A time of troubles

Last night I watched television. It is something I have been trying not to do but there was a special on WGBH about the younger days of Bob Dylan. It awakened old feelings and new thoughts.
It was amazing how young he looked. I had forgotten that then he almost always had an impish grin on his face. The duet with him and Joan Baez both paradying Bob Dylan was especially refreshing.
Then the show got serious. So many of my generation remember the Sixties as a golden time. We forget that it was a time of racial violence, assasinations, parents and children alienated from each other, war, and drugs wreaking their untold havoc on so promising a beginning.
Then came the ultimate Dylan, a man who was a true wordsmith, singing the saddest lyric ever written. "How does it feel, to be on your own, with no direction home, a complete unknown?".
Then it hit me, "No direction home". Thomas Wolfe was right. He was blunt and cruel but right. I miss coming in out of the cold to a warm home with a hot meal on the table and people who were genuinely glad to see you, who smiled gently at your supposed troubles and worries, and reassured you that everything was going to be allright. It was allright for them because you were home safe for one more day. They loved you but they also knew you very well. They knew that a hot meal and a warm place to sleep, surrounded by people that cared about you, were more important than anything else and they also knew that you didn't know that and were reaching out to the world for justification and validation. It isn't out there and never was. Working class heroes sleep much better than Rock stars. Rock stars bathe in the glory of a concert and then stay up till dawn in the long denoument of their day. Working class heroes endure their day and then go home and bathe in the paradise that is the busom of their family, if they are wise.
Dylan doesn't seem to smile much anymore. Perhaps he has Hibbing on his mind. Are there tamborines there? You can spend a lot of days coming in from the cold there.