A Dream

A Dream

When I began this blog…I can’t remember the year…I wanted to recreate some of the shared writing of the Journal Workshops I gathered since the early ‘80s.   It had been nearly 35 years, wherever I lived, enjoying and goodness knows learning from the stories and histories of the women who came to write with me.  But life changed after my husband died and I stopped giving them, going on.

Still, missing those shared stories and reflections, I thought to go back to words with others, hoping to have them share with me again, this time here.  If you read these posts, you will rarely see the comments and stories that come back to me, for often they are sent by email; only a few comment on the blog page.  A single word, sometimes, will spark a memory or feeling or emotion or opinion and return in someone else’s message.

It's a single word or short phrase, in fact, on which those earlier gatherings worked, opening our word-hoards (as the much-vaunted Beowulf writer called it) in voice or on paper.  I was reminded of that this morning when I woke out of a dream, though I remembered only about half of it.  A Dream was one of our most prolific cues. (The others which brought about pages and pages were The House on the Corner, My Grandmother’s Hands, and The Red Dress…just in case you want to try them out.)

I don’t know what this dream means, only that it was populated by (indeed initiated by) my cousin and included some others totally unrelated to her.  I would love to hear your thoughts about it; hence I share it here.

The first thing I remember:  walking into the room of a house that only vaguely looked like my cousin Gloria’s last house nearby, and picking up the telephone (the old desk kind) to hear her voice on the answering machine.  A whole message as if she had just left it.  I was startled to hear her voice so strongly and turned to someone just behind me to say so.  “How can this be? She’s gone.” 

Even before I’d moved back here, Gloria and I had had lunches and stay-overs and visits…a retired designer, she was one who came to look at this house when I was considering buying it (she frowned).  Over the years, her early health issues had begun to limit her life, but not our connection, until it brought it to a close a few years ago.  What has bothered me ever since then was that, though I knew her children, I’d had to hear about her death third-hand, and, it being the pandemic era, been told they would hold a memorial later, when possible.  I didn’t hear about that, either.  So perhaps you could say that her voice on that dream phone, so present-tense, was once more making a necessary connection, even after this long.

In any case, the next remembrance of the dream was Gloria herself, coming in from somewhere and sitting down with me to chat about family and life and sewing and cooking (she was superb at both).  She appeared in her beginning-to-be-infirm state of being, so the suddenly busy activity around her kept us separate from that.

Which included, strangely, a large table in a bare connecting room (never would she have had a room of that emptiness) where some men…one in particular whom I actually know (she didn’t) had turned into a chef in a chef’s jacket and small hat and was making a special sandwich.  I asked what the piece he was adding to it was, and, as he answered in French, I thought I heard him name a thin piece of rare roast.  No, he chided me, and then I saw it was a glistening slice of Emmenthaler or good Swiss.

When he and the others began to eat the sandwiches, I went over to ask for some for Gloria, too, for I knew she would enjoy it.  He had half a half of his left, and seemed reluctant to give it up.

But no matter…for then I realized, turning, that Gloria had left the house, and I began, with some women we had been chatting with, to look for her.  Not in front, not in back…there was a pool area…perhaps she was sitting there?  Yes.

Did I reach her? I have forgotten that part.  Once again, however, she seemed to disappear.  Still bemused, I woke then, this dream (so unusually) staying with me, even in bits and pieces.

I do miss Gloria, her company and her family connections to our long past.  She was in age exactly midway between my mother and me.  Her father was my grandmother’s nephew.  Her sister Adele was one I admired for her working life in the City.  Her letters and phone calls with relatives still in the prettiest part of  Italy…it was she who told me about them; in the years when she and her husband were able, they traveled every year, almost, to visit them. 

Her wall of our older relatives, installed house after house in the same way, was the backdrop for our visits in her family room.  Always her superb sewing (she, not I, had inherited the needlework talents of our foremothers and gone beyond many of them)…she taught me the trick of altering slacks (a need we shared, for different reasons), and her way of replicating, on her machine or with needles of all kinds, any high-priced garment she saw herself in, a marvel. 

Her recipes, old on thin paper, new cut neatly from magazines, or reinvented, all shared, her stack of instant appetizer-dinners from Trader Joe’s, and the tiny intricate cookies she baked for holidays…nothing like that giant dream sandwich…

All stay with me. As do the life lessons she passed on, on widowhood.

It being Christmas day, it seems the more poignant, this dream. Does it to you?