Last night I dreamed that I was in a take out restaurant in LA and could see the downtown skyline across a body of water. (My dreams rarely make any physical sense.) There were some kids and families from my work there as well. As we were watching, something happened. It might have been a plane but I don't remember the dream clearly enough. After whatever this act of terrorism was, the big cylindrical building downtown collapsed. I thought, here we go again. The people I was with didn't seem to know what to do. I was telling people that if they were staying where we were, they should close the windows to avoid the dust. Otherwise they should go home.
I've had at least one other dream about terrorist attacks recently. I never dreamed this kind of thing when I lived near NYC or when everything happened.
I did, however, have dreams after the destruction of the towers where I would be walking through the mall under one of the towers just like I always did when coming out from the PATH station on my way to work at Trinity. Everything was there but without other people. These were some of the few dreams I have had where things were physically in the right places. It wasn't spooky, but it was just as it had been.
There were visions as well. One was a quick flash of scripture on the Saturday before that infamous destruction. A group I sang with had just finished what had been an important performance for us on the Hudson side of the World Financial Center. I was standing at the entrance to the underground mall that I would pass through on my way to the PATH train home. I was talking to one of my older and closest friends whom I had just sung with as we prepared to part ways. She was telling me about changes in her life and decisions that she was preparing to make that would change things for both of us, including her anticipated departure from our current shared musical venture. I remember looking at the chunk of stone in the sunlight by the entrance behind her and a spot of scripture popped into my head. I thought of Jesus saying, "not one stone will be left on top of another." Three days later than would be literally, not just figuratively, true.
During my time working in lower Manhattan, the night before Easter was also a night of unusual thoughts. Although they were probably induced by the hysteria of the 10 day music marathon at Trinity that surrounded Holy Week, there was a certain theme. The night before my first Easter in 2001, I closed my eyes for the few hours of precious sleep to come. As I relaxed, I saw before my eyes the scroll work on the pillars inside St. Paul's Chapel growing and unfurling like a wondrous plant or a billowing cloud. The next year I had driven or walked around the pit that day before Easter. I saw what looked to me like layers of basement that remained with their edges scrappy and fibrous bits of metal splaying out. When I closed my eyes that night, the landscape of that pit was all around me, expanding and growing through my vision. In 2003 the scene was different. No longer mentally anchored in lower Manhattan, I saw the green shoots of new born plants from my morning's run, stretching and growing out, a young and vital green.
I don't know why I've been dreaming these things, or why I'm dreaming them now, but I've been in a horrible place during the day after these recent visions. This blog that no one reads is a place for me to let it all out, a place to wonder aloud, vent, ask why and try to find some resolution for myself.
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Christmas Closet
When I was home this past December, my stepmother assigned me the task of helping my dad go through and get rid of stuff in the closet of his office. When I think back to everything that happened during that vacation, the trips that I took, friends I saw, conversations I had or tried to have, my happiest thoughts are of time spent on that bloody closet.
My father's intellectual capacities seem to be declining quickly. I already knew that he could no longer remember phone conversations the that we have or even that they had happened after the fact. I was unprepared for just how much the present moment escapes him. Maybe it is not that the actual present moment escapes him. Rather, it is that he continues to exist almost solely in the present moment and has trouble remembering the ones just past.
Either way, conversations about anything but the distant past seemed to move at a glacial speed, if at all. Ask him what he was doing when President Roosevelt died and out comes a great story. Ask him what he had for dinner or just ordered at a restaurant and he has no idea.
It is with this in mind, that we ventured into his office. In addition to separating things for goodwill, one of the major jobs was to find and shred old financial documents. Once upon a time in the not too distant past, my father had a fair number of investments. In the process of his decline, he lost a lot of money. We don't know where it all went, but by the time we realized how bad things had gotten and my stepmother finally took over his finances a great deal had been lost to shady brokers, market declines, charities, political causes, vitamin salesmen, mail order smoked salmon and God knows what else. What was left to be gotten rid of were folders, binders and old cardboard boxes full of a paper trail of now lost wealth.
On days that I was home, the scene was set with myself alternately poking about in the closet and sitting on the floor shredding. My dad would sit in a chair slowly reading through a box of old class notes. The shredder served as a rallying cry to my father. He would hear it and then come to the office to make sure that I wasn't destroying something important. Invariably he would ask me if I had brought the machine with me. I would tell him that it belonged to his wife, and he would settle into the chair to continue his slow sifting through notes and newspaper clippings.
There were some exciting finds in the labyrinthine closet. My favorite was a letter that he had written to his Aunt Mildred in 1960 when Kennedy was elected. There was also a great stash of forgotten food stuffs buried throughout the closet. I removed 3 expired tins of fish, 4 cans of soup, an expired jar of peanut butter, a box of instant mashed potatoes and a bag of potato chips, mercifully unopened. There was also a 6" X 12" filled entirely with return address labels and other thank you gifts from charities including six unopened American flags.
In the recycled envelopes with tax returns from the 1980's and canceled checks, I found record of a loan that my mother took on after the divorce. My father had cosigned. I also found a three ring binder detailing his father's slow decline from Alzheimer's. I could only read as far as the first letter from my uncle describing some of his symptoms and the infamous incident when he disappeared into the woods in Wisconsin, which resulted in a massive search with a local team and dogs. This was the end of my grandfather's summers in Wisconsin, one of the few places he remembered.
Amongst the recyclables were incredible stacks of investment and health magazines. At one time organized into labeled binders, all of them had my father's tell tale underlining throughout to show that he had read them and what he had found important or useful. I threw these magazines out with relish just as I shredded the record of the loan, I shredded the history of my father's obsessions: investment and avoiding his father's fate through living a better life. Anyone could see how futile both of those exercises turned out to be.
In the days that I worked and thinned out the closet, I got rid of a box of unused candles, bags of clothing, 4 trash bags of shredded papers and a few carloads of recycling. My dad got through about 1 box of old class notes. I kept asking him if he thought he would use it again. He would say, "Oh, I guess not." Then he would part with a few sheets of paper but decide to keep some others. At one point, I asked him what he was reading. He said is was an article about Nixon, but really it was about Bush II.
Somehow, even with the emotional baggage of so much that I was finding, this was a happy time for me. We were doing something together. We barely spoke, but it was alright. We've always been quiet, except for talking about political things or family gossip. This is just how we both are; sometimes socially inhibited but with a lot of pent up passion that spills forth into the things we really care about. We both like to putter, read and run. We enjoy planting things and looking at trees. Though not easily aroused, we both have volcanic tempers but love very deeply and loyally. These things seem to be the essence of my father, and I am sorry that it has taken his stripping bear, his slow deconstruction for me to realize just who he really is underneath all that he had seemed to be for so long.
My father's intellectual capacities seem to be declining quickly. I already knew that he could no longer remember phone conversations the that we have or even that they had happened after the fact. I was unprepared for just how much the present moment escapes him. Maybe it is not that the actual present moment escapes him. Rather, it is that he continues to exist almost solely in the present moment and has trouble remembering the ones just past.
Either way, conversations about anything but the distant past seemed to move at a glacial speed, if at all. Ask him what he was doing when President Roosevelt died and out comes a great story. Ask him what he had for dinner or just ordered at a restaurant and he has no idea.
It is with this in mind, that we ventured into his office. In addition to separating things for goodwill, one of the major jobs was to find and shred old financial documents. Once upon a time in the not too distant past, my father had a fair number of investments. In the process of his decline, he lost a lot of money. We don't know where it all went, but by the time we realized how bad things had gotten and my stepmother finally took over his finances a great deal had been lost to shady brokers, market declines, charities, political causes, vitamin salesmen, mail order smoked salmon and God knows what else. What was left to be gotten rid of were folders, binders and old cardboard boxes full of a paper trail of now lost wealth.
On days that I was home, the scene was set with myself alternately poking about in the closet and sitting on the floor shredding. My dad would sit in a chair slowly reading through a box of old class notes. The shredder served as a rallying cry to my father. He would hear it and then come to the office to make sure that I wasn't destroying something important. Invariably he would ask me if I had brought the machine with me. I would tell him that it belonged to his wife, and he would settle into the chair to continue his slow sifting through notes and newspaper clippings.
There were some exciting finds in the labyrinthine closet. My favorite was a letter that he had written to his Aunt Mildred in 1960 when Kennedy was elected. There was also a great stash of forgotten food stuffs buried throughout the closet. I removed 3 expired tins of fish, 4 cans of soup, an expired jar of peanut butter, a box of instant mashed potatoes and a bag of potato chips, mercifully unopened. There was also a 6" X 12" filled entirely with return address labels and other thank you gifts from charities including six unopened American flags.
In the recycled envelopes with tax returns from the 1980's and canceled checks, I found record of a loan that my mother took on after the divorce. My father had cosigned. I also found a three ring binder detailing his father's slow decline from Alzheimer's. I could only read as far as the first letter from my uncle describing some of his symptoms and the infamous incident when he disappeared into the woods in Wisconsin, which resulted in a massive search with a local team and dogs. This was the end of my grandfather's summers in Wisconsin, one of the few places he remembered.
Amongst the recyclables were incredible stacks of investment and health magazines. At one time organized into labeled binders, all of them had my father's tell tale underlining throughout to show that he had read them and what he had found important or useful. I threw these magazines out with relish just as I shredded the record of the loan, I shredded the history of my father's obsessions: investment and avoiding his father's fate through living a better life. Anyone could see how futile both of those exercises turned out to be.
In the days that I worked and thinned out the closet, I got rid of a box of unused candles, bags of clothing, 4 trash bags of shredded papers and a few carloads of recycling. My dad got through about 1 box of old class notes. I kept asking him if he thought he would use it again. He would say, "Oh, I guess not." Then he would part with a few sheets of paper but decide to keep some others. At one point, I asked him what he was reading. He said is was an article about Nixon, but really it was about Bush II.
Somehow, even with the emotional baggage of so much that I was finding, this was a happy time for me. We were doing something together. We barely spoke, but it was alright. We've always been quiet, except for talking about political things or family gossip. This is just how we both are; sometimes socially inhibited but with a lot of pent up passion that spills forth into the things we really care about. We both like to putter, read and run. We enjoy planting things and looking at trees. Though not easily aroused, we both have volcanic tempers but love very deeply and loyally. These things seem to be the essence of my father, and I am sorry that it has taken his stripping bear, his slow deconstruction for me to realize just who he really is underneath all that he had seemed to be for so long.
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