An Easter Pizza Meditation: Bob Dylan's Instagram (and Patreon) Posts Part 21

The Hidden Story

A narcissus. Not a larkspur.

In the opening paragraph of Frozen Pizza, Dylan gives us a town named after a flower, the larkspur. He writes that on Sundays, the ushers in church are often confused by the Lundgren twins—which one is which?—because of their matching outfits. He tells us about grocery store freezers that “hum like a choir” and have “given up on perfection but not on faith.”

My subtitle on these posts has been “the hidden story,” but there’s nothing very hidden about the spiritual subtext of the story Dylan published on Easter Sunday. Frozen Pizza follows directly from Bull Rider, which, as I showed in my previous essay, takes much of its imagery from the Lenten Gospel of John. Frozen Pizza features several ideas from the Feast of the Resurrection and offers us a story about hope in a dark time.

Frozen Pizza is set in a frozen Minnesota January, when Carl Peterson is still grieving the loss of his wife the previous April. He hasn’t yet changed the page on the calendar. Carl worked in the hardware store and is gifted in the way of ordinary, hard-working people: he can tell the type of a screw by touch alone.

Reading this, I was reminded that Dylan’s father Abraham worked with his brothers in an electrical appliance store in Hibbing. As a boy, Bob sometimes swept the floors.

At Halvorson’s grocery, Carl considers the array of frozen pizzas and has the thought that his wife preferred plain cheese. Marlene Hobbs appears and helps Carl with his decision, with a few friendly words: “you can forgive a lot if the crust is right.” Carl says that Elaine used to say the same thing.

Marlene and the departed Elaine may as well have been sisters, perhaps even twins, like the Lundgrens. We are all pretty much the same.

Marlene, a second grade teacher, offers a couple more gentle aphorisms: In preparing the pizza, have “a willingness to wait … Start simple.”

At home, Carl preheats the oven and sees visions of Elaine in the atmosphere of their kitchen, in “the jar of wooden spoons … the faint scent of something floral that no longer had a source.” He hears her humming as she cooks. He looks at her empty chair that tonight feels “more like a pause than an absence.” He recalls the way she laughed at his old jokes and saved him the “last slice” of everything.

Elaine has died, but she is still around.

Carl is patient in preparing his frozen pizza, as Marlene advised. He is mesmerized by its transformation from something “frozen and rigid” to something “warm and alive.” The crust, it turns out, is “fine. Not remarkable, not terrible.” The pizza is “in its way, honest.”

He speaks to the air, “Crust’s not bad.” He hears Elaine’s voice, agreeing and teasing, and he smiles.

The pizza is not great, but it’s not bad. It’s given up on perfection. It’s honest. It can be forgiven.

Spring will eventually return and Marlene will continue “to teach her students the importance of beginnings.” Meanwhile, that freezer in Halvorson’s grocery store continues its “low, faithful hum.” Carl is an old man, but he has learned to “wait for the warmth to come back, however slowly it might arrive.”

The promise of Easter is that Jesus is here, alive in Spirit, and also that He is coming. The promise of the new covenant is that if we love our neighbors as ourselves and if we repent of our sins, we might be forgiven. The promise of Easter is victory over death.

As Dylan sang in 1979:

Of every earthly plan that be known to man, He is unconcerned

He’s got plans of His own to set up His throne

When He returns

Along with faith and love, much patience is required.

Before I sign off here, I’d like to mention an article I read in yesterday’s New York Times. No, not the one about the sick and deranged tweet from our Commander-in-Chief, the child killer. The essay about the friendship of Dylan and John Lennon, and Lennon’s appearance in Eat the Document, taken from an upcoming book by Jim Windolf about the creative relationship between Dylan and the Beatles. Windolf retells a well-known story about Lennon’s “Norwegian Wood” and Dylan’s “Fourth Time Around.” He also includes, however, a tender detail about the tortuous limo ride shown in Eat the Document in which Bob appears so completely fucked-up. John apparently helped Dylan into his hotel bed and then stood nearby for a while to be sure he was going to be okay. Twelve hours later Dylan was on stage playing his revolutionary set of electric songs, while John was in the audience, applauding and defending Dylan against the hectoring and boos. The filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker claims, in an interview quoted by Windolf, that John and Bob “adored each other.”

I mention the essay here because John Lennon plays a large role (as my regular readers know) in the hidden story of “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)” and Dylan’s use of material from The Golden Bird. Dylan valued the creativity of Lennon highly, and presumably his friendship as well. Besides a few other musicians of the period we could name, including Harrison and McCartney, Dylan had few true peers. Only Lennon, however, was seen by the public and the media of the sixties in the same light as Bob: as a prophet. This is the key to his covert inclusion in the lyrics of Dylan’s 2020 song. I invite you to read all about it in Chapter One of “I Don’t Love Nobody.”

Happy spring!