Seventies dream landscape

31 August 2011 07:52 AM Categories: Animal/vegetable/mineral

I woke up at 1 a.m. this morning after dreams of being driven along winding roads by Brandywine Creek. I went to the (non-existent) museum there by myself, admired how it had changed, expanded, become more realistic since my childhood. I ran into high school friends. I became trapped there, couldn't remember how to get back, and took a bus to Lovering Avenue. I was going to Gallucio's or to the apartment my mother and I lived in years ago. Somewhere within the dream, my husband and I were fighting or he was angry with me and I was defending myself.

I woke up thinking of choices and communication and how to do things better. I tossed and turned and when the boy came into our room, I changed venues and covered my head under his sheets before my brain quieted and I went to sleep again.

Other peoples' dreams are often boring, especially when we don't know the scene (water flowing over rocks on the Brandywine, the paths alongside, the old bridges and the race, the cars parked on clear spring afternoons with blaring music, the Victorian era zoo with its sad roaring lion). I apologize. And why was my mind resurrecting this world from childhood, from a long-ago time?

My mother is in town and we picked the boy up from his first day of first grade yesterday. Ah. When I was in first grade, we lived on Lovering Avenue, so near to Brandywine Park. Life was glass-fragile. I slept in a winterized side porch without any heat. My bed was skinny and I had a Mickey Mouse blanket, red underneath with various illustrations of the mouse on the white top surface. I had asthma attacks in the middle of the night in that room and bad dreams about intruders. In the summer I drank chamomile iced tea and plucked Italian cherry tomatoes off the plants out back. I practiced kissing on the pipes that ran from floor to ceiling in our kitchen. I played with the kid down the street whose mother had a greenhouse, an amazing thing in an urban neighborhood. I had a birthday party with a piñata and pin the tail on the donkey and one of our cat had kittens, while another cat was hit by a car and another chewed out his neutering stitches and died and yet another didn't make it out of kittenhood because of anemia.

On my first day of first grade, I didn't come home on time and my mother called the police. There was a squad car, an angry worried mother. My school was four blocks away from home, though now it is hard to imagine allowing an almost-six-year old to walk that distance alone. The girl I whose home I did walk to locked me out of her house so that I couldn't call home.

It was a time of six-year olds in empty houses, walking by themselves down the street, of frustrated mothers and seventies poverty.

Does that explain my dreams?

Maybe.

There are some days when I just don't feel like sharing my prompts and this is one of them. My writing is OK enough, I guess, though it's often hard for me to tell in the moment. But it's not going up here.

Images (all posted before): Me, Frank the cat, and Christmas, Lovering Avenue, 1975-77.

Tags: dreams, childhood, first grade

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