65

Some of this will be disjointed, fragmented, based as it is on fleeting night-thoughts and dreams.

Fifteen years ago, my dad died suddenly at the age of 65. He was a quiet man, and we were never that close, especially if closeness is in part measured by the words that pass between. Maybe it's because of that clear space between us that he has never really faded that much in fifteen years. I think of him often. Sometimes we talk in dreams, but as is often the case in the aftermath of these I can't remember the words.

During the night just passed, I was with him in the living room of the old house in Walnut. I actually don't know if this was a dream or if I was just thinking about it on the edge of sleep and in the context of a possible poem I was musing on. My mom's loud crying—a wailing—could be heard from behind her closed bedroom door. I must have been young, or maybe in my teens, because Dad's words came to me in a comforting tone: "She'll be all right. She just needs to cry." And he would have said this without looking at my grandmother, whose words under her breath—maybe about the length of my hair or the holes in the knees of my blue jeans—most likely brought on the tears. But then maybe the comment, whatever it was, was innocent, offhand even, and Mom took it the wrong way, either accidentally or willfully. He sat there, able only to bear with the situation, his jaws clenching and unclenching.

But don't get me wrong—such incidents, although somewhat chronic, were nevertheless not common.

Then in the early hours of this morning, after I'd been up once at four o'clock trying to get our computer working again (which I think I did!), I dreamed of Dad. We were in, of all places, a Kentucky Fried Chicken. Not that it looked like a KFC, not that we were eating that childhood treat—you know how it is in dreams when you just know the place you're in or you know that a person in the dream is a particular person in your life, even though in the dream he might not look anything like he does in your waking life. Anyway, we were eating something that looked like a flattened bologna and egg biscuit—don't ask me why—and talking, but I can remember nothing of what we said. Then suddenly we were in a car, he in the passenger seat and I behind the wheel, finishing off some French fries. Again I don't remember what we were saying. Then I was still behind the wheel, but he was sitting on a porch above me. The only words I remember from the dream were only thought, not spoken. I wanted to ask, "Do you miss the baby I was?" Phrased just like that. But I never said it, because as I was thinking it I was rolling backward, turning, rolling forward, leaving.

I suppose that my missing my younger son as a baby, now that he's grown and mostly gone, made me wonder if my dad missed me in that way.

But maybe that's too linear a thought process for such a dream.