When Dreams Were Options

Recommended Listening: America, Simon and Garfunkel

"Kathy," I said as we boarded a Greyhound in Pittsburgh

"Michigan seems like a dream to me now"

It took me four days to hitchhike from Saginaw

I've gone to look for America

He has a bike now, and is one step closer to the kind of independence Bob Dylan and Jack Kerouac sang about as they wove folk tales for a new America.  It wasn’t an unburdened America, but it was an America where everyone could hit the road, and the highways ran purple and red with break lights and neon signs.

I watched Bro today as he climbed up onto his fluorescent green bike, with its little bell perched proud and ready on the handlebars, and thought of the time I can no longer remember, when I must have had the same sense of wonder and potential I saw in his eyes. 

These days I wake up and head straight for coffee, tired before I have begun, but once, I know, that I woke up and headed straight for the world.  Bikes were wind and air, and the world was a place not yet discovered. 

I have tried to imagine a place where not everything is accessible on my computer.  Where the world is not blown in to me on the break-neck speed of hyper-media and vacant lots are filled with trees, not mini-marts, stripped malls and ghost stories. 

If, as a child, I was aware of the infancy of this new technology centered world, I was only aware of it from behind the legs of my 6’4 dad’s green plaid bell-bottoms.  In this world everything was optional: a non-committal place I opted out of in the sheer innocence of youth.  Things existed either to take up time, or to make it, and if I was in charge it was about now.

So today Brody chooses his bike, and sees trails where there are none.  His time is dedicated to the backyard where the tree fort we have been talking about since before he could talk will soon be built.

He is a dream-maker, a romantic in the most perfect sense of the word.  

Today, for Bro, dreams are options: roads to take and days to fill.  There is a lifetime of things to discover.  


This summer he will get his own ice-cream cone, and perhaps even grill his own marshmallow.  He will look through a telescope and see the patterns of the moon.  He will light a lantern on the back patio and catch a firefly, with the sole purpose of letting it go.  And he will take off on his bike, training wheels in tow, and I will run beside him, and maybe even catch a bit of the open road, the road not taken, that I left somewhere in my long ago.

Weekend Playlist #1

Bro and I were relaxing together at our favorite market, Morgan and York, when Otis Redding came over the speakers and got Bro swaying, croissant in hand.  I have not, I admit sheepishly, listened to Redding in a very long time, and I was once more moved by the power channelled in such an unassuming melody as "(Sittin' on) The Dock of the Bay".

Otis Redding only lived for 26 years, but the music he made in that time is irreplaceable.  I went home and dug through my old records for some other recordings to play for Bro.  This list is my dedication to Mr. Redding, and the other amazing performers who changed the way we, or least I, listen to music!

1.     I’ve Got Dreams to Remember, Otis Redding

2.     A Change is Gonna Come, Sam Cooke

3.     (Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher & Higher, Jackie Wilson

4.     I’ll Take You There, The Staple Singers

5.     Midnight Train to Georgia, Gladys Knight & The Pips

6.     Into the Mystic, Van Morrison

7.     Let’s Stay Together, Al Green

8.     Lay, Lady Lay, Bob Dylan

9.     What’s Going On, Marvin Gaye

10. You Don’t Know Me, Ray Charles

11. Sittin’ On the Dock of the Bay, Otis Redding

A bookshelf in our home. A place of light and air.

Recommended Listening, Follow, by Richie Havens

And maybe you can sing to me the words I just told you,

If all the things you feel ain’t what they seem.

And don’t mind me ‘cos I ain’t nothin’ but a dream.

I have collected scores upon scores of books for Bro, though there are a choice few he has gravitated to time and time again.  Some I welcome each time we sit down. Others, admittedly, have made me wince. 

For instance, I have no idea how Thomas the Tank Engine and the Big, Big Bridge even got into our collection, but it was a big, big favorite until I hid it, or should I say, “I guess we lost it little dude.”  Justin was growing weary of Goodnight Moon before he wedged it, I mean, it got stuck irretrievably behind a big, big impenetrable shelf. 

Other than these few regrettable incidences, I have tried to offer Brody freedom in the books he chooses.  He is only two, and though freedom at this age is more conservatively defined, I believe it still has the opportunity of leading to great things.

My dad offered this freedom to me daily at the library, and I can still remember the day I came home with what is perhaps my favorite book of all time, On Beyond Zebra, by Dr. Seuss.  In this genius little tome, Seuss invites his reader to discover a world beyond the alphabet.  I can still remember how powerful the suggestion was that we could imagine more than what was so narrowly defined for us.

My favorite books as a child almost always revolved around the more.  I loved, loved, loved Winnie the Pooh.  There were no lessons to be taught in the 100 Akre Wood.  What existed was a place where the unconventional was, though civilized, blissfully dominant.  We read Winnie the Pooh through the year, yet I cannot think of it without thinking of spring, and that smell of wet leaves mingled with the awkward and glorious smell of early spring flowers.  It was everything new, and nothing grim and mundane.

Milne, like Seuss, spared his reader the necessity of learning how to be an adult, while also not laboring too much over the notion of childhood.  You could, within the pages, free yourself from thoughts of you, and escape into possibility.

In honor of the spark these books and countless others have fostered within me, I have filled Bro’s shelves with books blissfully free of shoulds, and should nots.   I spend his day telling him what he should and should not be doing, and we are both tired of this by bedtime. 

My wish is that Bro will find, in these simple stories, the hope that life is so much more than how to hold a spoon and when to leave the table.   I found this hope within literature, but if I can just offer it to him, perhaps he will be able to find it wherever life takes him.

I can still remember where I was sitting when I first picked up To Kill a Mockingbird, or the first moment I realized I could understand Shakespeare on my own.  I was free within the words.  I was as real and independent as Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre: "I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will.”

I have a shelf in Bro’s room where I have placed books precious to Justin and I; books from our past, our material Wonderland.  The shelf is strategically too high for Bro to reach, but it exists with the potential to be discovered.  On it are my copies of Winnie the Pooh and The Wind in the Willows nestled beside Justin’s Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little.  However, I did not stop there.  I placed my tattered copy of A Midsummer Night’s Dream next to Kenneth Grahame, and this next to my much ruffled Dharma Bums.  Justin’s Sun Also Rises is also there, as well as his grandfather’s Odyssey.

It is a shelf of dreams and narratives.  A place of life and air. 

This morning Brody pointed to what for so long has been strange markings, and said “Brody.”  Excited, I hugged him and told him, as I do everyday, that this is a word, and that once he knows enough of these, experience will be limitless.  Today he discovered that a word can stand for something.  Many tomorrows from now he will perhaps understand that he can stand for himself.

My Soundtrack

a few of the albums Bro and I went through today

Recommended Listening: O-o-h Child, The Five Stairsteps

Some day, yeah

We'll walk in the rays of a beautiful sun

Some day

When the world is much brighter

In the spirit of writing about things that I know, I realized that there are really few things that I do actually know.  I can say, without a doubt, that I know my dogs are happiest when they are eating.  I know that I have probably, and at times regrettably, consumed more chocolate than the average chocolate enthusiast, and that I will almost always be late.  I lack the ability to fold a bed sheet and bring clean clothes upstairs, but I am great at spilling pasta sauce on a newly washed shirt.  I can recite poetry I have not read since high school, but will not be able to tell you the name of a person I have met already seven times before and within the last year. 

What I am finding is that measuring life by things that I know can be a bit daunting, and so today I am trying to write and think about life in terms of things that I love.  For instance, I love deleting things from my mailbox, and the way my dog looks when she is lying in the sun.  I love the sound of Bro’s voice when he is waking from a nap, and the way Justin is so resilient in the morning.

The thought came to me today as I watched my son tapping out a beat.  In that moment, I hoped that perhaps he might share the same love of music I have found to be so sustaining throughout my life.  A song, like an old friend, can remind you of a dream you once had, or the moments you wish you could relive.  For me songs come in different hues, like the sun slanted across your floor at different times during the day.

I have been fortunate to have parents who saved so many of my things from childhood.  Chief among these were my records.  I recently brought them home, and Brody and I have been going through them slowly and lovingly. 

Today we broke out Candy Land, the record, and as I played it I felt like that girl now almost 29 years ago who believed that if she just kicked her feet high enough, she might be able to finally push away from the earth and live in a world, she felt, was without limits.  

When I was young, reality was gauged by the way I felt from one moment to the next, not by any unforeseen law of science.  When the sun was out I played, and when it went away I slept.  When clouds covered it I hid inside, and when it broke through, I ran back out into its arms.  I didn’t know it was a mass of helium; I felt it was a friend.

Brody knows that I will come when he calls and hold him when he hurts.  He does not know what love as a concept is, but I think he knows its effects.  When he looks back upon this love, I hope that he remembers the songs I have offered him along the way.  I sing to him everyday at naptime, choosing from my collected songbook.  Today we started with nursery rhymes and ended with Bob Dylan. 

These songs have become the soundtrack to my life.  They are a road of hopes and dreams sustained and nurtured.  It is my genealogy.  It is a collection of songs that have been handed down to me, and ones I have found along the way.  My dad placed Rhinestone Cowboy and Folsom Prison Blues into it, and my mom is completely responsible for the show-tunes.  I don’t know what songs Brody will add to this playlist, or mix-tape perhaps, but I hope that one day Brody will look back upon this songbook, and know without question that he was loved.

Free Range

Recommended Listening: I’ve Seen All Good People, Yes

Don't surround yourself with yourself,

Move on back two squares,

Send an instant karma to me,

Initial it with loving care.

I wonder, and I say this with all sincerity, if children will ever be able to appreciate the feel of sweaty summer legs on the kind of woven plastic, stick to your rump, hyper melted car interiors that once took me wherever I needed to go in the height of summertime?

The thought came to me when I was buckling Brody into his car seat today.  It is soft with stylish cow print, and it put me in the mind to ask my dad what kind of car seat my parents had once had for me. 

Upsettingly, my dad does not remember any car seats for me.  Apparently, as a baby, my parents placed me in the back of their car, and prayed that I had the where-withal to position my weight against turns, and so maintain my stability through trips, both short and long, smooth, and *gulp* bumpy.  I guess the only other alternative was strangulation by seat belt.

My mom remembers differently.  She says that she used the same seat with me that she had once used with my brother in the late 60s.  As I was born in ’76, this is also not too comforting a thought, though of course, better than nothing.

So many of my memories are centered on the family car, though none before around 4 years of age.  I had originally attributed this to being too young to remember, but now I am attributing it to concussions sustained while free range in the back of a moving vehicle . . .

Children now are to be in booster seats until 12 years of age, and don’t get me wrong, they are safer for it.  Brody is 2, and still faces backward, which I know is perhaps neurotic, though the Swedish keep their children facing backwards until 3, so at least uprooted Swedes don’t think me insane. 

My memories of the car are from the back of our old American Motor’s Eagle station wagon.  When I think of this car I think of 8-tracks and Ernie Harwell.  I also think of the carpeting in the back of the station wagon, which was so often my place. I would sit in that back area and let the sun hit my legs.  In the summer, when we were done at the pool, the rug was scratchy, and I would lay my towel down on top of it, and feel blessed. 

The back of the Eagle was a place full of Sesame Street books and McDonald’s mugs, and it was mine.  I can still recall the way the sun bounced off of my Return of the Jedi collector’s mug, and the way the stars shone as we drove home from the theatre at night.

When I look back at this time, I think of the way we all seemed to be doing the same thing, living one big collective experience.  Somewhere, in cars next to me, other kids were sitting in the back of their station wagons watching the stars and listening to Ernie Harwell.  Perhaps they had just seen ET, or The Goonies, and were filled with the wonder of summer and the harmony that we were all in this together.

I wonder if Bro will have that same nostalgia?  The late 70s and early 80s were a time when pop culture knit us together and let us believe that we were all, somehow, Jedi’s. 

As we drove home today from the market, I thought about the other kids in cars next to us.  Our collective experiences these days are much harder to nail down.  Technology and the world it has created make me think that, if Star Wars were to be made today, it would be more like Avatar, a vast, lumbering techno-drone if you will, and less like the personal Star Wars we once knew and loved. 

But perhaps we have traded something in for another?  My son will grow up in a world where the massive cultural expanse of it all will create a larger identity, and while we can never know everything, we will be richer for the chances that are given. 

So no, Bro will never know what it is like to crawl free through the back of my car, and in the grand scheme of things, this is fortunate.  Perhaps he will even remember these days because of it.  I will keep sacred the memory of what once was for my grandchildren, and embrace this new frontier that is ultimately a galaxy far-far away from the one I once rode around in.

I remember the day we said good-bye to the Eagle.  American Motors had been bought by the French, and my dad was done with station wagons.  I remember seatbelts from that time on, and FM radio.  I had the where-with-all, slight though it was, to know that something was passing.  It was of something personal, nothing grand, a dear moment that I can return to whenever I close my eyes.