Dream flash, February 1989, weeks after my father’s death at sixty-nine: our backyard in Sacramento, the astringent floral of cut grass permeating the summer air, under a sprawling valley sky whose blue air breathed like a Vermeer still life, our German Shepherd circling the pussy willow, our Siamese cat cushioned on an aromatic cedar window seat, and my mother, young, curious, sliding open the screen door to call us in for lunch. In the dream I am low to the Spring earth, a toddler, gazing upward at my father, my hand reaching up to his, and in my knowing mind I think to him You have to go away now, don’t you. He had been gazing at nothing across the backyard, mournfully, yet attentive of me, but at my voice he turned his head gently, gazing farther away as if facing a summons, and there is discomfort, apprehension, a tired foreboding in his whispered reply Yes.
As often from these dreams I awake startled and vaguely sad, for it was only a dream. I knew he had to go, and he knew he had to go, and for this visit I was cast as a toddler with insight, but in the dream my father was a young husband with a toddler, as perhaps deeply in dusty memory I’ve seen him, or caressed timeless photographs of us, a young family standing before a pine sapling newly planted in our fresh suburb, awaiting fulfillment of all the promises.
Now I am many years older than my father in the dream. If I was the man I am now embodying the child in the dream, to his gloomy yes I would have soothed, But you’re released…
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