I went to see Bob Dylan play a show in a castle courtyard in Alcala de Henares, a small town outside of Madrid. I was 21, had just graduated from college, and was spending the summer in Europe. I was traveling alone, which started out as an accident. One by one, each person I was going to travel with backed out for some reason or another. Rebecca didn't have enough money. Amy didn't want to leave her boyfriend. I gave up on all of them and went by myself. I was terrified. I was liberated.
Concerts in Europe are very different from ones in America. We were standing in a Midieval castle courtyard with four real watchtowers (and he sang "All Along the Watchtower"). No one pushed or shoved to get the best location. There were no six-dollar bottles of water. I bought a Coke and the Galician boy who was flirting with me freely offered up some rum. Since I hadn't brought friends with me, I found new ones there.
Dylan played "Like A Rolling Stone" for the encore and everyone sang along in Spanish-lilted English. It was a dark, cool night in July and between songs I counted as many constellations as I could. On my grandmother's porch in North Carolina, I learned about Cepheus and Cassiopeia.
That was the summer I was a traveler instead of a tourist. There are other memories from that summer, like the only female cabdriver in Florence and a chance encounter in the train station in Montpellier, but what remains is the image of Dylan in his white suit and enormous hat, hunched over his piano and playing his harmonica. He was gravelly voiced and almost unintelligible, but the audience knew all his lyrics, and we sang for him.