A Pilgrim's Digression

The bachelor party last night was a success, I think.  I cooked steak and potatoes on the grill, and while I cooked, we sat on the back porch, talking and drinking.  Later, after dinner, we played Madden 10 and made frequent trips to the toilet to relieve ourselves of beer.  It was a tame party, if judged by college boy standards, but pretty exciting for a guy in his mid-thirties.  Between the two of us, myself and the groom killed a 12-can box of Bud Light plus a couple Coronas and a Heineken I found in the back of the fridge.

It’s been a few years since I drank that much.  It felt pretty good.

I have some memories of the night, but in the end, I don’t remember things all that well, particularly after the other men left.  I remember stumbling around outside, trying to walk the dog, afraid she would pull me down if she saw a cat.  I was pretty unsteady.  I remember trying to play World of Warcraft, but the required finger-eye coordination was a little beyond me.  I remember taking a shower. I remember lying on the bedroom floor, laughing so loudly and for so long that it scared the dog.  Somehow I ended up in bed.  I don’t remember my wife coming home and getting in bed beside me.  I woke up at around a quarter to three, mouth dry as a desert and calf muscles aching as if I’d run a marathon.  I got up for a drink of water and haven’t been back to bed.

Other than my achy legs and dehydration, I don’t feel too bad.  This is how my body has responded, every time I’ve gotten drunk in my life.  I wake up early after a night of binge drinking, and I feel energized.  No headache or hangover, just wakefulness, clarity.

In my sleep, just before I woke, I had a dream that for whatever reason motivated me to get up and write a little.  Lying there awake for about twenty minutes, going over the dream in my mind, I imagined myself telling it to my therapist.

It’s a very brief dream.  In the dream, my grandpa and I and some other men, no faces or names to any of them, are being judged on our singing.  The other men have vague identities as “friends” of grandpa’s.  The person doing the judging comes around to each of us with a device that measures whether we would be an alto, a soprano, a tenor, etc., when you sing a note into it.  Grandpa makes some self-deprecatory noises, saying he has never sang in his life and doesn’t expect any great result from this.  But I know he’s really just setting the men up.  He will sing impressively.  Grandpa sings the “la” note and registers as a very low bass on the tone measuring device, and the other men clap and hoot, clearly impressed.

When it is my turn, I sing “la” and measure as a rather flat tenor.  The men don’t respond positively or negatively.  Grandpa says nothing, but looks away, either embarrassed of me or still preoccupied with his own success.

That is the entire dream.  When I imagine myself talking about this to my therapist, he latches on to the symbolism of a competition between grandpa and I.  And this isn’t a competition he ought, by nature, to win.  It’s a creative competition.  Creativity is my field, although singing isn’t my specialty.  Still, why would a man whose interests were in active, athletic endeavors, best me at singing?

Even so, my feelings in the dream aren’t jealousy, or anger, or shame.  I feel proud that my grandfather is such an impressive man.  He can excel in so many fields.  Growing up in his shadow, that was (usually) how I felt, as well.

I remember in the late ’80′s, when grandpa would have been only in his mid to late fifties, he got in a fist fight with a man named Don.  Don was the boyfriend of my uncle Mike’s ex-wife, Debbie, and Don and Debbie had come to grandpa’s to pick up the kids.  Uncle Mike was living with grandpa and grandma at the time, while he found somewhere else to live.  I was there, but don’t even remember what started the fight.  My memory of what I’ve been told suggests that Don and Mike started arguing and grandpa joined in.  He bloodied Don pretty good and sent him running for his car.  Grandpa followed up by throwing a brick that struck the car on the hood as it pulled out, just missing the windshield.

My own Dad used to tell that story with pride.  Pride that the “old man” had sent a guy in his thirties fleeing for his life.  When Dad told it, the story would usually go something like this:

“It was like a fight between two girls until Dad joined in.  Don saw him coming around the corner of the house and he knew the real man had arrived.  He was headed for the car, but Dad grabbed him by the hair and yanked him back, and he laid one on that fella that busted his nose like an overripe tomato.  Don couldn’t get away fast enough after that.  Not a bad showing for a 56 year-old man.”

Now in his seventies, Grandpa remains a large man, with large hands that no one would want to feel hitting their nose or mouth.  But when I was a kid, he was so much larger.

I go long periods without blogging, eventually coming to think that I finally have nothing left to say.  Then something happens that I find worthy of writing about.

“Worthy” is probably too strong a word in this case, because I am writing about nightmares I’ve been having lately.  Hearing about a friend’s dreams is like hearing about their sex life: we feel mild fascination at first, followed by disgust and boredom.

Our dreams are not pointless, but they are pointless to everyone else.  So I will try to keep the description here to a minimum.

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This morning I dreamed that I was visiting my grandparents.  Grandma was sick with cancer and bedridden, and I never saw her during the weekend I visited.  I’m not sure why I couldn’t go into her bedroom to see her.  Then on Sunday, when I woke up, she was in the kitchen getting ready to leave for church.  She looked alive and healthy.  She was laughing as she said, “Oh, I wouldn’t miss church for anything.”  She seemed much taller, as if I were just a little kid, and she seemed fuller, too, as if she had put on weight.  I thought to myself, “Nothing is wrong at all.  She’s just fine,” and I felt so good, so happy and relieved.

This was one of those dreams that, when we realize it’s just a dream, is almost physically painful.

I’m not sure why I’d still be dreaming about grandma.  I thought that at Christmas, after the shock of realizing she was really gone, I had finally come to terms with the loss, but I guess not.  I do still think about her quite a lot, and just yesterday Lynn and I were reminiscing about some of the meals she made that we particularly enjoyed and will never experience again.

I don’t think I’m still grieving, just wishing the dream were real, I suppose.  Just dreaming about one last morning that never happened.

Last night I dreamed about a tree that grew in my great-grandmother’s back yard.  In the dream, it was a small tree, probably a dwarf fruit tree of some kind.  It needed trimming, and my mom and grandma were trying to trim it.  As they clipped the first branch, the tree trunk cracked and the tree collapsed into the yard.  Upon inspection, the women saw that the tree was almost completely hollow except for some wood at the heart.

After expressing some sadness at the loss of her tree, my great-grandmother said, “At least there will be a new tree that will grow up from the roots.”

My grandma answered, “Yes, but it may not bear any fruit.”

When I was little, my grandparents had a plum tree that cracked and fell over in much the same way as the tree in my dream.  Before it died, the tree bore the sweetest purple plums, and my grandma would put up jars of jelly from it that we would eat on all year long.  After it collapsed and grandpa had cut it up and removed it, another tree grew up from the stump.  It never bore any fruit, however.  I never did understand why it stopped bearing fruit.  Eventually, grandpa removed it entirely, as it was good for nothing except a reminder of what good fruit it once bore.

It’s interesting that the only people in this dream are these three matriarchal women, two of whom died this past year.  I think the dream is an expression of some worries I’ve been having over the fragmentation of my family in the wake of the older people dying.

My great-grandmother had five boys and a girl from the late nineteen-twenties to 1950, and one thing you can say about having so many children, all of whom continued living near each other and all of whom remained close, is that it made for decades of family reunions.  Now that the older folks have begun to die off, though, it seems unlikely that the younger generations will remain all that close.  Many of us don’t live near our family anymore.  Most of us weren’t all that close to begin with, going to reunions at least partly out of a sense of duty.  I haven’t even been to a Christmas reunion in two years, at least, and I know my Dad didn’t go last year, either.

It makes you wonder who remains for us, when our parents and immediate siblings are gone.  And if we are an only child like myself, and like my son, who then remains?  Certainly not second and third cousins, great aunts and uncles.  Even first cousins often grow distant over the years.  When I was little, I spent many weekends with my grandparents, and grandma would always invite my cousins over, too, so that I could play with them and get to know them.  We were great friends, back then.

When I see them now, usually only at Christmas, they seem almost like strangers.  So many years have passed during which I heard about them from my grandparents but had little contact with them.

Loss is something we learn to accept as an inevitable part of life, but it isn’t easy.  However, do we want life to always remain the same, people to remain unchanged?  No, not really.  Life is a losing proposition, though.  We steal whatever bits of happiness we can from death’s table, but in the end He comes for us regardless.

I guess what I want is some assurance that we will be compensated for our losses, in some way.  Compensated by god?  I don’t know.  My faith isn’t very strong these days.  When my grandma died, the one thing I remember the pastor saying at the funeral is that there will be a great family reunion in heaven one day.  Of course, that’s the kind of cliché pastors love to use in giving hope to the family of the deceased, but it has remained with me.  The idea of a celestial “family reunion” does not necessarily provide me any hope, but it is a symbol of the hope in which other people believe.

And who knows, maybe the cliché is true.

All I know is, it’s hard letting go of people, and letting go of the past.  I know from the experience of my maternal grandmother dying that even large families do not always remain close following such a death.  But whether we want to move on or not, time passes.  We go on anyway, a little lonelier.

I look ahead, down the road, and I do wonder what and who will remain after another decade or two.  I don’t know how anyone remains optimistic in a world that, to paraphrase Bob Dylan, has been dying since it was born.  I suppose most people don’t even think about it much.  We bury ourselves in the warm blankets of false hope, materialism, and transitory pleasures, and we close ourselves off from cold reality.  A death is really the only thing that strips away the covers and exposes us to the chilly truth.

My bad dreams seems to be spilling over into my life at home on weekends. I slept poorly roughly half of the time I was home this weekend, not always because of bad dreams. I am easily awakened now, for reasons I don’t understand. Also, I seem unable to fall into a deep enough sleep. Deep enough to dream, but then I wake up frequently in the night, and sometimes I have difficulty going back to sleep.

This afternoon, I lay down and took a nap around a quarter of two. I woke up within fifteen minutes, having had another nightmare. In this dream, I received a phone call from someone who sounded like a great aunt. I assumed she was calling to ask me how my grandma was doing.

Grandma has been much on my mind this weekend, because she went for a CT scan last week and the results are supposed to be in today. Whether or not she continues treatment for her cancer is dependent on the result of these periodic tests.

I have been putting off calling her today, because I am not sure I want to know the news. It’s been a year since her diagnosis with pancreatic cancer. How much longer can she reasonably live?

Anyway, in the dream, I talk to this person who I assume is a relative. I tell her I have not called grandma, and in my head I feel guilty because I haven’t called.

Finally, as the other person talks, I begin to detect oddities in the voice and in what she is saying. She seems to be repeating what I say, for the most part, not adding anything to the conversation.

I ask, “This is Aunt Mary Ann, right?”

There is silence on the other end. Then the voice says, menacingly, “Subtle. Very smooth.”

And she hangs up.

In the dream, I have this sickening feeling that this person knows something, or is going to hurt me in some way because I talked to her like a family member.

Probably, the dream is no more than an expression of guilt over not calling my grandma today. I need to do that and get it out of the way.

But what about my other nightmares? I had a therapy session today, but forgot to mention my sleep problems. I did talk about grandma and my feelings over her situation extensively, however.

I mentioned how I felt when I went to my great-grandma’s funeral at the beginning of the month, how it seemed like an eerie preview of the funeral to come. In retrospect, it almost seems like a nightmare itself, right down to the way my grandpa and his brothers kind of made light of their mother’s death by only postponing their fishing trip long enough to put their mother in the ground.

I know that puts a harsh angle on their actions, but as I told my therapist, the whole thing seemed rather surreal, not like a funeral at all. And I was left wondering, how is grandpa going to act when my grandma dies? Will he go fishing then, too?

My therapist didn’t say anything, other than to repeat back to me what I’d said I felt. Sometimes I feel like I’m in echo chamber. I wish I had one male friend who lived close by, with whom I could just go out and drink and talk. But this isn’t exactly the kind of thing men talk about when drinking…”Oh, my grandma’s dying…I’m afraid I’ll cry at her funeral, and no one in my family ever cries.”

But I’ve got a therapist. I’m going to see him again in two weeks. I’m thinking about scheduling my next appointment for one week later, and seeing him every week for awhile, until I start to feel like I’m getting a better grip on things.

I’m going back to Washington tonight. Here’s hoping for a good night’s sleep.

I slept badly again last night. I’m not sure what’s wrong lately. I sleep fine at home, but when I return to Washington I don’t sleep.

Last night, I even got to bed early, at 10:40. I turned over and over, one side to the next. I got up and got an extra pillow to make myself more comfortable. I lay there for what seemed an eternity.

I kept thinking I could hear thumping bass, as if someone were sitting outside the house in their car, playing hip hop on the stereo. After awhile, I decided the sound was coming from the air conditioner.

When I finally did get to sleep, I had nightmares that woke me up. I don’t dream much anymore, so it is worth recording what my nightmares were about.

In one, my son is kidnapped by a psychopath who keeps him in a dungeon in a dog kennel and forces him to watch as he murders other victims. The killer is intent on raising my son to his specifications and shows him pornography and talks to him for hours about the history of serial killers, and he grows furious when to comfort himself, B. starts singing a Carly Simon song he listens to at night when going to sleep: “Into White.” One day, he drugs B.’s food and, while he is unconscious, cuts his tongue out so he can’t sing anymore.

Meanwhile, the authorities seem indifferent. The police don’t organize a search. No one steps forward to offer a reward. Detectives have other cases they are working on, so they only get to our son’s case in the late afternoon when they are tired and ready to quit. The FBI isn’t interested in helping at all. Dateline turns down an offer to interview us.

“Will there be a Clarice Starling come to save you?” The killer asks my son. “No, I don’t think so.”

I woke up from this nightmare around two AM and then lay there reliving it for who knows how long. When I went back to sleep, I dreamed that my elderly landlady had died and I had to find a new residence. I moved in with a seemingly pleasant man and his wife, who actually have their tenants unwittingly sign a life insurance policy along with the lease. Then they butcher them. This nightmare ends with me locked in my room and the man and woman coming up the stairs for me.

In between all these bad dreams, I kept waking up periodically simply due to the lightness of my sleep. As the air conditioner cooled the room, the wooden doors in the room would crack or there would be a popping sound in the walls. Sometimes it actually sounded as if someone had opened the bedroom door, and I’d wake with a start. My groggy sleeplessness also brought on a headache which lingers even now, several hours later.

Hour after hour passed like this. I’d wake up and look at the clock, seemingly always in hour increments: 12:10, 1:00, 2:08, 3:12. Until finally I got up to get ready for work around 4:30.

What a dreadful night. I can only hope I’ll be tired enough to sleep better tonight. And may it be a dreamless sleep.

All night I dreamed of games. First, I was playing some sort of charades-style guessing game with my best friend and his wife. My friend cheated blatantly and without any attempt to disguise his behavior, but in the dream I laughed about it. This dream went on repetitively for what seemed like hours.

In the second dream, I was an audience member on the show “Wheel of Fortune.” There seemed to be only two older women as contestants. Both were probably in their seventies and reminded me of the cranky lunchladies in all the school cafeterias in which I have ever eaten: large, gray, wig-like hairdos, floral-print silk blouses, and a grim wart on the side of their cheek.

The two women were competing to guess the title and author of a book. Enough letters were turned over that the book title was apparent (I don’t remember it), but the author was more ambiguous.

Nonetheless, one of the old women tried to solve the puzzle; however, she missed the author’s name the first time she tried, then blurted out the correct answer after already getting it wrong. The other old lady smugly told Pat Sajaks that she would like to solve the puzzle, and she did so, correctly identifying the author as “Barbara Walrus.”

The two old women then got in an unseemly argument, the first old woman commenting harshly that the other would not have guessed the puzzle if she had not inadvertently blurted out the correct answer after it was too late.

Pat tried to defuse the situation by asking the women to tell the audience a little about themselves. The first woman, still hurt from losing so embarrassingly, merely told where she was from, the name of her husband and kids, and that she was a lifelong homemaker. The second woman, quite proud of herself, told Pat that she did a passable impression of Marlene Dietrich singing the old German drinking song, “Lili Marlene.”

And then she proceeded to offer an impromptu concert.

Let me just say, if our native language is the language in which we dream, German is not my native language. I’ve heard the song “Lili Marlene” many times, but even subconsciously I could not reproduce it as anything but gibberish, with the words “Lili Marlene” uttered at the appropriate place.

Nonetheless, the audience applauded respectfully when the the old woman finished her song.

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All week, I have dreamed about writing.

I can’t remember much about these dreams, except there is a desperate feeling to them. In the one dream I recall the best, I am back in school again. Grade level, or even my age, is kind of ambiguous. I feel like I am 33, but my classmates are all young pre-teen children.

I have to write a paper and deliver a report on a science topic that I find incredibly boring and incomprehensible. I don’t remember the topic, but it has something to do with plants. I procrastinate.

All night, I dream about trying to write this paper. There is nothing more to the dream than that. I worry and fret in my dream because I can’t write this paper. When I finally become desperate to produce a finished paper, I write two pages, but it is crap plagiarized from my textbook. I decide it will have to do, because I am simply not able to do any better.

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I slept poorly last night.  In my dreams, I was helping to build a house for Habitat for Humanity, an activity completely at odds with my non-work ethic.  So all night long, I was pounding nails while family members, including my Grandpa, looked on.

The thunk, thunk, thunk of hammer on nail, nail on wood, became almost nightmarish, after awhile.  My Grandpa was proud of me, though.  He said, “I taught you how to hold that hammer.”

You have to hold a hammer low on the handle, so when you swing it the hammer provides much of the weight that drives the nail; hold a hammer too high and you are driving a nail only with muscle power.  My grandpa taught me that when Dad, Mom, and I were building our house on Pine Avenue in Parkersburg.

At one point I took a break and wiped away the sweat from my face.  I was shirtless and pretty buff, practically a teenager again.

As I rested, my aunt Stella offered me a cigarette, a Lucky Strike.   Aunt Stella was weeping; in my dream, her husband, Harry, had died recently.  In reality, he is still alive, but very sick with a heart condition that probably will kill him sooner, rather than later.

I lit the cigarette with a match.  The first puff was heady and rich; the smoke flowed into my lungs smooth as if someone were pulling a silk handkerchief down through my air passages.

I went back to pounding nails, the cigarette drooping from my mouth.

I woke up from all this pounding at a little before three, and I could not go back to sleep.  I lay awake until 4:30, at which time I got up to prepare for work.

In my lungs was the ghostly feeling of cigarette smoke.  I can still feel it.

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Now that I have written my one obligatory political post for this month, I can return to writing about the things that are truly important.  Dreams, life, and literature.

In my dream, I am walking along the bank of the James River in Richmond. The River is high and muddy. The evening grows late. As I walk, the sun begins to set, but instead of turning back, I continue on.

Eventually, the city gives way to woods. The banks on either side of the river are heavily wooded, and the ground is growing rockier and steeper. Soon I am clambering over rocks, climbing away from the water’s edge towards the forest that is now above me. Still, I don’t turn back. Night is coming on fast.

By the time I reach the top, it is fully dark. There is no moon. I can hear the river below, rushing on its rapid course. The James is fairly shallow, so you might think of a river you have seen that is wide, but whitecapped with rapids.

On top of the cliff, I discover that I have come upon someone’s home and yard. An old fifties-model Chevy sits in the packed dirt of the driveway. In fact, the house itself appears to be old, what in my mind I describe as a “clapboard house.” I feel as if I have travelled back in time fifty years. I debate whether to go to the door and knock. There is a light coming from what I presume to be the living room.

I have to pee. I really have to pee. So right there in the yard, in full view of the large window from which the light emanates, I unzip and piss in the yard. What a relief.

Then, a woman appears in the window. She looks middle-aged and plainly attractive, though I can’t see her face well. She sees me pissing in her yard, and I have the impression that she is gawping at my penis, but I cannot stop the flow now. I had to go too badly to stop it now. Also, though I am frightened and conscious of the need to hurry up and zip up and skedaddle, I admit to feeling a rush of pleasure at exposing myself before this woman.

As I finish and zip up, she turns to someone in the house I can’t see and makes a comment. I can’t hear her. The person in the room must have said something, because she smiles as if he made an absolutely hilarious joke. Then she turns back to the window and resumes watching me, smiling to herself.

For a second, I stand there undecided. Should I go back the way I came, or follow the driveway to the road? I can feel my rising frustration with my indecision. If there is a man inside, he may even now be loading his shotgun.

With that thought, I turn and run towards the cliff where I came up from the river. The climb down is steep and slippery. I am pretty well bruised and scraped when I reach leveler ground.

I have a long way to go back, too. I start to think I should have gone the other way after all. “It’s always better to go forward than back,” I say to myself. I contemplate climbing the rocks again.

At this point, I wake up. It’s about 3:45 in the morning, and I really am about to burst. So I use the bathroom, and when I get back into bed I try to pick up the dream where I left off. I can get the feel of it. I can easily picture myself standing there looking up at the rocks, thinking I should climb them again. But I don’t know what happens next.