I Dream

I dream water is suddenly pooling on my kitchen floor and the wall to the dining room is soaked with it.  Dashing up the stairs to look for the source, I enter a room I've forgotten about altogether, with curtains from decades ago and the houseplants I favored then. In here the water damage is so great the plaster is peeling away from the timbers beneath. “What happened here?” is all I can think – until I suddenly spot her stretched out atop a moldy chest of drawers: my long-mourned cat Charlotte, (as a baby above) last seen lying on the warm stones just outside my back door and gone for good an hour later.“Oh where have you BEEN, Charlotte?” I cry, reaching to cup her small triangular chin in my hands. “In fields and meadows,” she anwsers.  "Alcohol came into it too."I laugh in the dream, not at the fact that she could talk but at the frank admission in what she has said and am just about to yell the happy news of her return to the other family members now tiptoeing in when my attention goes instead to the houseplants. They look like they need water but can it be that they're alive at all in a room not entered for decades? Charlotte looks like she could use some water, yet she too is down but not out. She is only smaller, flatter, merely diminished, like those promotional sponges that sometimes come in the mail with realtors’ names on them, flat as postcards on dry land but swelling into lovely fat things once you put them in water.And so there it is: a dream of a forgotten chamber with both too much water and too little, where things that should have perished live on. New Orleans 2005 was under this dream I think. Also Haiti 2010. Also all our yearning for those now gone from the shaky old house we call Earth, leaky as it, and imperiled.

Long Time Passing

Rain again jeesh. I'm sitting here watching a ladybug trundle around in the vase of peonies I brought in quick before they get all slashed and flattened by the downpour. Thinkin' back to a week ago when Annie got that diploma under the very same trees I once stood under myself, clapping  for the boy who would one day be her father. Ah the years do compresses themselves at times, like those novelty sponges that are flat as pancakes 'til you plunge them in water.... All these guys look young and fresh and adorable but it's the half-glimpsed one with the dimples who caught my heart and kept it.

Where Have All the Flower (Children) Gone?

All Souls Day

I had a dream last night in which I had just died. I was dashing around - flying actually, over scenes like the one above, recently visited - and so didn’t realize I was dead until I swooped back over my body sitting in my same clothes from that morning, seat belt still on, so to speak.

I didn't look dead - just kind of deflated is all, like our little cat looked in the gutter after that car killed her, and all I could think was "So wait that anxious get-it-done, get-it-done girl wasn't even ME?"?

It wasn’t a sad dream though really, not like the one I had about my mother a couple of months after she died. In that one we were at the cemetery, the whole noisy family. I was scooping dirt from the grave to take home with me and my cousin Carolyn was saying "What are you going to do with THAT?” My husband was shivering in his best suit and Cousin George was just wading over to him: “Ever hear of an OVERCOAT?" he wryly remarked, only all that really happened. The dream was that my mother was there with us.

“Gosh isn't it cold!” she said. “I can’t wait to get back to the house! Do you have somebody there making the coffee and setting out the food?”

“Oh Mom I’m sorry but you... you can’t come. You have to go lie down there,” I said in the dream, pointing to the box, pointing to the open hole, and woke feeling about as desolate as ever I have felt in this life.

The other day I saw my former neighbor in a book store. Her husband was the heart of our town before he died in his sleep in a few summers back. He used to cut his grass in the pitch dark if the sun dared go down, using his headlights so he could see. He'd rive through the downtown in his pickup, yelling jokey hellos to people every 30 feet. He crashed a Halloween party we gave once; appeared in a gorilla suit, joined the dancing briefly, made apelike gestures and, even grabbed a sandwich before leaving without ever opening his mouth to say who he was.

Seeing his widow I suddenly realized something. “You know what I just remembered Joanna? I dreamed about Dave last night!”

“Oh! You did really?” she said with a face of inexpressible longing. “I haven’t dreamed of him in so long! How is he?”

The longer I live the more I think that last remark reveals the larger truth: when we leave here we don’t go lie down in a box. We take off our seatbelts and fly.

Gaudeamus Igitur

Italy Day 11: Being on a guided trip is like being a baby again: you HOPE your caregivers know you need a nap and a juice break; you HOPE they'll check to see that you’re still dry. Our caregivers do know all this and have handed us along from dawn to forenoon to golden gloaming with so many of our needs anticipated that I find myself released somehow to range in thought over all of my tiny life, remembering, and regarding anew, and looking forward.

 What I’m remembering today is what it was like to be 18 and beginning my second year at Smith College, when a girl named Vicki James arrived.  Dewey House, where we lived, was a tiny dorm, the place where my Aunt Julia had lived in her own time at Smith with her big sister (my future mom) just three dorms away. It is for me one of THE key places of my life, a stage upon which unfolded so many new thought and fresh insights, a place gracious and formal and fine, staid and timeless - until Vicki came and changed everything.

She knew History, and believed in History’s lessons. She also knew what fun was and she believed in beer. The above picture shows her blindfolded on the lawn in front of Dewey House before the Freshman Sophomore picnic that ended with one of us spraining an ankle and another getting wedged inside one of the sinks at the Davis Student Center. It was Vicki who found out we could drink 35-cent beers in downtown Northampton. She liked the townie boys and so I liked them too, and the nights we walked down to see them we'd roll back up the hill toward campus singing the ancient Latin drinking song she taught us all.  “Gaudeamus Igitur dum Juvenes” it began. Let us rejoice now while we are young because “Where are they who were in the world before us?” As if we didn't know. We knew all right, but we didn't think for a minute that we would ever be anything other than young, with firm strong limbs like the marble limbs of the Greek and Roman youth we saw in our textbooks.

I had my first apartment ever with Vicki that summer while I worked and she took the courses at Harvard that would let her finish Smith in three years’ time.  A week into our living in that tiny Cambridge house I met the boy who would become my husband. Vicki went on to the PhD program at Harvard; David, then a Senior there, went on to get his MBA at the B School just across the river. And I, who had so earnestly hoped to go to grad school too, instead became a teacher of Tenth, Eleventh and Twelfth graders and saw almost every value I had previously held turned on it head, in the best possible way. Those students changed me as much as Vicki had and when the letter came at last admitting me to my own Masters Program I tore it up, taught five more years, and four years after that began writing the newspaper column that has aimed always and only to delight a weary public.

Well, Vicki came a few days ago to see her two old friends in Bellagio. She is called Victoria now, Dottorressa Munsey in fact and has lived here in Northern Italy for the last quarter century. She and I walked the hills above the city while David toured the Villa Carlotta and then three old friends ate dinner together.

Our blindfolds are off now and we all see more clearly. And if we are old, yet are we happy.

So here below is old Dewey House that gave birth to our young dreams; and below that and larger for the beauty of the photo the clear light from our hotel room that helped me remember it.

 

Leavin' on a Jet Plane

The block party looked like such fun last night but we couldn’t go.

Our girl Annie wrote us all an email to say she wanted to see us.

More to the point she wanted to feed us because that’s what Annie does. She knew we were leaving today for Italy and I guess she just wanted to collect all her family members up and look at us all again.

I brought a very old photo album to her place to show them all, a pictorial account of my grandfathers' wedding trip from 1903.

I say 'his' : His bride was along for the ride too of course but because she died at 31 I have trouble thinking of her as a grandmother.

I think of her only as Carrie, who I have heard about all my life. the young mother who died of uremic poisoning in her fifth pregnancy in six years, Carrie with the blue eyes, Carrie who we named our own first child for.

It happens that I have all the letters this honeymooning couple sent home in 1910 and so last night I asked 'our' Carrie if should I take my new silver Sharpie and just carefully print some of the text of those letters inot the book, to illustrate various phrases of the wedding trip based on what they said about it.

"Hmmmm, I don’t think so Mum,” she said in her careful and diplomatic way. “I mean, this is so beautiful as it is, the old black paper, the leather covers. You wouldn’t want to take anything as new as Sharpie to it, would you?"

That’s the difference between us I guess. They are all aesthetically tuned, these three children of ours; they love a thing by leaving it alone. I am historically tuned; I love a thing by learning all about it and trying to pass on what I learned. I want everyone in our family to know our story and well - this album has no markings on it all. You can slide the photos out yes but even they have no writing on the back. Who will remember, I worry? Who will know and remember what happened to us?

That there was this early death and a baby buried in a mother’s arms?

That there was poetry and the Irish Virus which means drinking?

That my father didn’t even ask to see me when I was born and had been gone throughout the pregnancy anyway and then stayed gone for the rest of his life?

Who will remember my grandfather’s sadness? My mother’s willed jauntiness in the face of a society that shunned and feared her as an abandoned woman?

Who will remember and why can’t you write in an album and leave your own imperfect handwriting as part of the record because you will soon one day be dust yourself?

But my judgment is always shaky. And come to think of it my three children do know the story. Annie knows every least detail of it, right down to maiden names and birth dates. Carrie protects the artifacts and reveres them so much you can see it in the way her very hands look as she holds them.

Even our son knows it and talks about it in a very different way: when he was a college senior he did this charcoal at the top here. It is a huge canvas, five feet wide and three feet tall and it depicts the four children at a window just weeks before their mother's death would forever mar them.

He worked from a tiny photo just like the photos in the wedding trip album. In it you can see the shadow of a tree falling over their faces. You can see the shadow of the hat worn by the young soon-to-be widowed father who snapped it. I mean you couldn't think up an image so filled with such foreboding.

This grandfather, this photographer, was not a drinker himself, any more than our abandoned mother or our abandoned aunt who helped raise us and yes her husband drank and left us too so it was deja-vu all over again.

My grandfather was too nervous to let alcohol carry him away. He was like me in that respect and in many other respects and I know this because I lived with him. In our abandoned state we lived with in his house, my sister Nan, and Mom and I, and when he died we had to find someone new to take us and that’s where Aunt Grace and Uncle Jack came in.

Well enough of all this old sadness. I'm getting on a plane with David this evening even though as the classic child-of-a-drinker I distrust fun and fear loss of control…. Still, all of Northern Italy awaits and if a person can’t relax and enjoy 16 days there, I guess she can't enjoy anything.

I'll close with this image of Michael and Carrie from 1899. He is the one with his hands on her mortal head. She is the one already engulfed by waves.

I know but who else knows that the woman next to him perished in the great Influenza epidemic of 1918? I know but who else knows that the man next to her died three weeks before the Armistices, just two months after his wedding day?

And if we didn't - if someone didn't - know all their stories, who would they be to us but strangers on a beach?