2:30 AM, MONDAY MORNING, AUGUST 18, 2008:

I do not know who Nettie Moore really is. All I know is that whoever she is, she means a whole lot to Bob Dylan, and his heart must be aching he misses her so much. When I listen to "Nettie Moore," I miss her for him, and I wish she were still in his life.

I could stop there, because when I hear Bob Dylan sing this song I hear pain in his voice. I feel for him even though I have no idea what the specifics are. Specifics do not matter.

It is not the same, but it is a little like when they show someone on the news who just had their entire home blown away by a tornado, and maybe their elderly mother did not survive it. My throat gets tight because I feel like crying for that person. I don't need to know anything more. I don't need specifics. It just happens. But I hate those news people who put the camera on someone's grief.

"Nettie Moore" affects me in that way, even if I don't focus on what the different verses say. This song triggers empathy for Bob Dylan's loss and grief even though I haven't a clue what it really means to Bob Dylan.

But this song is doing so much more, and I think, subconsciously I have avoided letting it all the way into me because I fear what it will make me face, and I don't know those specifics either. Those specifics are locked up tight. But I promised "Paul in London" that I would look.

12:45 AM, THURSDAY MORNING, AUGUST 21:

I feel the tired busy-ness going on as usual, the struggle, some laughter, more struggle, and I go on as if all there is for me to face and experience is all that I am facing and experiencing.

But while this is going on there is the downward pull on my heart of a deep sadness, grief, and pain that won't let go. Yet on and on I go, living my life, but life just isn't the same place without the one you grieve for, without the way it was.

That is this song, "Nettie Moore." The verses seem light, the beat almost bouncy, like the joys and struggles and roller coaster rides I'm on as I go through day to day, week to week, month to month, up and down, up and down. But then the refrain, "Oh I miss you Nettie Moore," is the aching pull downward on my heart.

The contrast between the up and down of life moving me forward and this downward pull makes the pain and sorrow feel worse, as if I'm never really allowed to finish my sorrow. Knowing one never really finishes grief doesn't negate my need to be with it, or the pain of being continually distracted from it.

When I hear, "Oh I miss you Nettie Moore," the pain in Bob Dylan's voice, and the pain in the melody of this refrain causes my own pain to pull my heart down and I just want to cry, but then the melody changes, like the moments in my life, and I can't quite cry. I never get to cry. I feel trapped by this, and my heart feels so heavy I can't stand it.

1:15 AM, FRIDAY MORNING, AUGUST 22:

I won't be with my computer until Sunday. Fatigue is growing stronger, but my visits with my father in the nursing home, and getting my mother the help she needs to live at home help to soften the tension of my tiredness. "Nettie Moore" plays inside my head off and on all day, in the background, and gets louder when I'm up late alone.

The pureness of my personal relationship with the song was interrupted hours earlier when someone contacted me to report that my "Making a Promise" blog was still on the Community main page. That was fine, but then they added that someone had left a comment saying that "Nettie Moore" was based on a poem from the Civil War period.

My stomach twisted once. I did not need to know that. I did not want to know that, even if it is not true, I did not want to hear that, not now: it is a disruption in the purity of my experience.

But then, almost as quickly as I felt these things, I felt a "so what?" It does not change the fact that Bob Dylan wrote the song, or how Bob Dylan sings the song, or that Bob Dylan was inspired to write the song.

The source of the inspiration is irrelevant to how the song affects me, and I'm pretty sure it must be irrelevant to how it affects "Paul in London."

But I thank the person who wrote that comment about "Nettie Moore" on my blog partly for their interest in the song, and my blog, but mostly because it opened up a whole other topic about the relevancy of the DNA of creative work, and this is a topic I feel so strongly about that I know I'll write a blog about that.

5:20 PM, SUNDAY AFTERNOON, AUGUST 24:

I am home again but not yet on the computer. I am on the couch. I am exhausted. I picked up this pen because "Nettie Moore" started to play again inside my head the way it has played inside my head all week while I was away.

I cannot sit in a chair. I just ate my first meal of the day and my stomach is too exhausted for the task. I feel sick. There is a big bowl on the floor next to me. I am avoiding looking at it because I know, if I stay calm and just breath, this nausea and lightheadedness will pass.

I arrived back here at home late last night after another of my periodic weeks spent being a patient, resourceful, and loving daughter to my parents who have lived separate lives for 38 years and who are nearing the end of the line but who are still very much alive.

I am trying hard to make their remaining years the most comfortable that they can be. I am trying to keep my father's spirits up as he sits in a nursing home each day running into the next like a road growing narrower and going nowhere.

I am fighting corruption and incompetence while trying to acknowledge and encourage those in the health care profession who really care, and I am constantly assessing and reassessing who really cares and who pretends. I need X-ray eyes.

I am trying to keep my mother out of a nursing home.

I am trying not to absorb the anxieties of others close to the situation. I have kept it in control for a week and now I pay the toll for traveling that highway.

I feel like multiples of myself are trying to stay together in one person. I just want one of me. I want to relax the way I used to. The only relief ahead is coming in the form of the inevitable death of my parents and the hope of a peace from having no overly disturbing regrets.

Everything seemed so easy when I was young, when my parents were young, when my grandparents were alive. My grandparents. My grandmother. The joy of her without the responsibility. "I miss you Nettie Moore."

My father's family is from Virginia. Nettie Moore sounds like someone my grandmother might have known. My grandmother was born in 1895 and grew up on a farm in Crew, Virginia.

Nettie Moore sounds like someone who took care of things, who comforted, who made a home a home. A safe place. A place you could go always go back to and be at peace, where the furniture stayed in the same exact spot it had been since before you were born, where old pictures of people you never knew except from passed down stories had been hanging on the walls so long that if you disturbed their position just a small bit, you could see the outline of the frame on the wall where time had etched its passing. Nettie Moore lived in this place.

Nettie Moore was who you went to when you needed to escape the madness. She was deeply loved. I miss you Nettie Moore.

What is all this other stuff that keeps going on and what does it all mean? Peak moments of joy, and awful sorrows. All the things I have done, and all the things I still want to do. What is this force that pushes me through my life? Why do all these horrible things keep happening? Why do wonderful things keep happening? I miss you Nettie Moore.

Whoever Nettie Moore is I miss her terribly. I want to go back. I want to be in the home only she could have made. I want to be with her again. But it's all gone. I can never go back. I hold back tears, because faster than I can stand it there is something else coming at me. It may be good, it may be bad, but there is no time for my tears.

I have to keep moving. I'll never know again what it feels like to be with her in her home that was my home. She has been gone a long long time, but I miss her more now than I ever have before. I just want to cry. Please let me cry.

12:35 AM, TUESDAY MORNING, AUGUST 26:

The computer is humming across the room. It looms expectant. I'll get there soon and type all these notes into the computer. But now I use my pen. I started with a pen, maybe I'll finish with one. This is the final entry for this blog, an earnest attempt to keep my promise to "Paul in London," and anyone else who cares.

I promised in my last blog that during my week away I would spend time with the song "Nettie Moore" and now it feels like "Nettie Moore" has spent time with me.

I promised that I would try and figure out why I need this song, why I need to feel what it makes me feel. I found out that what this song makes me feel is something I have already been feeling for a long time, before I ever heard the song in the first place. But right now I just can't put into words why exactly, I need this song.

3:31 AM:

I'm back on the computer. I can't procrastinate any longer. When I am finished with this whole piece, this blog, that has become much bigger in my head than it will be in these words, I will type my handwritten dated notes from the past week in front of these words and you will read what occurred in my mind as I wrote it.

4:04 AM:

Listened to "Nettie Moore" with Bob Dylan's voice deep in my ears. Every softened crack in his beautiful voice that has grown old with me sung things familiar.

Ever know someone who was so sad they wanted to commit suicide? That's the first verse. Many years ago a good friend knocked on my apartment door after the bars had closed. He carried a six-pack of beer because he wasn't finished yet and we sat on the stairs in the hall so as not to wake my roommate and he told me about his plan to set himself on fire in the middle of the street.

Two or maybe three hours later, with some beer left over, he went home to his bed in the basement of the print shop where he worked part-time and the owner let him sleep there because he had no home. He died about a year and a half later of pancreatic cancer at the age of 39.

He hasn't been the only one who felt like that, who almost did it, who might still do it. During my first listenings to "Nettie Moore," that's the one verse I could always remember. What a way to start off a song. "Blues this morning falling down like hail, Gonna leave a greasy trail."

Each verse is a different version of some feeling I already have felt.

Ever need to go to court to protect something that no one should ever have to worry about protecting?

Has the intensity of something ever been so bright you couldn't take it? "…I wish to God that it were night."

The particulars of Bob Dylan's creative process as he wrote the lyrics are of no importance to how I experience his song. What is important is that his words and music rub up against my consciousness, my subconscious, and whatever else is buried in here that hasn't been nudged by anything else.

The thump thump like a heart beat that accompanies each verse is the tension I feel as I go through each day. Sometimes it's a good tension, sometimes not so good, but when Bob Dylan gets to the refrain, "Oh, I miss you Nettie Moore, And my happiness is o'er..," the tension is released, I can relax and let the grief wash over me.

Ever see a northern river in Spring? The ice melts and cracks and puts on a dramatic show. The water rises. It moves so fast and you have the sense of things being washed away, cleansed, and you want to start again. But there are some things that can never be started again. "But there's no one left here to tell, The world has gone black before my eyes."

Some people probably ignore this song, intellectually and emotionally, because they will be thrown off by what seems like a contradiction in tones between the verses and the refrain. But some people, like Paul in London, and myself, are going to feel a deep sadness and not ever really pin it down. You can't pin down grief. You can't pin down life. You can't pin down this song. The last thing I wanted to do was to write a critique of "Nettie Moore." I hope I have not done that. But I hope I kept my promise.