Once or twice a month, I dream my dad is still alive, though in the waking world we’re almost ten years out from his passing. True, I dream-remember, he was gone for a little while, but it was some kind of misunderstanding or temporary condition, and now he’s back among us, sharing a restaurant meal or needing a ride somewhere.
In a tawny-colored flannel shirt he stands there, and I take in the broadness of his gently rounded shoulders and the robustness of his rib-cage, which give him a powerful presence, despite his age-diminished height. He’s right in front of me, and I fall for this illusion every single time. Even when my sleep-self puzzles, “Didn’t I used to have a dream like this?” or when I sleep-solve a real-world math problem–“He must be 94 by now”–I just go on and sleep-marvel at the unlikeliness of it all.
Even in my waking life, it occasionally takes me some effort to distinguish between what I dreamed and what has actually happened. I flutter my eyes open in the morning still trying to figure out how to coax that elephant into the ballroom for my wedding. I console myself at the disappointing realization that I do not write for a travel magazine edited by Stephen Colbert. Most importantly, I need to savvy up to the fact that I paid the mortgage this month or informed my husband about a change in our schedule only in my dreams.
That’s the middle-aged brain for you–my middle-aged brain, at least. Typically, we associate the blurring of mental states, between the conscious and unconscious mind, between reality and imaginations, with early childhood or extreme old age. Granny Weatherall reunites with her long-dead daughter Hapsy; young Max sails away to the kingdom where the wild things are. Folks in mid-adulthood who wander in and out of fantasy get diagnosed and treated, or else dismissed as charming but inadequate “Walter Mitty” types.
Mature adults (according to Erik Erikson’s psychosocial theories) are supposed to focus on generativity, on establishing ourselves in society and providing for the next generation. Practical, persistent, goal-driven, yes! Blurry is the last thing that we’re supposed to be. So when I stumble on my quirks and confusions, I find myself asking, “What’s wrong with me?” and wondering if others in their 40s and 50s feel the same way, too.
Contrary to the age-related expectation that my efforts should be outwardly focused, I’m in my own head a lot of the time. Having unhinged myself from the 9 to 5 work world, I’m always reshuffling my daily routines, teaching short-term classes, driving all over the place to meet my tutoring clients. People try for regular meeting times, but not a week goes by without a sorry-it’s-so-last-minute change. Having no children and no single boss I’m accountable to means that I have very few inflexible demands on me. It’s a luxury, but it’s disorienting. (Yes, I hear all you working parents playing the world’s tiniest violin for me.) Sometimes I have all day to myself. Other times I’m so busy at odd hours and locations that I spend the breaks napping in my car by the side of the road. Sometimes, the instability of my work life and the eidetic dreams I’ve been having feel like they’re a part of the same wild ride.
And yet the dreams about my father are all about generativity, his and mine alike, all about how the muddles of the past can contribute to our finding a meaningful place in the world. During his lifetime, my relationship with my father was fraught with difficulties related to his catastrophic mental illness, a recurring depression that in its worst form caused him to hallucinate and at its mildest left him so anxious about making decisions that he agonized over simple tasks like getting out of a parking space. When he was sick, I was stricken. When he was on an upswing, I struggled to establish personal boundaries in the face of his theatrical exuberance. In his 60s and 70s, he liked to date women in their early twenties, phone me with half-serious, half-facetious business proposals, pick fights with me by telling me he was worried I would turn out like my mother, copy edit my already-published articles, pull out a plastic whistle in a restaurant and act like he was about to trill for the waitress.
There were easy times with him, a few, not enough, but still: sitting on the steps of the Berkeley Rose Garden watching the sunset, looking up etymologies in his Oxford English dictionary, getting trounced by him at Trivial Pursuit just for the stories he could tell about World War II battles, Negro League baseball players, and folk music from the Great Depression. When I am teaching English as a second language, I often remember him laying out for me, with his gold Cross pen on a restaurant’s paper placemat, George Bernard Shaw’s satirical claim that “ghoti” spelled “fish” (gh as in cough, o as in women, and ti as in nation)
And to tell the truth, the best time for me with him is now, when I have had almost a decade to heal from the emotional extremes that he inspired–the panic, shame, and grief. Only now am I getting around processing the positive aspects of our relationship and the tendencies he provided: an awareness of patterns in nature, a passion for stories, and an unconditional love for the wayward English language. Every time I help a student correct a double negative, grasp the difference between that and which, or save their hardest-hitting idea for the punchline, I am laying out the best of him for the benefit of a new generation, reveling in the entirely real persistence of his legacy.