Tangled up in Blues, Installment I

Originally posted (4/5/07) at Age of Reason

Off topic (any excuse to postpone actual writing) but the title of this thread is from the House of Blues album "Tangled up in Blues - The Songs of Bob Dylan (This Ain't No Tribute Album)" -- with covers of Dylan songs by blues artists. I heartily recommend it to anyone who likes Dylan and/or the blues. Link to Amazon

By the way, the same label does a great album of Rolling Stones Songs titled "Paint it Blue - the Songs of the Rolling Stones" that I also recommend.

Back on topic. This is the first installment of what I intend to be a series of vignettes about some of the women who have played important roles in my life.

This one is possibly the most complex one of all. And one which, in spite of a definite mutual physical attraction, never materialized into a romantic relationship. Actually, come to think of it, this is a common theme here. Maybe someday, I will analyse why that has been the case.

I first met Margaret in 1968, at the beginning of my freshman year at the conservative Christian college we both attended. Physically, she was strikingly plain -- an impression exaggerated by her apparently complete lack of personal vanity and disregard for razors, makeup and contemporary fashion. In an environment where I also felt like a complete outsider, that may well be what first attracted my attention.

It turns out that both of us were involved in several Quaker-led political and social movements and both of us considered ourselves to be Quakers. We also shared an English Lit class and a love for the music of Joan Baez.

Margaret was much more sophisticated and worldly than I. Her parents had immigrated to Canada from Germany following WWII, and she spoke fluent German and French. She had spent the previous summer studying in Paris and had been caught up in some of the student uprisings there. Both her political and literary orientations were much more radical than mine.

We became quite close, but while I was clearly interested in a romantic relationship, she just as clearly was resisting that. But we did spend many hours debating politics, philosophy and poetry.

One of her political obsessions was anti-Semitism. This was strange to me, because in the community in which I was raised, I had never really encountered any traces of that -- lots of racism, but nothing directed toward Jews. It was not until much later that I understood the roots of her obsession. Her parents had been members of the Nazi party in Germany, and the reason they were in Canada was that they were not permitted to immigrate to the US.

I dropped out of school to pursue my anti-war and civil rights causes and lost touch with her for some time. But we reconnected several times over the next 2-3 years. The next time was when she dropped by on her way from Greenwich Village to Vancouver. She wanted me to join her, but at that time, I was romantically involved with another girl.

About a year later, I was about to be drafted and was debating going to jail or to Canada, so decided to check out the scene there. I drove up to Vancouver, hoping to hook up with her there, but she had moved on. I spent a few days there, and learned that she had returned to her parents home in the Okanagan Valley. I reached her father by telephone and he invited me to spend some time there.

I spent about a month helping him with his orchard, repairing outbuildings, picking fruit etc, but things with Margaret just didn't click like I had hoped. It was clear to me that she did not want any relationship at that time, and that she would soon be moving on -- physically and emotionally. I returned to the US, and while I got a couple of letters from her, I never saw her again.

Months later, I learned from her sister that she had been in the Bay Area where she was involved with the Panthers and the Weather Underground, and had then returned to Europe where she joined the radicals and was reportedly being sought by German police for suspicion of having participated in attacks by the Baader-Meinhof Gang.

Somehow, it seems as we could never be the same place at the same time. In retrospect, I think she sensed that I was too emotionally demanding -- that a romantic relationship would have been smothering for her -- that she would have been happy to just fuck me, but sensed that I needed more than that.

From a political perspective, she and her friends were responsible for radicalizing my views, and ultimately, when I saw the extent to which they were willing to go, for my subsequent disillusion with radical leftist politics.