by Dr. Jeffrey Lant
 
Author's program note.
 
It is exactly 463 miles from Maywood, Illinois where I was born on February 16, 1947, to Duluth, Minnesota, where Bob Dylan was born May 24, 1941. In these few facts, there is a multiplicity of meaning... for I, a deep-rooted Midwestern boy myself, take my hat off to you Shabtai Zisl ben Avraham, aka Robert Allen Zimmerman, and then, at various times and various places, Elston Gunnn, Blind Boy Grunt, Bob Landy, Robert Milkwood Thomas, Tedham Porterhouse, Lucky Wilbury, Boo Wilbury, Jack Frost, and Sergei Petrov.
 
Our lives have crossed often, as I will show you here. But an understanding between Bob Dylan and Jeffrey Lant is the work of a lifetime, and your true importance is that through sentiments which often seem to drive us apart, came your rendition of the great truths which have kept and must keep us together.
 
"Get that Jew out of my kitchen".
 
It is hard to see amidst so many travels the small tight-knit Jewish community he was born into. Neither Minnesota nor Illinois, its very near neighbor, were particulary welcoming to Jews, especially ones which in Dylan's family came from the Eastern European countries of Ukraine and Lithuania, places they particulary despised, avoided, and condemned.
 
I had a vision... I had a shocking vision into what the "real" Midwestern Americans thought about Jews. When I brought home from school the brightest boy (next to me of course) in my class, he was a New Yorker, he looked "ethnic", and was sharp as a tack.
 
I remember as if it were yesterday, what my grandmother said when I brought him home to the house through the kitchen entrance, used only by family and friends. I introduced him... not a word was said about Judaism until completely without warning, she shrieked "Get him out of my kitchen! Get him out now!"
 
I've never told this story before, but now is the time to do so, since it demonstrates how even amongst the "best families" anti-semitism was rife, if not voiced. I know, and I was apalled.
 
I, as the son of a leading family, was promptly forgiven for my picadillo. As for my grandmother, she never mentioned it again, in any way, shape, or form. Bob Dylan faced his situation in a vastly different way than I did with mine. For him, there were no swimming parties, no lazy afternoons at the club house, no finding golf balls hit by errant duffers. All this came to me as if by right, for so we regarded it, by right.
 
For Dylan, things were different. And where I watched the Lennon Sisters, where Lawrence Welk directed his lily white Champagne Music Makers, and had two-toned shoes just like Pat Boone, and a cap like Davey Crockett wore, Bob Dylan fled his boyhood home in Hibbing to the bigger world of the University of Minnesota, where he enrolled in 1959, and where I taught as a lecturer many years later.
 
I stayed in school, never left, attended 12 universities, and got four degrees, including a Ph.D. from Harvard. I chose the comfortable route. Dylan, by contrast, had heebie jeebies, ants in his pants. There was always something new with him... that never changed.
 
Rock'n'roll was here to stay, but not for Dylan.
 
Studying was never his objective... American folk music was. But only for a short time, providing yet another escape hatch from dead end rock'n'roll.
 
"The thing about rock'n'roll is that for me anyway it wasn't enough... There were great catch-phrases and driving pulse rhythms... but the songs weren't serious or didn't reflect life in a realistic way. I knew that when I got into folk music, it was more of a serious type of thing. The songs are filled with more despair, more sadness, more triumph, more faith in the supernatural, much deeper feelings."
 
With strongly held sentiments like these, and just a few bucks in his pocket, Bob Dylan did what every aspiring, counter cultural artist did: fled to New York... the Big Apple even then; de rigeur if your politics were Left, you had a world of drugs to sample, and your sexuality was promiscuous, but ardent.
 
Here, young Bob Dylan and I diverged again. I went to Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa (Harvard only came later). My agenda included "God Bless America" and staying straight and squeaky clean in a place where one may safely send one's children, and where the "real world" scarcely made an appearance at any time. As for sex... that wasn't even invented until 1968, remember?
 
It was about this time, I can date it almost to the minute, when Bob Dylan's America and mine broke apart. The chasm between us was so deep, it still exists today, and worse than it ever was. He was on his track, I was on mine.
 
He, from February 1961, played at clubs around Greenwich Village. He was a magpie, picking up a song there, a lyric here, a soused composer somewhere else, and a singer whose golden voice failed to obscure the fact she was a heroin addict, at $25 a day. She would sit on his lap, and look in deeply at what she could only see. Bob Dylan saw this, as he saw everything. For without even knowing the word, he was a humanitarian... and therfore a friend to all, whatever they thought of him. And what they thought was often unnecessarily hostile, mean spirited, and dismissive.
 
In my case, because I came from West Los Angeles, I was appointed by the administration as the master of interracial relations, and the cataclysms which, like East Los Angeles (called Watts), frightened the bejesus out of America, as it watched black marauders destroy the basis of their lives, and what they could do to yours if they weren't stopped.
 
By this time, Robert Dylan (he had legally changed his name again in 1962), was becoming savvy about the record business, but not savvy enough. In 1968, the BBC took a film recording of "Madhouse on Castle Street", starring Dylan, and gratuitously destroyed it. There is no copy extant today, because those bozos thought he was a has been.
 
My path and Dylan's didn't cross much anymore after he changed his musical direction as easily as he shed and gained a new name. He was looking for something, but what was it? Perhaps he didn't even know.
 
Then one day I got myself trapped in a booth at a local restaurant here in Cambridge. I had just recently been diagnosed with having Parkinson's Disease, and I acted like no one in the world ever had a disease before and certainly pointed fingers and laughed at mine. It was pathetic, self-pitying, a dead end. Then, I remembered a song I had used as background music for a poetry reading once upon a time. It was Bob Dylan's version of "Forever Young", published in 1974.
 
I had spent my whole life doing what was expected, doing it when expected, doing it with as little ruckus as possible, and above all, doing it oneself, becoming a burden to no one. How I could get out of my coat, wedging me as it did in the booth, so that I could go neither forward or back, I did not know. But then, these lines, rose as if by magic from my roiling brain:
 
"May you always do for others
And let others do for you"
 
There was Bob Dylan, masquerading as the voice of God, and doing a damn good job of it, too. I was ready to change my modus operandi of a lifetime. I was ready to let people help me for a change, and it was Bob Dylan right there before me who made me willing to have it happen. He was the one who pointed to the insidious refrain...
 
"May God bless and keep you always
May your wishes all come true
May you always do for others
And let others do for you"
 
And so far, I've been doing pretty well listening to his advice.
 
Envoi
 
On December 10, 2016, on a splendid evening soon to come in another memorable event in the Swedish dynasty, they will have front row seats as the Swedish Academy bestows its highest honor, the Nobel Laureate for Literature.
 
Bob, if I may advise you in a small sartorial matter, do not appear in white tie with tails. It is not you. Come instead as the man who has shown the world not just about various kinds and types of music, but about how music can beautify and cleanse a world so deeply disunited.
 
And, remember when King Carl XVI Gustaf (b. 1946) hands you your glittering prizes, you will have no greater admirer than I, for you deserve the thanks of the world for having a full heart, and knowing what to do with it.
 
As for His Majesty and his beautiful commoner Queen, Silvia Sommerlath (b. 1943), you can be sure they had a helpful hand in this election, after all, they are the same age we all are, and love your music in all its varieties.
 
Sing them, "The Times They Are a-Changin'" (1964), for they certainly are. Skol!
 
Here's the musical link:
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7qQ6_RV4VQ
 
About the author:
 
Now 70, a bonafide septuagenarian, Harvard educated Dr. Lant looks upon his much favored life with happiness and joyful acclimation. Author of nearly 60 books and well over 1,000 articles, this is a man who knows how to tell a story and tell it well. To see his complete oeuvre, go to www.drjeffreylant.com.

by Dr. Jeffrey Lant
Author's program note. Rarely if ever have I seen my fellow countrymen so riled up... irritable, angry, rude epithets at the ready, bad behaviors endemic. What's going on? Try these for openers...
A rotten economic situation that just won't get better... and you're afraid it never will. And so you worry (for the umpteenth time) about just how secure your job is. Is there some guy in Mumbai who'll be glad to do it at half what you get? You've raised the subject with your boss... but his answer was not reassuring and now he won't look you in the eye.
A president whose leadership style gives us no leadership... and nary a Republican presidential candidate who doesn't cause multitudes to hold their noses, gagging, and wonder why our mind boggling lengthy and expensive campaign produces candidates we can't stand or respect, much less admire.
Sickening scandals like the one still unfolding at Penn State, scandals that make us wake up in the middle of the night shouting, "What the...... is going on around here?". Sometimes we wonder, and not just once either, whether anyone is honest, decent, and unarmed anymore... or whether it's only suckers (you being one) who play by the rules.
Every day we pick up the newspaper and read about another murder in the neighborhood, our neighborhood. Are our neighbors only "good" because we don't know their secret lives and the home truths that haven't yet been disclosed?
We read about some drug bust at the school down the street... and are horrified to see the police photo and recognize our kid's favorite teacher. We run upstairs and check the closet and dresser drawer to see if this has touched us even closer. You're fortunate today... nothing out of order... but the word "yet" comes immediately to mind... since these days you expect something bad to happen any time now and aren't particularly surprised when it does.
We read about... and are as concerned as our busy lives will allow... another species declared extinct... another Web sex scandal... another political official with a skill for theft and plausible denial. You feel sure he'll get off easy when his time in court comes up. Is that what the bandage over the eyes of the statue of Justice is supposed to mean?
You're concerned about America's unending wars in countries whose names you cannot pronounce, much less find on a map, but which you are paying for. You've got a friend whose young cousin, proud and handsome in his Marine Corps uniform, was killed by a sniper... a boy just 20 years old.
The thought haunts you all day... You want to believe such early death helps the country in question, America, the world... but you don't. You see that boy's eyes and feel them boring into you, asking one question over and over -- "Why?"... and you just can't give a good answer. You feel increasingly helpless as the barrage of bad news, miseries, muddles, mayhem just won't quit. You want time off from it all... but these realities, details delivered to us faster than ever compliments of the Web, constitute the unceasing rhythm of our lives.
And this is only the tip of the iceberg.
We wonder if, after a lifetime of contributing, Social Security will be there when we need it... and whether Medicare will provide the level of service we'll need. A gal from our office had that acute breathing problem and was put on a respirator; the hospital didn't want to pay for it... and the matter now resides in their legal department. We want care... we get lawyers. It makes us very, very nervous.... and sad.
We wonder how some shady Greek and Italian politicians can have so much influence on our lives so far away. What kind of magic powers have they got that force us (however superficially) to pay attention to what they're doing... and doing... and doing, all of which threatens the stability and satisfaction of our lives? You want to say it's "unfair"... but you know no one cares what you think about the matter... and you don't want people to think you're a wimp. So you stay quiet and unsatisfied... it's just the way things are. And so the days pass...
... until the calendar tells you it's Thanksgiving, the official day, sanctioned by custom and dictated by law, you get together with family and friends to eat too much and give thanks for your ability to do so. But this year, you just don't feel like it, though you wouldn't mind a piece or two of pumpkin pie. What's a body to do?
I'll share something that works for me... don't waste your time enumerating all the good things you've got, especially when you realize most of them are flawed and superficial. Instead, focus on the myriad of problems, inconveniences, woeful situations and debilitating malevolence you don't have... bullets you have dodged for another year. This will make you feel really thankful about things that really matter. Here's how it works...
Preparation and The List
This year I attend my 64th Thanksgiving, so I consider myself a man with some experience in the matter. Put this experience to work by putting aside the usual falderals... don't just hold hands and ask little Janie to say the blessing. Janie is probably too young to have much insight into the event... and will be unable to perform her helping role to perfection. Thus the end result will be unutterably banal, like all the years before.
Instead, seize this bull by the horns and brainstorm a long list of things you are thankful you don't have to do, think about, or consider in any way. Be brutally frank.
Item: your boss got fired because of that restroom peccadillo, and you never have to see him again. That was huge!
Item: your estranged cousin Herbie, bete noir of many years, has gone missing, no one knows where. If he never returns, that would be too soon.
Item: Your darling daughter didn't marry the wild idealist who always played the zither and never bathed. Delicious.
Item: your neighbor's noisome pooch Mickey, gifted with a piecing yelp and high decibel duration, ran away in pursuit of amorous freedom. He will of course be missed by someone... but not by you.
Keep going! Don't stint! As you get into the task, you see that the things you don't have, that you were afraid you would have and forever are the very things you always needed to make this holiday sing.
Now type your list. You will never remember them all and since each adds its mite to the happy event, do not rely on memory. Practice, too, reciting them. Read slowly.... with deliberate cadence and gravitas in your voice.
Having recited this list you will feel, perhaps for the first time in months, truly happy for you have discovered for yourself and shown the world the ample bounty of happiness at your fingertips, Thanksgiving now and forever your favorite holiday.
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About the Author
Harvard-educated Dr. Jeffrey Lant is known worldwide. He started in the media business when he was 5 years old, a Kindergartner in Downers Grove, Illinois, publishing his first newspaper article. Since then Dr. Lant has earned four university degrees, including the PhD from Harvard. He has taught at over 40 colleges and universities and is quite possibly the first to offer satellite courses. He has written over 50 books, thousands of articles and been a welcome guest on hundreds of radio and television programs. He has founded several successful corporations and businesses including his latest at …drjeffreylant.com
 
His memoirs “A Connoisseur’s Journey” has garnered nine literary prizes that ensure its classic status. Its subtitle is “Being the artful memoirs of a man of wit, discernment, pluck, and joy.” A good read by this man of so many letters. Such a man can offer you thousands of insights into the business of becoming a success. Be sure to sign up now for his Future Guaranteed Millionaires Club at www.drjeffreylant.com
 
More can be found on Dr. Lant on his author page at: http://www.amazon.com/author/jeffreylant/