Chice are going to England

A couple of years ago, I was having a very hard time both sleeping well and sleeping enough.  So I started taking Benadryl (or, actually, a generic equivalent) at night to help me sleep, and then this spring, I started taking two pills a night: it's made a big difference, and I get a lot more full nights of sleep now.

For better or worse, the Benadryl doesn't really seem to alter my dreams: I still rarely remember having any, and while I don't recall any recent alien-invasion dreams, I never did have them very frequently.

This morning, for whatever reason (Rosemary diagnoses the reason as anxiety: you can be the judge), I work up with a very clear memory of parts of a dream I had.  In the early part of the dream, I was somehow working as an Antiques Roadshow-style appraiser, where I was supposedly the specialist in identifying medieval things: I remember conducting one appraisal (in French, of course) for a small grouping of children's stuffed-cloth toys, printed on the cloth to look like pea-pods filled with peas.  I told the disappointed owner that they appeared to date from about 1890, and thus were definitely not medieval: I specifically recall saying: "look how these images are printed: if these were medieval we'd expect to see them look more like woodcuts."

Somehow, later in the dream, I was working with a group of students, and for some reason I needed to persuade them of the quality and value of their knowledge of the English pronoun system.  "Who knows all the forms of 'I'" I asked.  "I, me, my, mine?"  Everybody raised their hands.  "Who knows all the forms of 'you'?" I asked and followed it up with "he," she," we," and "they."  Everybody knew them all.

Then one student piped up with a question: "What about 'chice'?"

Of course I was dumbfounded. 

"Chice" I thought; "what the hell is 'chice'?"  But, in that dream way, all the students were looking around and nodding.  "What about 'chice'?" seemed to be a question on everybody's minds.

So I started in on a spiel: "Well, there's an old saying," I began, "that there's an idiot in every crowd, and maybe I'm the idiot here--but I've never heard of 'chice.'  What kind of pronoun is it?"  Of course, there wasn't much clear answer forthcoming, until one student brought me a grammar textbook of some kind, and there was "chice" printed right in black and white in the middle of a table of English pronouns.

Of course when I saw it on the chart I recognized it right away as doing the work of the Old English dual pronouns like "wit" (= "we two" or "you and I"--a kind of plural that can only include two members).  Naturally, I started in on a kind of historical explanation, but with the problem of "chice" apparently solved in my own mind, I woke right up. 

So: there it is--antiques and valuation, English linguistics, the value of knowledge about medieval matters and Old English.  I guess that's what's on my mind these days. 

But I think Rosemary and I may be using sentences like "Chice are going to England" for the next few days, perhaps.  Wish us luck!

I let a song go out of my heart

As the song goes, "Little things mean a lot."  And they can also add up to a big meltdown.

Earlier this week, there was a story on the WVU homepage about "Hot Rod Hundley," a legendary basketball player here in the 1950s, whose number was being retired.  My dad had often told stories about Hot Rod's antics, and when I saw the story, I immediately thought, "Oh, I've gotta send this link to Dad!"  And then, I remembered:  Dad's dead.

A couple days later, I got a call from the "digestive specialties clinic" saying that they were ready to schedule my colonoscopy.  Though I'm only 44, I get the thrill of having this procedure every five years thanks to the fact that both of my parents had (and survived) colon cancer in their late 40s/early 50s.  I realized after I hung up, though, that I can't say my dad survived it anymore, apparently, since the doctors believed that the brain cancer he died of had probably metastatized from the colon cancer he had thirty-five years earlier.

I guess I shouldn't have been surprised, then, that watching WVU play its arch-rival Pitt on TV Wednesday night kind of put me over the edge.  It was the first time the reality truly hit me:  I'll never see my Dad again.  

Often since his death, I've become conscious of certain tunes being stuck in my head--and not because I've heard them recently, and they've simply gotten lodged there.  These tunes seem to float up from my subconscious, somehow.  On the morning Dad died, it was "When I Look in Your Eyes."  Later, "The Song is Ended (But the Melody Lingers On)."

That these songs would be archived in my brain isn't too surprising; Dad had his own dance band while in college in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and was a lifelong jazz afficionado and musician.  I grew up with this music as a soundtrack, piping through the radio on WOSU's Big Band Saturday show, or from Dad's collection of 78s and vinyl.

When Tom and I first started dating, he was astounded by the fact that I knew all the lyrics to so many of the old standards, but after many years of visiting my parents' house and hearing them continually himself, he's pretty good at recalling titles and lyrics himself. 

I'll never forget the tone of Dad's voice once when he told me about finally discovering a place he could go to hear (and make) music when he was in Army basic training in Texas.  Having been away from home--and his instruments, and the church choir, and whatever other musical outlets he had there--for months, he was, as he said, "So hungry for music!"  In many ways, I think it was the first time I genuinely understood how much music defined my dad--what a near-religious centrality it had in his life.

That was echoed again in his final days, when my brother and sister-in-law created a slide show of some old negatives that Dad had been meaning to scan and identify for a long time, and--almost as an afterthought--added a soundtrack with classics from Harry James, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, and others.

We figured out how to connect Mark's mp3 player to the TV in Dad's room at the rehab center, and as Dad watched, I was astounded at his instant recall both of the people in pictures he'd taken sixty years earlier, and also of the title, artist, and lyrics of every single song that played.  When he tired and we got ready to leave, he asked us to leave the music running:  "I'll just drift off on that tonight."

That was just a couple of days before he died.  I'm glad to know that there was music in his life even toward the end of it, and I'm even more glad that even though I won't ever be able to enjoy watching him listen to and play music himself, he's left me with an enormous repertoire of melodies to remember him by.

Sometimes, in my more woo-woo moments, I even think his spirit is communicating with me through some of these songs.  I had one such experience this morning.  I'd actually been dreaming about Dad, and woke up with "Serenade in Blue" stuck in my head, for no apparent reason.  As I lay in bed slowly coming to consciousness, I tried to remember the words...When I hear that Serenade in Blue....da da da da da da da da daaaaa--to you?  Couldn't recall the exact lyrics.

An hour or so later I got in the car to drive to the gym, and turned on the Sirius satellite radio, which was tuned to the "40s on 4" station.  As I turned right onto High Street, what should start playing but "Serenade in Blue"?  I listened, carefully, to the lyrics I'd struggled to recall:

When I hear that Serenade in blue
I'm somewhere in another world, alone with you
Sharing all the joys we used to know
Many moons ago

Once again your face comes back to me
Just like the theme of some forgotten melody
In the album of my memory
Serenade in blue

Whether I choose to believe that there's some kind of supernatural communication happening through the music, or that it's a total (if pleasant) coincidence, or that I'm just in a place where I'm bound see what I'm looking for everywhere, it doesn't matter. The songs make me think of Dad.  They make him live, and they remind me that he lives on in me.  All I have to do is tune in and listen.

Dream hopping

As I think I've written here before, I don't think that I usually remember my dreams. But I've had to realize over the last few years, I think, that I have a recurring dream in which my primary mode of locomotion is hopping on one foot.

Undoubtedly, my other leg is asleep or something, and my dream is just my mind processing some sort of physical sleep phenomenon. But it's fascinating: it has taken me a surprisingly long time to realize that this is actually a dream, because every time it happens, I feel like the dream is actually real. So each time it happens again, I just feel like I'm experiencing a very familiar series of real events, in which hopping is just how I get around.

(Oh, and by the way, I hop around because my other leg is cramped up, or twisted up like a withered limb, and sometimes the bad leg actually hurts: it's these things that make me think that what's 'really' happening is just that my leg hurts in a non-dream way.)

But anyway, I just think in my dream “Oh, yeah, hopping: that's just how I do it,” and it seems real.

And anyway, sometimes when I'm not paying any attention to whatever the hell is happening in my waking life, I remember these dreams like real memories, and I think, in a kind of half-conscious way, “Wow, today I can get around fine without all that hopping. That really is a pain when it happens.” Then I stop myself, and I remind myself that I can't recall a single time in my waking life where I really did get around by hopping because my other leg was a withered limb. At least I don't think I can remember any—and I always feel a little uncertain, because the dreams seem so much like memories.

And even more: my hopping has some special dream properties: I can take some really long hops, where, really, I just float across the ground for eight feet, ten feet, twelve feet, maybe twenty or more, and then I can just kind of put my foot back on the ground and take another smooth, low long-jump hop. And I have the feeling that if I just didn't put my foot back down, I'd keep gliding along. I always hear that flying dreams are among the most common dreams, and maybe this is my kind of flying dream: low, slow, close to the ground, and requiring regular effort to keep moving along: it's probably the kind of flying dream I'd have, after all.

In some of the fantasy novels I've been known to read, dreams give one access to a kind of real alternate world, where unicorns get devoured by wolves and things like that. In my fantasy dream world, I get around by hop-floating. And in that world, it's totally normal. Somehow, I don't think there's a best selling fantasy novel in there. Too bad.

But for today, I guess I'm just as happy I'm not in a hopping dream, and I'm vaguely comforted that the next time I am, it will seem familiar, comfortable, and right.

Has no one any sympathy for the clown?

I am one of those folks who rarely remember their dreams. I'm sure some Freudian reader out there is already getting ready to reveal what that reveals about me, but I really don't care. I rarely recall my dreams past waking, and I'm perfectly happy with that state of affairs.

When I do remember my dreams, like this morning, they are often science-fiction dreams (although I also had some sort of medievalist dream this morning, in which my colleague Pat featured, though I don't recall any other details). I have a long tradition of science-fiction dreams, usually of the "alien invasion" sort. When I was young, I think they were scary dreams, but I no longer find them terrifying in the least, I think--my memory of most of them is not clear enough to be sure.

But once in a while, I have a dream that is a bit more memorable, or that (when I wake up) I tell it to Rose quickly enough that the retelling makes it stick in my memory. Once, for example, I dreamed I had the Ebola virus. As I told her the next morning, in my dream it really wasn't so bad: all I had were the ubiquitous "flu-like symptoms," and I recovered quickly enough. I'm sure that dream eased me of all sorts of anxieties!

But my favorite dream memory is waking up in the middle of the night one time with the title of this post swirling through my brain. I don't remember anything else, such as what sort of narrative antecedents might have led up to this rhetorical question, but ever since, I guess it's fair to say I've had a slightly different perspective on the life of a clown.

But I've never had another dream of one. As far as I can remember.