Chronicles - Bob Dylan [10]
In 1951 I was going to grade school. One of the things we were trained to do was to hide and take cover under our desks when the air-raid sirens blew because the Russians could attack us with bombs. We were also told that the Russians could be parachuting from planes over our town at any time. These were the same Russians that my uncles had fought alongside only a few years earlier. Now they had become monsters who were coming to slit our throats and incinerate us. It seemed peculiar. Living under a cloud of fear like this robs a child of his spirit. It’s one thing to be afraid when someone’s holding a shotgun on you, but it’s another thing to be afraid of something that’s just not quite real. There were a lot of folks around who took this threat seriously, though, and it rubbed off on you. It was easy to become a victim of their strange fantasy. I had the same teachers in school that my mother did. They were young in her time and elderly in mine. In American history class, we were taught that commies couldn’t destroy America with guns or bombs alone, that they would have to destroy the Constitution — the document that this country was founded upon. It didn’t make any difference, though. When the drill sirens went off, you had to lay under your desk facedown, not a muscle quivering and not make any noise. As if this could save you from the bombs dropping. The threat of annihilation was a scary thing. We didn’t know what we did to anybody to make them so mad. The Reds were everywhere, we were told, and out for blood-lust. Where were my uncles, the defenders of the country? They were busy making a living, working, getting what they could and making it stretch. How could they know what was going on in the schools, what kind of fear was being roused?
All that was over now. I was in New York City, communists or no communists. There were probably plenty around. Plenty of fascists, too. Plenty of would-be left-wing dictators and right-wing dictators. Radicals of all stripes. It was said that World War II spelled the end of the Age of Enlightenment, but I wouldn’t have known it. I was still in it. Somehow I could still remember and feel the light of something about it. I’d read that stuff. Voltaire, Rousseau, John Locke, Montesquieu, Martin Luther — visionaries, revolutionaries…it was like I knew those guys, like they’d been living in my backyard.
I walked across the floor over to the cream colored drapes, pulled up the venetian blinds, seeing into the snowy streets. The furniture in the place was nice, some of it even hand built. That was nice, too — inlaid industrial dresser cabinets with highly stylized carvings with florid latches — floor-to-ceiling ornamental bookcases, a long narrow rectangular table with metal elements with geometrics that seemed to follow some unguided rule — one amusing piece, an organically shaped console table resembled a big toe. There were electric plates ingeniously placed in closet shelves. The small kitchen was like a forest. Kitchen herb boxes stuffed with pennyroyal, woodruff, lilac leaves, other things. Chloe, a Southern girl with Northern blood, was skilled in the use of bathroom clotheslines and sometimes I’d find one of my shirts hanging in there. I usually came in before dawn and slid onto the sofa, which came out into a folding bed in the high portico living room. I often fell asleep to the sounds of the night train rumbling and grumbling through Jersey, the iron horse with steam for blood.
I’d seen and heard trains from my earliest childhood days and the sight and sound of them always made me feel secure. The big boxcars, the iron ore cars, freight cars, passenger trains, Pullman cars. There was no place you could go in my hometown without at least some part of the day having to stop at intersections and wait for the long trains to pass. Tracks crossed the rural roads and ran alongside them as well.