Tangled up in Dylan

Kathryn and I memorized "Tangled up in Blue" between Chapel Hill and Pittsburgh sophomore year of college. I was in unrequited love with a Dylan fan, and that fall I was listening to the version off a greatest-hits CD, the bootleg version (where you can hear the buttons of Dylan's jacket clicking against his guitar) and the Indigo Girls' live version. I think Kathryn was more of a "Hurricane" girl, but we had what we had in the Nissan.

By West Virginia, we had it, except for the line, "where I happened to be employed," which on Greatest Hits Volume 3 sounds like "where I [something something] employed." We were particularly fascinated with the extra rhyming here:

I muttered somethin' underneath my breath,
She studied the lines on my face.
I must admit I felt a little uneasy
When she bent down to tie the laces of my shoe,
Tangled up in blue.

A year later I would sing it in hotel room in Austin and imagine I had impressed the four or so people there by knowing all the words. (I got the missing ones from the Indigo Girls.)

These days I hear "Tangled up in Blue" mostly when my iPod shuffles to it. And instead of thinking about a boy from Asheville, I think about a friend who would drive to Pittsburgh on short notice.

I haven't heard from Kathryn in a couple of years, but I know she's in a band, and now that I think about it, she really did sound better than me in that Nissan.