Tag: Dad

A Key Dream

The dream began with me buying a Porsche. A 911 SC model, which would make it between 1978 and 1983, it was dark blue – ‘Sunoco blue’, in my mind, after the color used by Penkse/Donahue in the late 1960s and early 1970s (on, for example, the Ferrari 512 they raced at LeMans/Daytona or the Porsche 917 used in Can Am racing in the first year) with a tan leather interior. Very classy and clean to me, even though it had right rear quarter panel damage. Seeing it, I made an offer, which was accept. I paid $10,000 for it, transferring the money via Paypal. After driving it home, I told my wife. She was pleased with the purchase. I told her I was going to have the body repaired. I wasn’t certain whether I’d keep it or sell it after that, vacillating between the options.

Penske Sunoco Ferrari 512, LeMans, 1971

After parking the Porsche at home, which was a sort of compound of buildings, I walked around, preparing for guests. They were already arriving. Someone needed a key. I had a spare that they could use to unlock a door. As I gave them that key to use, I noticed several emergency keys were by the doors, often hanging above the door. I told others that I didn’t think that was very smart. While, yes, it was convenient to have the keys there in case you forget the key, outsiders might come, see the keys, and use them to get in when they’re not supposed to.

I entered the main house where most guests were congregating. Dad was there, taking measurements for a project. He and I had a discussion about what he was doing, and more importantly, why he was doing it at that time, since the guests were arriving for a party. He replied that it would only take a little bit, and besides, the contractors were there.

Yes, the contractors were there, in the foyer by the front door on the other side of the crowded living room. I told them that Dad was taking measurements. The contractors, two men, were testy and impatient. Dad began calling out numbers. Hearing them, I repeated them to the contractors, telling them that those were the numbers they needed. Dad kept doing this, but the party noise was increasing, making it difficult to hear, and the contractors were slow to start writing the numbers down, forcing me to remember and repeat the numbers. As Dad kept moving around, calling out numbers, guests began acting as intermediaries between him and me, listening to the numbers when he called them out, then coming to me to tell me the number and where it was from, which I would then give to the contractors. This all struck me as pretty hilarious.

The dream ended while we were in the middle of doing this.

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On Some Days

  1. On some days, I want to get away by myself to scream at the world. Yesterday was such a day. Stepped into the shower and screamed in silence. Was somewhat cathartic.
  2. I was driving along unlined streets in a residential neighborhood yesterday. Cars were parked along the side but there’s more than enough room for two cars to pass. Yet, so many drivers could not manage that. Driver age, sex, vehicle size…none of it seemed to explain it. People just couldn’t manage it. I thought it was because of the lack of lines. What tended to happen was that folks in one direction would stop so that folks proceeding in the other direction could drive straight down the middle. Young, old, male, female, all exhibited problems with it. “Just move over,” I’d tell them through the windshield. “Just use your side of the street. Honestly, it’s not that hard.” I should be more considerate of others but…on some days…it’s harder.
  3. Contemplating a favorite shirt’s fate. Like everything else, there is a season, turn, turn, etc. Bought this shirt back in 1999. Have photographic evidence of that, for there I am, wearing it in a dated photo. Nothing special, button down collar, long-sleeved, cotton, faded blue stripes on egg shell white. It’s been with me in two states, four houses, five companies, and ten cats (sigh.) (The cats were three to five at a time…) Probably paid about twenty-five dollars for the shirt. Can’t recall that, although I do recall that I bought it on sale at Macy’s. Good jeans shirt. Have gotten some compliments while wearing it, but mostly I like its style and comfort. It’s been gently descending the hill for years, evidenced mostly through armpit stains. I’ve washed those out with a lemon juice and baking soda process a couple times. Now, though…the collar is frayed. It looks like it’s time for the shirt to finally move on. I guess, properly, I’m moving on from the shirt.
  4. I feel like a prisoner sometimes. (Such an exaggeration, right?) I hate throwing things away, but it’s inculcated into my nature and our society. Besides the shirt, there’s now an electric kettle. Probably purchased ten years ago, the spring which helps the lid release and open no longer functions. Can it be fixed? Maybe…if I can find the right spring.
  5. I contemplate the conundrum. Savings are acquired by mass production. Costs are kept down by underpaying people and going to the margin on design and materials. Paying more can gain you more…maybe. You really can’t be sure. But after a few years, when the device or clothing fails, what do you do with it? Where does it goes? The recycling gig seems to be filling up and failing. That’s always been the fallback: recycle or repurpose. I have containers full of used shirts now relegated to being rags out in the garage.
  6. Dad was going to get a new stent this past week. His wife called. He’s eighty-eight. A COPD sufferer, he’d gone into the hospital on Monday to have his meds adjusted for his COPD. Suffering from edema resulting in a swollen left leg and foot, he was kept for observations and a stress test, and given diuretics. The stress test never happened; he was wheezing too much on that day, Wed. He was released on Thursday with plans to have the stress test done in the future. Meanwhile, he and his wife got the COVID-19 vaccination on Friday, which was paramount for them.
  7. I spent an hour on the phone chatting with Dad. He was in a talkative mood and opened up about his youth, something unusual for him. Mom and Dad divorced when I was about ten. He was in the military and oft stationed overseas, so I lived with him for about seven years total, including my final three years of high school. It was just him and me for two of those years. He worked, and I went to school, cleaned, and cooked. We didn’t see much of one another.
  8. Dad revealed that he met Mom in Sioux City, Iowa, when he was stationed there. (She’s from Turin, Iowa, and he’s from Pittsburgh, PA.) This was back in 1952. He was a radioman and she was a seventeen-year-old telephone switchboard operator. Too young to for her to marry in Iowa, they went to Luverne, Minnesota. There he discovered that while she was older enough (fifteen was the age for females there), he wasn’t old enough at twenty; he had to be twenty-one. Naturally, Dad managed to procure a letter with his father’s signature verifying that he was twenty-one. But no, wait. They told him that he had to have his mother’s signature. “Well, Mom is dead,” Dad replied. Then he called his father and said, “Can you tell these people that Mom passed?” That was done but he got grief for it from his parents for years.
  9. Joe Biden has been POTUS for a month and has yet to go golfing. By this point in his term, one month, Con Don had golfed six times. Donald Trump’s aides don’t want to admit the President is golfing – CNN Politics
  10. Enough whining and complaining for now. Got my coffee. Caspa, Uno Dos, and Billy await. They’re just meeting Spag and the recos for the first time. Time to go write like crazy, at least one more time.
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Water Dream

It was a water dream featuring Dad.

He and I lived in a house together. I was a teenager. Our house was pleasant and modern, with water features in the backyard.

We were going about the early morning with him talking to me about something as we were in the backyard. Hearing running water, I traced the source to a pipe sticking out of the house’s side beside the faucet. I’d never seen that on a house.

Water started flowing from it. I put my hand under it; it was was warm. I said, “Dad, I think something is wrong. There’s warm water coming out of this pipe.”

Dad said, “Yeah, we’d better check it out.” Then he went on about how he needed to go out and get something to eat. When he talked about the food, his choices appalled me. He was saying something about getting about a dozen sliders and I ended up asking him to get me a couple.

“But what about the water?” I asked.

“You take care of that for me,” he said.

I went into the house. Shock struck. Water was seeping out of everywhere. The kitchen floor was swollen with a huge lump in the middle. Horror seizing me, I thought, “This water is pent up and is going to burst, where are the valves, I need to shut the water off,” and ran to find the valves.

Dad returned (I don’t think he’d actually left but had been in another part of the house). I showed him the lump and leaks. I told him that I’d shut the water off. He said, “We’d better do something about that. Find someone to call.”

Ready for the pipes to burst, I dug out the phone book to call a plumber.

The dream ended.

Editing note: No, I didn’t get up and go to the bathroom.

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Sunday’s Theme Music

Today’s song comes from out of my dream stream. Very involved, with many scenes, one scene featured me in a record story with sisters, cousins, aunts and uncles, and Dad. As I said something about the music selection (which was large), Dad said, “I’d go for Genesis. I like them.”

I said, “Genesis? You like Genesis?”

“Sure, Genesis, Journey…I like just about all of them.”

When I awoke and thought of that part of the dream, “Follow You Follow Me” (1978) popped into the stream. So, here we go.

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The Father and Me Dreams

My Dad was a special guest star in my dreams last night. I was a teenager in all of them, not really surprising, because that’s the era of my life that I saw the most of him, as I lived with him for three years after things became dark and unpleasant with Mom’s husband. Then I graduate from high school and left home.

In one memorable part of the dream, Dad and I were following a young tabby cat. The cat had gone down a sidewalk. I hurried after him, and discovered him rolling around on the cement walk in some freshly cut grass.

After that, the dream scenes fluttered and crackled. There was Dad and I driving in a car, and I’m looking out the window, checking out passing scenery. We throw a baseball back and forth in sunshine. I hear his laugh. Dad enjoys laughing.

The dreams grew darker and faster in nature. Then, suddenly, it became “This Is Your Life” from when I was in my mid-teens.

Life wasn’t going well. Most of my time was spent reading books, riding my bike, playing sports, drawing and painting, and listening to music. Although I enjoyed math, history, science, and literature, school was a bore. I was becoming a loner and acted out out a lot, and the dream managed to feature sharp memories of that era. In one sequence, a boy two years younger than me was riding a bike. A bunch of us children were in front of his house on a late summer afternoon. We weren’t doing much but hanging. I think I was fourteen. This kid, though, was riding around and bantering with others. Then I heard my sister say, “He spit on me.”

I don’t believe I’d ever reacted as fast to anything in my life, and I have always, from childhood on to even now, been known for amazingly fast reflexes.

He was riding his bike by me. My hand shot out, caught the rear of his bike and jerked it back, pulling it out from under him. As he fell free, I tossed the bike to one side, stepped forward, grabbed the kid, and hauled him to his feet. I told him he needed to apologize to my sister. I remember that other kids there were freaked out and afraid I was going to do something terrible to the kid. But he apologized to my sister. I released him. He took his bike and ran to his house.

His mother came out and confronted me. I was unapologetic. I told her nobody was going to spit on my sister while I was there. She didn’t know her son had spit on my sister. That changed things.

The scene was just a brief flash in my dream, the part where my sister said, “He spit on me,” and I grabbed his bike. I remembered the rest, along with other memories from that period, after awakening.

The whole dream and memory sequence left me emotionally shaken as I went about my morning routine. As I wondered why I’d dreamed so much about my father and childhood, I reached out to him to ensure he was okay.

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The Car Colors

Walking today, I passed a red car. My thoughts were drifting, and seeing the red car, I thought, I’ve never owned a red car.

Dad had owned a red Thunderbird. That began a stream of recollections about Dad’s cars. He’d owned a turquoise Thunderbird (with matching interior), a maroon Monte Carlo (also with matching interior), beige Corvette and a blue Corvette (guess what color their interiors were?), and a white Chevy Impala, along with a white Thunderbird. Both of the white cars had red interiors.

I thought, what an eclectic mix. But then I reviewed some of my car colors. I’d had a copper Camaro (black interior) and brown Firebird (with a tan interior), a green Mercedes (with matching interior), a white BMW (blue interior), silver Audi (gray interior), orange Porsche (brown and black interior), a silver RX-7 with a red interior, a blue RX-7 with a brown interior, and a black RX-7 with a black interior.

In each case, I’d not consciously decided on a color. It was more of a decision, this is the car for me.

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Remembering A Dad Moment

1971

Besides being a rock fan and fifteen years old, I was an auto racing fan. My father was in the U.S.A.F. He’d just returned from being stationed in Germany and was now stationed at DESC near Wright-Patterson AFB in Ohio when I moved in with him. He surprised me with tickets to the premiere of LeMans with Steve McQueen.

Whenever I hear the movie’s opening minutes, I’m back in that packed movie theater, one of the few children in the place, remembering the movie’s beginning, and Dad. The start is just the sounds and images of racing cars of the era screaming around the French race track. To non-fans, it’s probably noise. But to racing fans, the sounds of Porsches and Ferraris of different-sized engines, Alfas, Corvettes, and Matras can all be heard as individual howls.

Dad had no interest in seeing the movie, but he knew I wanted to. So, thanks, Dad.

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The Sisters Dream

I dreamed of my sisters, sisters-in-law, and their daughters. My wife was also present, but ‘off-stage’, in the other room. Sometimes I heard her, but I never saw her. Only one male was in it; he didn’t enter until the end.

I was in someone’s house. I don’t know whose house. Toward the dream’s beginning, one sister-in-law entered. She and I hugged. She said, “How long until December?”

There was a calendar on the wall beside us. Indicating it, I said, “You’re behind. It’s already December. It’s almost the middle of December.”

She and I joined the others by a coffee table. Everyone was happy to see me, and I was happy to see them, but I knew it was a dream, and I was trying to understand why they were there, and what was going on. Bowls of finger-food and plates of sandwiches filled the coffee table. My two youngest sisters were beside it. The youngest was talking and laughing with several nieces, while the next oldest sister talked to me about the food and asked me what I wanted. I saw my older sister and my other sister in another part of the room. Multiple overlapping conversations were taking place, and there was a lot of laughter. I couldn’t hear much of what was being said. My sister-in-law sat close to me, trying to talk to me, but my sister was also talking to me, leaving me unable to answer either.

Taking a break from them, I went into another room. My Dad was in there, doing business. I was trying to understand what his business was, and what was he doing. Although I asked these questions, I couldn’t comprehend his responses. Eventually, I went back into the other room to find something to eat.

Which is where memory of the dream fades.

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A NASCAR Dream

It was peculiar.

My Dad, wife, and other family members – none of them ever seen, but heard in the wings of the dream stage – and I were watching a NASCAR race. It was one of the big banked tracks, like Charlotte, Michigan, or Daytona. I lean toward the last as the site. The cars were in roaring packs. It was the race’s mid-stage. Fans know this means the drivers were racing for position, but were mostly finessing the situation and vehicle to make a run at the end. Stock are mostly high-speed endurance races with a final ten-lap shoot-out, especially with the modern tendencies for the cars to wreck on the last, desperate laps. That stops the race and frequently leads to a green-white-checker situation.

I’d driven in with family in a white Chrysler Sebring convertible, with a beige leather interior. The car was parked right there.

Watching the race wasn’t the same as in reality. While watching on a huge screen, I (and everyone else) could virtually walk among the cars as they raced around the track. NASCAR encouraged this technology as a way for fans to get closer. Further, you could design a new paint scheme for the cars as they raced. The drivers and team could then review your scheme while the race was on, and adopt it for the car, again, while the race was on.

That’s what I was doing during the race. ‘My’ driver was a female (and not Danica Patrick). She’d was leading for most of the race, but there was a wreck. She was eliminated, and the race was red-flagged for track clean-up.

My family wanted to leave. The race wasn’t going on, and the one we cheered was no longer in it; why stay? I was working on that paint scheme, though, and didn’t want to quit. I finally surrendered to their heckling. Then Dad wanted me to move the Sebring up. Although we weren’t in a garage, there was a closed garage door. Using a remote control, I moved the car forward, but resisted getting it too close to the garage door. Dad insisted, move it further forward. Irritated, I did, stopping the car with the nose right against the garage door. I then complained to him about it.

That’s all there was. I found interesting symbolism to move after I awoke: a white car, my father as an authority figure, and a female driver, in the lead. All of those seemed like elements of myself. After mulling it over for a while, I took it to mean exciting times were coming (the race) during which I would be pushed to the limit (the car against the garage door) but that it would be fine (my father), and that while I had control, I wouldn’t be in full control.

As if I’m ever in full control, right?

 

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