The Occasional Pleasant Surprise

Bob Dylan's "Ballad of Hollis Brown" is the most disturbing set of simple words that I have ever heard set to music. When I first heard a recording of this song about the slaughter of a Dakota farm family the hair stood up on my arms--Mike Seeger's banjo, Dylan's unique voice, and "seven people dead on a South Dakota Farm." A horror movie, a reality show, and a searing indictment of our society as we turn once again to the most wicked of social sins--that of not being being willing to be our brother's keeper--all in seven or eight haunting verses.

I have never done the song on stage and I have never even taught it to a kid. To my great embarrassment, I have never been able to do the song correctly. Every time I did it it was a failure that sounded entirely too much like the ancient mountain murder song, "Pretty Polly."

I read a short article about this song recently that explained that Dylan put his words to the tune of an ancient mountain murder song, "Pretty Polly." In short, I did not have it wrong all along.

Now such little things are meaningless to the most people and I have never met anyone, (including my wife), that understands why rare, pleasant surprises like this are so important to my emotional well being. They give hope that failures might not be as bad as they seem. Or even better that failures are not failures at all. That realization, plus having a pot of coffee waiting for you, makes getting up each morning a lot easier.

Such things suggest that, regardless of two failed attempts to do so, the next time I try to ride 100 miles in one day I might just make it.