A Hard Fall

In the week before he died, my Dad had a dream where everyone he knew was gathered around him on a mountain top. He seemed mystified by it...

As he seems mystified by the dream he writes about here:

A Hard Fall

He’d had this nasty fall the week before so it probably shouldn’t have come as any surprise when he woke one night in the midst of a wild dream about falling. But it was such a blindingly real dream, so bizarre that he had to get out of bed, turn on the lights and sit on the edge of the bed to try and get some recovery time.

In the dream, he was using his walking stick to help himself through a meadow of high grasses, the dog at his side. It was early spring and the landscape had just begun to green. It had been a long tough winter and the sunshine this day was lifting his spirits as high as the endless sky. He was whistling one of those catchy tunes from the Sesame Street songs that had been filling the house as background noise for the grandkids who were in the house for the weekend.

In his dream he had stumbled on a mound of dirt that was piled up around a hole about the size and shape of a manhole. He had tried frantically to check himself but there was nothing to grab and he found himself pitching headlong into the hole. He’d gone tumbling down what he soon saw was a long tunnel, the sides smooth with a sheen to them like a glaze on a piece of pottery. For some reason, he felt no sense of panic and as he tumbled he found himself counting off the seconds that he was in freefall. “A thousand one, a thousand two,” he counted, and reached the count of fourteen before he landed in what felt to him like a deep snow pile.

He lay there for a while to catch his breath. He looked around, already trying to figure out how he was going to get himself out of this mess. The soft stuff he’d tumbled into felt like a cross between a dense fog and a fistful of cotton. It had some substance but also an ethereal quality that made him think of mists around the lake where he used to run early in the morning.

When he poked his head out of the pile he saw that the soft fluffy material was a long string of clouds that were part of a highway stretching toward the horizon as far as he could see. What had looked to him like stick figures were actually people lined up along the sides of the highway and they were looking toward him as though they’d been expecting him.. He got to his feet and managed to take a few steps toward them. He was puzzled to see that they cast no shadows across the road although the sun was behind the group to his left.

As he got closer the stick figures began to have some substance and faces began to emerge. He recognized the first figure as Tony Kedzior, one of his former roommates in college who had been a quarterback on the football team, a great guy but he’d never lived up to his potential. He’d left he Naval Academy just to come and get the chance to start as a quarterback but had been upstaged by a transfer from Notre Dame who turned out to have a bazooka for an arm.. He thought it odd that Tony was here; he was certain he’d heard that Tony had died unexpectedly with some bizarre disease or another

Even stranger, next to him was George McKeever, another of the four of them who had roomed together in the dormitory in their sophomore year. And next to him was George Dalton, the basketball ace who he’d played with for four years. Even stranger was when he saw Big John in the queue. Big John had been his best friend in both high school and college. He’d stayed in touch with John on and off over the years and one thing he was sure of was that John had died of cancer a year ago.

He wasn’t terribly surprised when Big John stepped out into the middle of the road and began to do an old comedy bit the two of them used to perform after a half dozen beers. “We’re a couple of song and dance men,” Big John was singing , all the while doing a soft shoe shuffle much the way he’d always done it. A low murmur of approval rose from the stick figures along the line.

Tony Kedzior had moved a few steps back from the line and he was rifling a football to George McKeever who was running downfield flat out. Tony’s long spiral landed softly in George’s hands. A perfect pass.

George Dalton was shooting one handed foul shots at a hoop that had appeared out of nowhere. Each shot was all net. George had always been a great foul shooter and when he was practicing you knew he’d hit nine out of every 10.

This is really weird, he thought, these guys had all died in the past couple of years and here they are screwing around in my dream; What in the world are they doing here? He began to feel a little nervous. Big John had walked to the edge of the highway and was looking at him funny but then started to wave him away.

John was laughing and saying something that sounded like “come back when you’re ready.” And all of a sudden he was headfirst in the tunnel and tumbling down until he landed in the soft green meadow he’d been walking in before. The sky was bluer than ever, the green on the trees so delicious looking he wanted to chomp on the leaves, the sun was a welcoming hot plate high above.

He made his way home. He felt giddy and then he started to sob. He didn’t know why; they had all looked so happy. His wife looked at him as though he was from some distant planet. He told her the story.

“That’s the last time you eat Chinese before bed,” she said. “The last time you thought you were playing Carnegie Hall and the middle C key got stuck. It took you a week to get over it. Remember?”

He did remember. In fact he’d talked to the owner of the restaurant and told him to take it easy on the MSG. He must have forgotten.