While the world was watching for white smoke from the Vatican chimney, the undisputed master of American songwriting in the post-Tin Pan Alley era was himself inducted into an exclusive club. Officials of the American Academy of Arts and Letters announced that Bob Dylan had been elected, the first rocker to make the cut for a stuffy Academy that may be trying to remake its image. (In fact, as the Associated Press pointed out in its story about Dylan’s election, “the academy once was designed to keep the likes of Dylan away, shunning everyone from jazz artists to modernist poets. Even now, the vast majority of the musicians come from the classical community, with exceptions including Stephen Sondheim and Ornette Coleman.”)

Dylan has accepted the invitation ­ apparently, if you don’t accept, they don’t induct you, meaning that Groucho Marx wouldn’t have stood a chance ­ but no word yet on whether he’ll attend the Academy’s April dinner or May induction ceremony (neither are required). But because the 71-year-old (he turns 72 in May) tours so frequently, even the Academy’s executive director, Virginia Dajani, concedes that it’s unlikely.

No matter. He’s in, albeit as an “honorary member” ­ because, the Academy says, voters couldn’t figure out how to categorize him (writer or musician?). That’s perfect, of course, since Dylan has spent his entire career confounding people who’ve tried to categorize him. And it’s not as if the Academy’s “honorary members” are slouches: they include Yo-Yo Ma, Marty Scorsese, Meryl Streep, Woody Allen, and Twyla Tharp, among others. (What’s wrong here? The Academy couldn’t figure out how to categorize them, either? Let’s see: Yo-Yo Ma is a musician, Twyla Tharp is a choreographer–how hard can this categorization stuff be?)

The Academy, according to its website, is “an honor society of 250 architects, composers, artists, and writers” whose members “are elected for life and pay no dues” (until Pope Benedict XVI, of course, the “elected for life” part was true of Popes as well). “The honor of election,” the website intones, “is considered the highest formal recognition of artistic merit in the United States.”

Get in on the discussion: If you could have front-row seats to any concert, who would it be? 

For more than 50 years now, Bob Dylan has needed no formal recognition of his artistic merit ­ although he’s gotten it in spades, having gotten an honorary doctorate from Princeton more than 40 years ago; been named a Kennedy Center honoree in 1997; been included in the TIME magazine “100 Most Important People of the Century” in 1999; and won a Pulitzer Prize “special citation” in 2008. Just last year, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom ­ nearly half-a-century after, as a young man of 23, he wrote and recorded the brilliant “Chimes of Freedom.”

But it has never been in the academy, or the Academy, where Dylan has most reverberated. His songs are not for them; they are for, as he himself wrote in that landmark 1964 song, “the warriors whose strength is not to fight the luckless, the abandoned, the foresaked–the misdemeanor outlaw, chased and cheated by pursuit” and perhaps–most fittingly, for “the poet and the painter far behind his rightful time.” In this case, it was the American Academy of Arts and Letters that was far behind its rightful time in recognizing a poet ­and word-painter ­ who not only lived in his rightful time, but helped shape it in a way that no other songwriter ever has.

Photo credit: Getty Images

Credit: Brooks Kraft/Corbis

I sure was; I had a ticket to the concert in my pocket.

I don’t remember much about the concert (no snickering, please), although fortunately I can revisit it any time I want; the tour was captured for the album “Before The Flood,” which rock critic Robert Christgau called “at its best, the craziest and strongest rock and roll ever recorded.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Yesterday, I spent the day sitting at my desk, wearing a suit and sending e-mails in between rushing off to meetings — with Bob Dylan’s voice blaring from my computer.  For last night, Dylan was scheduled to perform with Mark Knopfler at the Verizon Center in downtown Washington — the next-to-last stop in a tour that began over the summer. This time I had two tickets in my pocket: one for me, and one for my music-besotted son — at 16, a year younger than I was in 1974.

My son plays guitar and harmonica, with Dylan songs a bedrock of his repertoire — and therein lies the problem. His first reaction, when I offered the chance to go to the concert, was to say no; “I want to remember him like he was,” my son said, “not how he is now with his voice all old and scratchy.” (As opposed to, I held back from responding, young and scratchy?) But a few days later he changed his mind. “If I don’t go see him now,” he decided, “I’ll always regret it.”

And so off we went, hoping for no regrets.

Yes, of course the times they are a-changing (you knew I would work that in, didn’t you?). How could they not, after 38 years? By my count, Dylan played 5 songs he had played that long-ago night in Oakland. But none of them sounded the same; he gave all of them either a rockabilly or roadhouse blues twist, arrangements designed in part to mask what my son diplomatically calls his “vocal limitations.” Dylan didn’t even play the same instruments; he rarely plays guitar now, reportedly because of arthritis, so he settled in behind a piano. He played harmonica, and he sang. And yes, my son was right: his voice sounded all old and scratchy.

So what? My son and I knew it would. People in the audience — mostly, by all appearances, folks of AARP age, with some teenagers and “kids” in their 30s and 40s thrown in — were surely disappointed if they came to see a museum piece, perfectly preserved from the 1960s and ’70s. Instead, we got a living, breathing, confounding artist who in many ways embodies the best of America — inventive, ever-changing, imperfect.

He barked. He croaked. He growled. And instead of being diffident and uninterested — a charge often leveled at Dylan for his concert appearances over the past five decades — he seemed to be reveling in the moment, at times getting up from behind the piano to prowl the stage like another singer of a certain age: Mick Jagger. My son elbowed me excitedly at one point: “Dad,” he said, “he’s dancing.”

It was, in the end, a performance full of soul. The voice is long, long gone as a musical instrument, but in its place is a rawness and energy that made me feel the songs more deeply than ever. This is what we all hope for as we age: to continue to do what we love; to understand that we may not be able to do it the same way we did when we were 30, but that doing it differently — allowing for, and working around, our limitations — can even be an improvement; and to give pleasure to ourselves and those around us in the process.

My son, at least, got the message. “No regrets?” I asked him as we left the concert. “None,” he said. “It was epic.” In every meaning of the word, it certainly was.

Courtesy Everett Collection

Sad, and true: the Skipper’s “little buddy,” Bob Denver — who also starred, unforgettably, as Maynard G. Krebs in The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis — died.

Seven years ago this week, as it turns out.

Didn’t remember that? You’re not alone: “news” of his death, reposted and re-tweeted breathlessly with the requisite comments of social media mourning — such as “RIP, Gilligan!” “Another part of my childhood gone” etc. — spread via Facebook and Twitter this week as if he had just taken his last breath a few hours earlier. F. Scott Fitzgerald (who, by the way, has been dead a lot longer than Bob Denver, so please don’t start any rumors) famously, and wrongly, wrote that “there are no second acts in American lives.” Now, thanks to social media, there are second acts in American deaths. If you’re lucky — and sort of famous, but not so famous that everyone remembers where they were when they heard that you died — your death can be recirculated as news every few years, sparking a new spasm of mourning.

But at least poor Bob Denver is, as the Saturday Night Live crew used to say about General Franco, still dead. Eddie Murphy, on the other hand, appears to be very much alive — although Facebook users and the Twitterati have killed him off several times recently (along with Bill Cosby, among others).

The Eddie Murphy and Bill Cosby rumors are easier to trace: they seem to spring from a totally fake “news” site — one that, on its pages, even acknowledges in the fine print that its articles are “based on zero truth” and are “complete … fiction for entertainment purposes.”

Of course, none of this can be blamed entirely on the Internet and social media: our generation was caught up in perhaps the biggest celebrity-death hoax ever, when we all studied the cover photo of Abbey Road and played Beatles’ songs backward on our record player to see if Paul was really dead. But our new ways of communicating make these rumors easier to start.

They also make them easier to stop, which is where we geezers and near-geezers come in. Generally, we’re more recent adopters of Facebook and Twitter than our children, grandchildren, and nieces and nephews are — so we’ve built up fewer bad habits on social media. We’re also, the scientists tell us, less prone to acting on impulse. So here’s my plea to my fellow boomers, and our older brothers, sisters, and parents: when you read shocking news (or really good news, or any kind of news at all) on Facebook or Twitter, pause a moment before you pass it on. Do a little checking via old-fashioned media (my two favorites are The New York Times and CNN; substitute your own favorites if you like) to see if it’s being reported there. If it’s not, hold off. It may in fact turn out to be true; if memory serves, Nora Ephron’s death was on Twitter an hour or so before the Times confirmed it. In a case like that, waiting for confirmation before reposting or re-tweeting means you won’t be on the absolute cutting edge of up-to-the-minute coolness. But if the “news” turns out to be no news at all (Bob Denver, Eddie Murphy, “I buried Paul”) then you’ve earned the right to remind your younger relatives and friends, once again, that — especially when it comes to social media — you can’t believe everything you read.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Fifty-year-old Roger Clemens, who in baseball years is not just old but ancient, pitched a few innings for a minor league team in Texas — instantly prompting breathless speculation about a possible comeback to the major leagues. But the Rocket, who may have had (ahem) a little chemical help in his final years pitching for the Yankees and Astros, must know that he would have tons to lose and little to gain by attempting to pitch again in the majors, which is probably why he threw cold water on the “Roger’s coming back!” hysteria. [And how weird was the timing of his appearance for the Sugar Land Skeeters, coming while the sports world was still buzzing about the latest chapter in the saga of another suspected performance-enhancing athlete with strong Texas ties, cyclist Lance Armstrong?]

Meanwhile, the much better old-guy-and-baseball story played out in Los Angeles, where Vin Scully, who has been announcing Dodgers games on radio and television since 1950 (when the team was still in Brooklyn), said that he’ll return to announce the games again next season.

Because of his age, Scully is on a year-to-year contract, and typically decides late in the season whether he’ll return to announce the next season. Age, did you say? Well, there’s that: When the 2013 baseball season starts, Scully will be 85. So what? If he were a pitcher, he would be said to be “still bringing it”; He’s almost universally believed to be, as Jon Miller — the announcer for fierce Dodgers rivals the San Francisco Giants — said: “The greatest (sports) broadcaster there is and there ever was.”

And at 85, he’s still learning. Earlier this month Scully — after musing about soul patches and mullets — asked TV and radio audiences to tweet about Dodgers player A.J. Ellis, one of the Dodgers’ least famous players, as an experiment in social media trending. His gleeful (and somewhat surprised) reaction is typical of a man who still enthusiastically loves what he does — which is about the best way to find the Fountain of Youth, with no performance-enhancing drugs required.

Monday Quick Hits: 

• Incomes fell for near retirees. A new report found boomer households (ages 55 to 64) are earning almost 10 percent less than they did three years ago. The median annual household income for near retirees declined from $61,716 in 2009 to $55,748, in today’s dollars.

• Preview Art Garfunkel’s “Lena.” The song comes from his new collection, The Singer. The album will be released August 28, though Garfunkel isn’t around for promotion; the 70-year-old is trekking across Europe.

Photo: Danny Moloshok/Reuters

A classic 1960s baseball card of a classic 1960s baseball player

Well, that settles it. No mom will ever be able to throw away her kid’s baseball card collection again.

I mean, how could she — after the news broke yesterday of a trove of rare cards, from the early 20th century and found in an Ohio attic, that could fetch up to $3 million?

The news reports brought back memories of what I, and every kid I knew, said when we moved out of our parents’ house after high school: “Don’t throw away my baseball cards! They might be worth a lot of money some day!”

(An interlude here, one that has nothing to do with baseball cards: if you’re under 30, your jaw probably just hit the floor. But you read right: when I was a kid we actually moved out of our parents’ house – not just down to the basement – after high school: to go to college, to join the Army, or to otherwise strike out on our own. And not only did we move out, we did so willingly. And not only did we do so willingly: we couldn’t WAIT to leave.)

Back to the cards, with a confession: we only threw in that last part, about our collection being worth a bunch of money some day, to show off our nascent adult sense of responsibility. We didn’t really know if the cards would be worth a lot of money some day; what’s more, we didn’t care.

We didn’t collect baseball cards as an investment. Nor did we plunk down our nickel for the long, flat, sweet-smelling stick of pink gum that came with each pack – a mere afterthought to the true treasure, really; even a distraction. (Little did we know, or care, that early baseball cards were designed to advertise cigarettes and other tobacco products, and often were included in a pack of smokes.)

We collected baseball cards because they were close-up pictures of our heroes, sometimes in cheesy pseudo-action poses. We collected them for the baseball stats and fun facts on the back, sometimes accompanied by goofy little drawings. We collected them because you could insert an unwanted card (either a duplicate or a player you didn’t care much about) in the spokes of your bike to make a cool flapping sound as you rode around the neighborhood. We collected them to set up marathon trading sessions, an early lesson in supply and demand – and the art of negotiation.

And most of all, we collected them because they made us feel intimately connected to the game we loved – as an active participant, not just a passive fan. The cards found in the Ohio attic may bring in millions of cold, hard cash, but 45 years ago my friends and I would have told you that our collections were priceless.

Come to think of it, they still are.

Ohio Family Finds Rare Baseball Cards

And yet I owe her a huge debt. So does my daughter, and so do lots of little girls who grow up dreaming of playing baseball.

Doris lived A League of Their Own as a superstar for 8 years in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League – the circuit immortalized in the 1992 film. She pitched a perfect game; she won a batting title; she led the league in home runs. You could make a case that she was the Babe Ruth of professional women’s baseball.

And she is, for all her exploits, unknown to today’s baseball fans — who think of the stars of women’s baseball as Madonna; Geena Davis; Rosie O’Donnell; even Tom Hanks. But the real-life players who were the inspirations for the characters played by those stars in A League of Their Own lived their lives out quietly, even anonymously, after the league folded in 1954. Doris Sams went back home to Knoxville, where she worked for the local Utility Board for 25 years.

Her legacy? Girls like my daughter, who is 11 years and plays baseball — not softball, but the game that tv announcers sometimes call “good old-fashioned country hardball.” She’s the only girl on her Little League team, and she’s the only girl on her travel team. And, if you’ll permit some parental bragging, she’s also good; she is, in fact, an All-Star. She never talks about being the only girl, and the boys she plays with don’t seem to notice — at least once they realize that she can actually play.

And she has watched A League of Their Own, by my conservative estimate, 9 million times.

It’s funny to her that the women play baseball in skirts, like the one Geena Davis is wearing here. It’s funny to her when Tom Hanks, playing drunkard manager Jimmy Dugan, tells an umpire that he looks like “a penis with a little hat on.”  And it’s funny to her when one of the players intentionally throws a ball into the stands to nail a heckler who keeps yelling “Girls can’t play baseball.”

But it’s not funny to her how seriously the women take the game of baseball; instead, it makes perfect sense to her, because that’s how she takes it.

And it’s not funny to her when Jimmy Dugan says, in the movie’s most famous scene,  “there’s no crying in baseball.” She agrees — and she also knows on some level, even though she’s never said so, that while the boys on her team can cry (and most have, at one point or another), she, as the only girl, can’t.

But I think Jimmy Dugan is wrong: there is crying in baseball. I know because, after reading about the brave pioneer Doris Sams — who paved the way for girls like my daughter — I cried grateful tears for someone I never heard of until she died.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Photo credit: The Knoxville News Sentinel/AP

Photo credit: Columbia Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection

It’s typical anti-democratic poppycock from the Royal Family, which goes against everything we Americans stand for. You see, Kate Middleton is – despite achieving through marriage  the title of “Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge” – still a commoner; she is still not royal enough for the Royal Family. She’s still not one of the cool kids.

Look, I’m not so naïve that I would insist that ours is a classless society; it’s clearly not. And of course I realize that all of us curtsy or bow, metaphorically, to bosses and other higher-ups every day. And yes, despite significant inroads made – thank goodness – over the past 50 years by women and people of color, power in American society is still held disproportionately by white men.

But still: curtsying to your husband’s relatives every time you see them? Seriously?

So let’s review why we celebrate July 4th: after our Founders declared independence from Britain and mad King George III on that day in 1776 (well, actually on July 2) the colonists fought the Brits for seven years — losing some 25,000 men in the process. The result of the hard-fought American victory? Our messy, imperfect, still evolving democracy, based on the principle that all people are created equal — a principle that most of us now take for granted, but one that was utterly, well, revolutionary at the time. It’s a principle expressed perfectly by that great American philosopher, Aunt Eller of the musical Oklahoma!, when she declares “I don’t say I’m better than anybody else, but I’ll be damned if I ain’t just as good.” It’s a principle echoed by Bob Dylan in “To Ramona,” when he sings “I’ve heard you say many times that you’re better than no one, and no one is better than you.” And it’s a principle, of course, that is completely antithetical to the institution of monarchy.

Because make no mistake about it: the Royals, who are direct descendants of mad King George, fundamentally believe they’re better than you are, simply because of who their parents are and who your parents aren’t. They even think they’re better than people who marry into their family, for goodness sake.

Well, I don’t.  This July 4^th, as every July 4^th, I’m going to treat the fireworks as candles lit in the memory of every American who’s given his or her life — from the Revolutionary War, to the Civil War, to the civil rights movements, and other pivotal moments in our history — in the fight against tyranny, monarchy, injustice and those who believe they were born better than you or me. Let the Brits have Will and Kate; we’ve got Aunt Eller and Bob Dylan. And, to my mind, we come out way ahead in that deal.

Photo credit: brian.gratwicke via flickr.