When’s the last time you were swept off your feet? And don’t count that high school girl (or boy) on the subway whose button popped open.

Here’s what Bob Dylan said about meeting Suze Rotolo in 1961:

“Right from the start I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She was the most erotic thing I’d ever seen. She was fair skinned and golden haired, full-blood Italian. The air was suddenly filled with banana leaves. We started talking and my head started to spin. Cupid’s arrow had whistled past my ears before, but this time it hit me in the heart and the weight of it dragged me overboard… Meeting her was like stepping into the tales of 1001 Arabian Nights. She had a smile that could light up a street full of people and was extremely lively, had a kind of voluptuousness—a Rodin sculpture come to life.”

She’s the girl on his arm on the cover of The Freewheelin’ album. She became pregnant with his baby in 1963, but had an abortion. They broke up in ’64. The breakup is credited with inspiring several love songs, including Boots of Spanish Leather.

Well, if I had the stars from the darkest night
And the diamonds from the deepest ocean
I’d forsake them all for your sweet kiss
For that’s all I’m a-wishin’ to be ownin’

The breakup also led to his angry and bitter Ballad in Plain D. Twenty years later, when asked if he had any regrets about Ballad In Plain D, Dylan said: “Oh yeah, that one! I must have been a real schmuck to write that. Of all the songs I’ve written, maybe I could have left that alone.” Here’s how she looked when she was young.

Rotolo, an artist, married Enzo Bartoccioli, a film editor who worked for the UN, and they had a son, Luca, who’s a guitarist in NYC. She was only 67 when she died in NY in 2011.

It’s Dylan’s birthday today. He’s 82, kinahora. 

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Here’s a depressing comment by Jacqueline Donnelly on the puzzle today. (FYI, the clue at 51A was “Rapper with the 2010 hit ‘No Hands’” and the answer was WAKAFLOCKAFLAME. It ran across the whole grid.)

Sadly, at 81, I’m beginning to feel I have aged out of the NYT crosswords, dependent as they have become on words from a pop culture I have zero familiarity with or interest in. That might be OK or even instructive if the crosses could lead to solution. I have trusted my kids (three of whom are rock musicians) to keep me “kinda hip,” but now that they are all in their fifties, even they probably wouldn’t know stuff like WAKAFLOCKAFLAME. And PACMAN is a game I’ve heard of but never played. Maybe my kids did, though. But they don’t live here anymore.

Jeez Louise! Lighten up, will you? It’s just a crossword puzzle.

Gary Jugert posted this reply:

{Getting out soapbox.} Uh, you’re not supposed to know everything. It’s supposed to have a challenge. You’re supposed to fail sometimes. We’re supposed to be curious about words we’ve never seen and maybe go look them up and try to get smarter about the ever changing world around us. We ask young solvers to know Lon Chaney and Bela Lugosi, so isn’t it fair to ask us to know something about Pac-Man? And when we don’t, we can open up our good buddy Go-ogle and a robot will help us for free. We have an enormous encyclopedia set sitting on our digital shelves.

Sometimes, the crosses allow you to figure out an answer, but you don’t usually learn anything when you get the answer that way. It’s a normal occurrence for daily posters to say they’ve never seen a specific word, even though that word was in a puzzle last week or last month. They got it off crosses, they’ve seen it, but they learned nothing. I personally hate TV stars and Asian cooking ingredients in puzzles, but it’s not because I am aging out of the puzzle, it’s because Will Shortz hates me. Kidding of course. I need to learn that stuff, or go look it up. Many here would rather die than look up something, but that’s because they’re playing a weird game of chicken with the possibility they might be losing their minds. Be okay with not knowing once in awhile. There’s lots of beautiful things waiting for us to discover. {Descends from soapbox.}

BTW, here are Bela Lugosi and Lon Chaney. (Maybe not Chaney.)

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Remember Amanda Gorman, the young Black poet who impressed the nation at Biden’s inauguration? The poem of hers that she read was “The Hill We Climb.”

Well, not everybody was impressed. A mother of two in Florida’s Miami-Dade school system, Daily Salinas, complained about the poem’s being available to elementary school students in the library. Salinas wrongly listed its author as Oprah Winfrey, not Amanda Gorman, and claimed the function of the work is to “cause confusion and indoctrinate students.” Salinas is clearly what anyone with a working brain would call “an idiot.” So what did the school district do? It capitulated. The poem is no longer available to elementary school kids in the district. (They can see it in middle school.)

Here’s Gorman’s response:

“I’m gutted. Because of one parent’s complaint, my inaugural poem, The Hill We Climb, has been banned from an elementary school in Miami-Dade County, Florida.

She continued:

“Book bans aren’t new. But they have been on the rise–according to the ALA, 40% more books were challenged in 2022 compared to 2021. What’s more, often, all it takes to remove these works from our libraries and schools is a single objection. And let’s be clear: most of the forbidden works are by authors who have struggled for generations to get on bookshelves. The majority of these works are by queer and non-white voices.

“I wrote The Hill We Climb so that all young people could see themselves in a historical moment. Ever since, I’ve received countless letters and videos from children inspired to write their own poems. Robbing children of the chance to find their voices in literature is a violation of their right to free thought and free speech.”

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I like to think of the little coincidences the universe sends our way as little messages, — maybe signs that things will be okay. About 35 years ago, we were panicked about a little bump on Caity’s belly that the docs couldn’t explain. At the height of our worrying, I was riding home on a bus from the city, sitting up front, and the driver suddenly screeched to a halt for no apparent reason. The traffic coming towards us stopped suddenly too. The driver said “Look,” and what I saw was a Mommy Duck safely crossing a very busy Main Street in Chatham (NJ) with her little ducklings tootling behind her. I took it as a good sign. A few weeks later, a hot-shot surgeon in NY assured us Caity’s bump was harmless.

So today it’s worth noting that the clue in the puzzle at 47D is “Bit of hair,” and the answer is HANK. I don’t recall HANK ever popping up in the grid before, though he may have. In any event, I’m taking it as a sign that he’s doing okay on his journey. Is it crazy to think he’s reaching out in this way to give us a thumb’s-up? Of course it is. But we don’t mind a little crazy from time to time at Owl Chatter. Hi Buddy — safe travels.

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Quack! Quack!