A Memory Dreamscape

A good enough dinner last night.  The cat was extremely vocal but had little to say about her backstairs adventure.  Afterwards I got the telephones re-installed in the bedroom and set up a new television (Magnavox, with only a power switch on the frame, to replace the Samsung, with multiple light-touch tuning controls that he'd press at random and lock out the cable signal altogether.  Note to electronics manufacturers -- simplicity isn't a bad thing and advanced features aren't always your friend). 

And after that another long tour through the past.  The conversations are getting stranger, particularly as he loses track of identities, and one person blends into another.  Time shifts out from under you as well.  So, at one point, there we were at lunch after my mother's funeral.  Except that his mother's live-in maids were there, because suddenly it was his mother's funeral.  And his father disliked my father-in-law, right?  Well, actually that was my mother, because when my parents first met my prospective in-laws, my grandfather had been dead for 32 years.  And I was in grade school when my mother died, wasn't I?  Well, in fact I was a little older -- 43, in fact, but we won't lean on that too heavily.  No, I was already working, I tell him.

People and events shift the way they do in dreams.  You're at my mother's funeral, and then suddenly it's 1942 and you're going down to Whitehall Street with him and his father to meet Commander Sharty and get him enlisted in the Coast Guard.  You follow along as best you can.  Occasionally you feel a little like Wile E. Coyote, because the conversation and the terrain have turned 90 degrees left with no warning, and you're standing there in midair, thinking that if you looked down, that would be bad.  So you turn left and try to catch up.  It beats falling.

Just like in dreams, there's a logic underneath the chaos.  Take my mother, for example.  She was a complex personality -- too complex for him to handle all at once, now.  So she gets divided out into her different aspects.  The difficult, spiky side of her becomes his father, who didn't hit it off with my father-in-law.  The side that cared for him becomes his mother.  The side that had a sometimes challenging marriage and was ill for a long time becomes his sister.  The side that took good care of me is still my mother.  He looks at an old picture of her every morning.  Things were good between them, weren't they?  Yes, they were.  There were never any problems or conflicts, were there?  No, there weren't.  Not any more.  What would be the point?

A common pattern -- the details shift, and so does the cast of characters, but the underlying emotion is stable, and sound, and important.  The conversation descends through all these swirling people and events and lands back in Atlantic Beach 40 years ago.  After dinner we'd ride our bicycles on the boardwalk, and that was good.  And did we build models together?  Yes, we did.  And he used to love to swim -- always far out, past the jetties, so that it worried other people.  And there was that Columbus Day weekend when it was incredibly warm, and we were able to go swimming, and the water was so clear you could see all the way down to the bottom.  Yes, he remembers all that.

And those are good memories.

And sometimes it's still so clear that you can see all the way down.