A man rents a car at the car rental agency in the municipal airport where my five sisters-in-law work. They recognize the man as famous, but as required, they ask for identification. He takes a handful of credit cards out of his pocket and tosses them on the counter like an ace-high flush. Robert Zimmerman embossed on each.

“Happy?” he says.

On the third night, Bob Dylan returns the car. It’s been mistreated. One imagines mud on bleary headlights, corn stalks and field grass caught in the undercarriage, a side mirror hanging boozily from the door.    

“Riotous living,” he says.

I know this about the women in my wife’s family. They were born like prophets, sympathetic to God and unsympathetic to man’s weaknesses. Woe unto you, Bob Dylan. They do not unwill what God has willed. They do not spell their first zeal away.

One imagines Dylan standing in the green light of the parking lot. One imagines my five sisters-in-law inspecting his car, circling it—from the verb galal, root of the noun Galilee—clipboards in hand, neatly marking, as required, small boxes on a form.

Happy. As one can sometimes imagine Sisyphus happy.

Bird Report

68S. Heading into Yellow Springs. Above the scrub cedars on the sandy hillside and then over the pine treeline of the woods: the first crane of the year, the bill like a dagger, the drainpipe neck, the wings tipped at the ends like long fingers, the jointed bamboo legs, trailing.