Is Bob Dylan My Dad?

A middle-age man’s quixotic quest to find his birth parents leads to an ailing septuagenarian woman and a world-renowned rock star—but the answer, it seems, is blowin’ in the wind.

Illustrations by Penina Gal

For Bob Dylan, it was just another stop on his Never-Ending Tour. Maybe a little glitzier than the city parks and college auditoriums the singer often plays: His September 8, 2012 show was booked into Connecticut’s Mohegan Sun Arena, the 10,000-seat facility inside one of the country’s largest casinos.

Ticket-holders filtered into the venue after the dinner hour, past the clattering slot machines, the bright high-end boutiques, and the unsettling stuffed wolves serving as décor. When he took the stage without comment, the inscrutable slit-eyed singer opened with a rambling version of “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere”:

Whoo-ee, ride me high / Tomorrow’s the day my bride’s gonna come.

For Dylan fans, the show was more or less what they’ve come to expect in recent years: a superb, agile band; rough, noncommittal singing; a mix of enduring favorites and recent album tracks. But for the forty-eight-year-old man in the corduroy jacket in section 25, row D, stage right, the c…