Braver Than You Thought

Here we are, nearly through the month of March, overwhelmed by global news of catastrophe and war, not to mention a bit weary of rain and wind and the gloomy weather inside my own head.

The other night I had one of those dreams I used to have all the time, maybe because the dream is the story of how my life used to be. I was alone in an old Northeastern city...h-m-m-m...seemed a lot like Syracuse. I was trying to figure out what I would do with my life and where I would live (no biggie), and I was desperately trying to call someone with my emergency dime (remember those?), but of course the pay phone was out of order.

Somehow I found my way to a dreary brick building with a vacant studio apartment above the neon-lit window of a seedy bar on the verge of out-of-business. The building was the type owned by an absent slum-landlord who rented to students, and I supposed I would enroll in school and learn how to do something and then find a job -- not that this would be an inevitable sequence of events!

What stalled me was not the fact that I had no rent or tuition money or any clue what I wanted to do, but rather the distressing realization that I had traveled back into a period of my life that was (mercifully) over, and that as depressing and miserable as it was when I was young, this whole business would be awfully rough on a person of 60! Darkness was coming and shadows swept across the brick building and the street was abandoned and the neon light glowed red, the loneliest red I ever saw, and I had that sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. I was lost and unredeemable.

And then I woke up.

But I have to ask myself: why am I having dreams like this now? I am so far beyond all this stuff...am I not?

The answer is, well, not really, or not always. I have a home and a comfortable life, and I am loved and grateful, and I am often filled with a sense of light and joy...yes, truly! But still there is a gnawing feeling sometimes that I have not accomplished much, or that the train to some vital destination left the station years ago. Without me.

Perhaps it is all about coming to terms with being older. One's fantasies constrict a bit. The list of things I will never do reads more like a bureaucrat's final report than a summary of wishes yet to be fulfilled.

A few days ago I went to visit my mother (who lives in an assisted living facility about 200 miles away) and this alone could go some way towards explaining my frame of mind. She is nearly 90, becoming increasingly bewildered and batty and...well, elderly. Elderly in the way that makes you sad. I've talked at times in this blog about my mother, her past and present, and the difficult dynamics of our family. It was tough and it was tragic, and even now, being with this small, shrunken, feeble version of my mother can be emotionally exhausting. I do my best with it.

Anyway, I was driving her back from having her hearing aid checked when she mentioned that she'd had a nightmare that she was driving a car, and since she doesn't know how to drive, she was terrified, and she crashed it in an alley.

"I never learned how to drive a car," she said, although I certainly knew this. I remember her taking me all over the city on foot, or sometimes the subway, or those old trolleys that she loved.

"I never drove in my whole life," she went on. "I never learned to ride a bicycle. Or roller skate. I never did any of those things. I was always such a timid-cat."

This made me think about the story of why she never learned to play piano either; supposedly the piano got chopped up for fire wood.

"Did you swim?" I asked, since my own inability to do so has always been a personal frustration.

"No, I didn't know how to swim," she replied. "But I went in the water and held onto the ropes. Oh, I loved going in the water! The ocean, I mean. Not a pool. The ocean at Coney Island! I loved the ocean because of the waves."

She liked the waves? Wow. I personally never saw her go in the water in my entire life. Come to think of it, if we ever went to the beach, I don't even recall her being there. Sometimes I wonder what really happened and what didn't. Or what did and has long been lost.

But more interesting to me was hearing the litany of all those basic things my mother never learned to do, and I started ruminating about how so much of this not-knowing-how was passed along to her kids.

The "timid-cat" phrase was interesting too...most of the never-doing was fear-based, and believe me, she diligently projected that fear onto her children. I guess it was her brand of caring? "

Don't run!" she used to say. "You'll fall down if you run!"

I ran anyway. I used to run around the block as fast as I could (hiding my scraped knees if I did fall down) and I ran around lakes and tracks and neighborhoods...even in sleet, and ultimately I ran away to California and discovered it was home.

And I raised a smart, brave daughter who knows how to do lots of things, swimming included.I even went to Istanbul.

So it's particularly annoying to be having those dreams again of fumbling in phone booths and looking for apartments...those days are behind me now. Right? Consider this blog post a momentary glitch.