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I think my great character fault – well, one of them, anyway – was that I had no dream. I mean I had no hell-bent, clearly-focused vision of what I wanted to do, what I wanted to become. Ambitions and desires and interests shifted, from year to year, really, and, as I look back and think about it (not that I haven’t), I see that I wanted, desired, worked toward one thing or another, but had lacked an overall dream.
Clear as a dream?
I think the phrase is meant to be a paradox.
I feel that I did a great deal with my life, starting quite early, but a dream? Did I ever live the dream life? Well, I think I did, once or twice, maybe more, but that’s not the same thing. Those are times that just happened.
For instance, I played first chair bassoon through junior high and high school and college. Was that ever a dream of mine? Well, it was, temporarily, once I learned to play the bassoon at all. Then I wanted the first chair. I hardly ever started out, as a kid, saying, the bassoon is what I dream about.
I was an English teacher. Again, not my dream, but certainly a calling (if you will) that I felt destined for once it was in place. My whole life. Almost. Until now.
I had two children, a boy and a girl. I could not believe my good luck or whatever one would call it about that arrangement. People do that all the time, don’t they, have two children, but I had not had that dream. I hadn’t thought about it; it, they, just happened. Sometimes I wonder why they were both taken away from me; but then I remind myself I had her as a daughter for 45 years and him as a son for 57 years and I should not be greedy about what was miraculously, so to speak, bestowed on me. (And yet I am.)
I had the excitement of books, of writing, of producing. Again, not a dream of mine, not an ambition that I nurtured, but one that I fell into, early enough, in college, that I enjoyed, that I wanted. I envisioned little beyond the doing of it.
I loved the dancing lessons, taking them, performing, choreographing. A dream, I guess, once I got started. But at five or six, when I wanted to go to dancing school, did I dream of such things? I think not.
I had men, I had love, I had travels to many places around the world. As I visit with my sister and her life, I see how limited she was, has been, how uncurious. Is curiosity the same as dreaming? It’s hard to tell.
But I also see that she has two sons, a daughter, nine grandchildren and two great-grandchildren, to my none. She must see me as pathetically without a dream.
Was that hers? I don’t think so. But she has walls, so to speak, on all sides. That is her life. That is many people’s lives. I didn’t dream of that life, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t have happened.
Well, what’s clear to me now, is that I am alone and old and am trying to make the best of the present, writing, traveling, doing what I can. I am still not deaming, though.
Not in that sense, not in any sense, really.