Another Wish Granted! My heartfelt thanks to the giver of "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan," who wished to remain anonymous, but whose identity I cleverly sussed from the treacherous packing slip.→[More:] I will allow the individual's generosity to go unattributed, but look forward to many more opportunities to enjoy that person's sparkling wit, good cheer, and personal fearlessness, as do all of us here. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

I've never owned this album, a silly oversight. It came along at a good time, right before I pulled out the driveway for a 3-hour road trip. When I came to this song, I suddenly heard it like never before; I think, like jonmc, I'm just now the right age to have 'gotten' it. I hit 'repeat,' repeatedly, for about two hours until I had it memorized, howling along all the way.

The song is prophetic, gripping, revelatory. It places no blame, it's not political, it's not about us vs. them; it simply takes in a swath of the human condition, vividly drawn in images that are so vague but powerful as to be Jungian, complete with love and pain and oppression and unfairness and lostness and beauty, and it says: yes, it will be hard, it is hard, but what we do is to tell about it.

And wht'll you do now, my blue-eyed son?
What'll you do now, my darling young one?

I'm a-goin' back out 'fore the rain starts a-fallin',
I'll walk to the depths of the deepest black forest,
Where the people are many and their hands are all empty,
Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters,
Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison,
Where the executioner's face is always well hidden,
Where hunger is ugly, where souls are forgotten,
Where black is the color, where none is the number,
And I'll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it,
And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it,
Then I'll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin',
And I'll know my song well before I start singin',
And it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard --
A hard rain's gonna fall.