I dream I am inside, playing a doubles match. I am at the net. A long point is playing out cross-court, out of my reach. I get almost hypnotized watching the ball go back and forth. Suddenly the ball comes to me! I am not prepared. But I recover. Whack! I hit a sharply angled volley, unreachable. Whew. Wow. My partner and I win the point, and the game.
At the changeover, I look around and realize there are lots of people watching and, for some reason, others just milling around. It’s crowded in there. I remember that I am not supposed to be there. I have to get out of there. I panic. I find a woman who looks official and I stammer out an explanation. Not feeling well. Not supposed to be here. Bone marrow transplant. Germs.
A substitute materializes. The match will go on, without me. I feel guilty about interrupting the match and scared that I will get sicker. But I'm still happy about that volley.
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I dream that we are emptying out the apartment in New York. My father is there; my mother has just died. (In reality he died first, and both parents were gone when Diane and I cleaned the apartment out more than two years ago). I look through a dining room cabinet. Crystal punch glasses. Miniature tea sets. Delicate napkin holders. Beautiful china. Cocktail napkins with pretty designs.My father and I go into the tiny galley kitchen (so small that four of us could never fit there, although three could squeeze in like sardines.) I look in the kitchen cabinet, full of the things I remember, right where they belonged. Calcium pills, vitamins and prescriptions on the bottom shelf. Above, Saltines, LeSeur peas, tuna, tea biscuits, dark-chocolate-covered "Little Schoolboy" cookies.
I start crying. “I wish I could be 13, no maybe 14, and go to school and come home and all of us have dinner together,” I say to my father.
He smiles, warmly, sadly, lovingly. “Don’t we all,” he says. “Don’t we all.”
When I wake up, I lie under my quilt, thinking about this second dream for a long time.
In reality, of course, 13 is not exactly always a picnic. But who doesn’t wish to go back to a time before anything really bad happened, a time when someone else took care of us?
If I went back, none of the bad things would have happened.
But none of the good things, most notably my children, would have happened either.
