Belonging

     Rejection. Who needs it? Mary Buckham says we do. In an interview I did with the accomplished writer and successful writing teacher, she spoke about dealing with rejection and managing the uncertainty of a writer’s life. She shared an encouraging reality: those challenges prove you’re in the game. You are truly in the business of writing. You have engaged the clutch, the car can move forward.

     When she told of losing one of her sons to SIDS, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, and how she had to follow her dream of writing not only to fulfill herself, but for her son and what his dreams might have been, tears welled in my eyes. And a dormant bulb ticked on in my mental chandelier.

     Of course, pursuing her dream also included her five other children, as they were there for the sacrifices, balances, compromises, collaborations, late dinners, and undone laundry that is part of having two artists for parents. Yet, ardently, rigorously structuring her life in order to write was directly related to honoring her son.

     Am I respecting Rosie by living my dream? We were sisters yet I don’t even know what her dream was. She checked out at the age of forty-nine years and four days, over16 years ago. She had worked on Alaskan fishing boats, in a busy studio as a photographer, and was in optician school when she died. She had drifted, looking, never seeming to find an answer. What did she give up on? And why? Do I honor her by staying the course, no matter how difficult? The African folktale, “The Cowtail Switch,” says a person is not really dead as long as they are remembered. Does that go for dreams too?

     My father died relatively young, a bit shy of age sixty-six, the decades of smoking had done irreparable damage by the time he quit in his early sixties. He resented quitting, actually, but his emphysema gave him no choice by then. What about his dreams? He gave up on a dream of professional golfing in order to take care of his wife and three children. At one time, he was a ‘scratch’ golfer, meaning he had a zero handicap, meaning he was really good. I shake my head remembering one occasion he tried to teach me a ‘natural’ swing when I was around thirteen. After a series of golf balls hit our Great Dane/Labrador dog, knocked over a couple tall droopy sunflowers, and ended up lost in the blackberry bushes, Dad gave up and went in the house. Do his and Rosie’s dreams live on in me when I pursue mine even though I can only guess at what theirs were?  

     My Mom was ninety-one when she died. She, and my dad, told me I could do anything, being President was just one option. She wanted to be a social worker. One of her teachers strongly encouraged Mom to go to college. Yes college was a nice idea – yet regular people got jobs and got married. Will I carry her dreams with me now that she has passed on by living mine fully, as she would want me to? Have I already done so without making the conscious connection, as I worked many years in social services and graduated from college in my forties.

    By living my dreams, pursuing heart-driven goals, and delving into what I feel passionate about, do those other peoples’ wishes find a path as well? Am I the vessel for more than just me?

     Storyteller and sublime harpist, Patrick Ball, tells about going to college in pursuit of a law degree. Then when his father died suddenly, he walked away from that legal career as he realized that law was his father’s dream; Patrick went looking for his own, and found it in music. Yet by doing so, did he carry his father’s even further?

     Grandpa Alfred, my Mom’s father, died at age thirty-nine of tuberculosis. In 1937, all that could be done then was put TB patients in a sanitarium and wait. Like Doc Holliday fifty years before him, there was no cure for TB. In fact, Doc was about the same age as Alfred. What a mysterious scourge TB was: Doc’s mother had also died of it.

    Dreams. Alfred married a French girl he met in eastern France where he was stationed in World War I. Big dreams when he brought her back to the U.S. four years later and started a family, as well as a furrier business in downtown Seattle. Then died when his children were thirteen, nine, and four. Dreams. My mother tells of the family moving to Cle Elum to be near the sanitarium; Mom, being the eldest, usually fixed dinner as her mother was over at the hospital every night till dusk. Then one evening, her mother came home, sat down on the porch step and remained there. Mom watched her mother through the screen door, then after a few minutes, she came out of the cabin. It took a moment or two before ma Grandmere’ quietly said, “He’s gone,” as she looked over across the field on the other side of the road. Wondering where the dream had gone?

   Dreams in the laboratory, dreams in the courtroom, dreams in the typewriter, dreams over in the next valley, dreams on the stage, dreams taking off on a journey, dreams unspoken in the secret place in one’s heart.

     Where do dreams go that are released, abandoned, forsaken, or denied? Are they inherited? Do they collect in a big pool somewhere? A gigantic cosmic canning jar?

     Can others’ dreams live on in me even if my dreams are different than theirs? Yet, maybe all dreams are much the same:  what makes us feel alive, what gives us hope, what compels us to tell the stories about them, what pulls our eyes to the horizon? What makes us aspire to better? What keeps us in the game? Dreams.