The ten cent rule

When I was a kid, my dad had a standard question when he handed out my 10 cent allowance. ‘Are you going to spend it or save it?’ he asked.

If I said, ‘spend it,’ that was that. But ‘save it’ produced another dime from his pocket. I used to think my depression-era parents had ruined me for life with thrift. But today I’m grateful for the capacity to relish life in slow motion.

I don’t know how his Hibbing folks approached fiscal education, but ‘madman-jester’ Dylan’s ‘hilarious love of the wisdom and idiocy of words' (Gabriel Goodchild in Robert Shelton’s ‘No Direction Home’), in a canon vast and deep, let his pen wildly savor experience.

Dylan’s ebullient wordage pulls emotion and meaning from a culture where words are a dime a dozen. I think about this in a metro hospital waiting room, TV set to the winter boot parade, a new survey of pop celebrities and a Chase Bank app for mobile deposits. Talky words chase out rare thoughts; show hosts twitch their mega-switches at our helpless minds.

The other occupant of the room has his nose in a paperback as I turn off the babbling box. New arrivals consist of a little girl reading the funnies and a mom with her morning coffee. The receptionist ventures from her desk to readjust the strangely quiet noise scene but agrees to leave it be when I lobby for the peace. A small man of carved cheeks sits down across from me, two tired eyed women at his arm. They discuss the prospects of the morning in Chinese. Now we hear the little girl’s sneakers pad the carpeted hallway through a squeaky door between her mama and the warm tones of a cotton clad nurse. The stillness sounds like freedom.

Dylan’s early Village expertise juxtaposed him to folk shows, poet rants and boozy giggle fits. He spun records and read volumes filled with worlds of sound. He fed the syllables erupting in his mind with morsels of observation, void of TV gibber jabber.

Do mad potions flood the streets of New York while our parochial hinterlands stand desolate and dire? What if Dylan had stayed in Hibbing or got as far as Cleveland and retired? The ten cent rule applies. For every dime’s worth of real time humanity, you can either savor it gladly or choke on the smoke screen of easy distraction.

It doesn’t take a madman-jester to make that call.

Original photo Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license, adapted by Susan Weber