DREAM, AUGUST 24,
2012 430am
I’m up before dawn because of a dream again.
In it, April and I were walking along a railroad track
towards a station. We had just come off some adventure and were talking about
it as we walked. I don’t know why we were walking the way we were; only that we
were walking away from the streets, cars and grocery stores behind us. The
adventure we had just come from had involved them all, and the experience was
fresh in our minds.
As we walked – it seemed to be in the late morning – I saw
someone approaching. It was a woman, dressed in a black overcoat. As she
approached, I could tell she was a larger woman, with white hair. As she was
about to pass, I jumped in front of her and looked hard at her face.
“Gramma Marley?” I almost yelled at her in surprise and
happiness.
She looked at me as if she had almost hoped to walk by
without saying anything. Nor did she smile at first. She did not look very
flourishing; her skin had an almost grey pallor, and her eyes were likewise nowhere
near their normal sparkle. However, she hugged me back when I hugged her. I
introduced her to April and she said something about “lovely girl”. The three
of us began to walk back to the train station to where I had been inexplicably
walking with April.
“How have you been, Gramma? What have you been up to?”
I remember more the feeling of the conversation than the
conversation itself, but we talked of her life, and how she was now back here
looking around, for lack of a better term. She was looking in on her relatives.
In the process of speaking about her life, she spoke of a song she had listened
to during what she called “her divorce”, and how this song had cheered her. She
spoke of friends and experiences she had had in her life. As she spoke, her skin
got lighter, and her eyes began to sparkle like I remember them doing when I
knew her here. She looked like herself again as we sat in that lonely train
stop (it looked like a bus stop, really). The feeling was light and cheery.
April was sitting next to me, commenting and asking
questions from time to time. Suddenly I saw something move in the near distance
behind Gramma, about 30 yards away.
I was addressing Gramma and was in mid-sentence, but I
suddenly shouted, “Grampa!”
He was peering at us from a ways behind Gramma Marley. Only
his head was visible because he had walked up an embankment on the other side
of the station and the tracks from where we sat.
I ran over there, feeling badly and, to an extent, feeling
Grandma’s own feelings about cutting our conversation short so abruptly and
leaving here there alone with April. Her feelings were that it was expected
because it was Grandpa, and that is indicative of how it always was in her life
with him; always seeming to play second fiddle, never getting the attention she
probably deserved as the strong personality she was. However, she had
ultimately made a measure of peace with it, understood it, and was beginning to
forgive it easily.
Grandpa looked fantastic. He was young as I had never seen
him. He wore his black-rimmed glasses, and I think a leather jacket. His blue
jeans were rolled up at the cuffs. We hugged each other and I smelled tobacco,
as I remember smelling on him as a child. We spoke fondly, smiling and laughing
regularly in our conversation. I don’t remember the specifics of it. He was not
“with” Grandma, not at this point, but they kind of travelled together. We
smiled at one another with the utmost familiarity and regard.
I saw that he had a cigarette in his hand, still smoking.
“Grandpa, I always knew you as a smoker,” I had said in an observational,
matter-of-fact tone. I had said it off the cuff, and I realized that it could
be taken as an accusation as soon as I said it. It was not meant to be, nor was
it taken by Grandpa as one, I could tell. However, all he did in response was
make a very funny face, flick the cigarette off the tracks we had been standing
upon, and turn and start jogging away down the tracks. I watched him go,
smiling.
Returning to Gramma and April in the bus/train stop booth,
we continued our conversation. Gramma affirmed that she and Grandpa were not as
they had been in life, but that they were never too far apart. I got the
impression that this was more Gramma’s doing than Grampa’s, but that there was
some peace around the arrangement, for now.
We continued talking about Gramma’s life, remembering this
and that, talking about people she had known and people we had both known. As
we spoke, a few others gathered; the ones about whom we spoke. None of them
looked especially familiar to me, but their countenances were all smiles, like
old friends at a reunion.
Eventually it was time to go. I looked at Gramma. She fairly
glowed, so different from when I first saw her. She thanked me, and I said we’d
have to do it again sometime, talk about her life. She demurred, as Grandma
always did when faced with a compliment, saying something like she wasn’t that
important. I insisted, and we parted with a hug. And then she was gone.
As April and I stood there, I saw a crowd of people
approach, almost innumerable. We were no longer in a bus/train station, but in
something like an airport. They were coming down escalators on both sides of
us. Some of the people looked familiar as they filed past, but most did not.
But what came to me as I watched them pass was significant. The thought was,
and I expressed it as absolute truth to April, “Every relationship we have in
this life will be accounted for. How we treat every single person we run across
matters somehow in the end. And a relationship can be something as simple as a
nod and a wave on the freeway as we pass someone, or as complex as family ties.
They all matter. And it’s important to talk about our relationships, particularly
those of our family who have passed on,” I explained. “When they hear their
names, they always come around to hear what is said. It is part of their work
as a progressing soul, part of their judgment and glory, to hear stories of
their mortal existence from the perspective of those that interacted with them
here.” This felt like an important message I was to take away from this
experience.
I awoke not long after this realization, and felt that both
Grandpa and Grandma were near. I felt them standing just to the west of me.
Humorously enough, in the Native American tradition I currently follow, this is
the direction of “The Ancestors”. It seems we get communication in the voices
we can understand.
