasp even a fraction of how well I understood him. How many hopes and dreams I had for him since he was a little boy.
My little boy…
I wanted him to know, that in spite of his limitations, I believed in him. And I would never stop believing in him. No matter what. With these thoughts filling my heart, I reached for a paintbrush and I began to paint. When I put down my brush, the result was the best I could do to tell Joel, using my art and Bob Dylan’s amazing poetry, how very much I loved him.
The next morning, I knocked on Joel’s bedroom door. He swung open the door and immediately his eyes fixed upon the small piece of watercolor paper in my hand. I told him these were the lyrics we had talked about. “Do you want me to read them to you?” I asked. He replied, “No Mom, I’ll read them.” He sat down on the edge of his bed and I sat next to him. I watched his face as he read, and to my surprise, his eyes were filling with tears. By the time he finished reading, he was wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. I broke the silence, not wanting him to feel embarrassed. I asked what he thought. He replied, “I get it now, Mom. You’re right. This is really good.” He started to hand the little painting back to me. I said, “That is yours, Joel. You hold onto it.”
And from that day on, Bob Dylan’s “Forever Young” has been Joel’s song.
——
Joel Stephen Woodworth
October 1, 1992 ~ February 5, 2011
Forever Young
