I Think I Might Be Ready To Write About This Now
I had a dream. It was a dream about a place that people shared and yet there was no one else around. It was a dream about a place that was perpetually on the brink of closing that you always want to remember but never remember your camera to take a picture of.
There’s a place I would like to visit every day but I haven’t been able to visit it even once. It’s made out of glass and ice in a structure that might be architecturally impossible. Somehow, though, the oddly balanced image of it makes you feel more well balanced emotionally just witnessing it. There are pillars that surround colliding shapes with brilliant colors; so brilliant you can almost hear them like sound. I went there while I slept two years ago. It was at the end of the green el line in Chicago and there wasn’t much time to look.
A month ago, this place reappeared in my dream. I remembered going there before in this dream and I wanted to go back. But the dream wasn’t about a place at all. It was about a person. It was about my grandfather.
Let me backtrack a little bit and tell you a bit about him. He was a hard working union man…very stern as he was raising five boys so I am told but he always had a gentleness and patience with his grandaughters. I remember him as a gardener and the way he treated the plants so lovingly. I’d visit and I’d watch him out there in his garden. He also liked to play cards and he was good at it, although I do think there may have been a couple of times he did let my grandma or I win. When I was visiting one summer, I broke my left radius. I held my arm protectively while he drove me to the hospital and at one point, he calmly looked from the road back at me (there isn’t much traffic in Canisteo, NY) and said very matter of fact, “Well, the bone is not sticking out. That’s a good sign.”
In my dream a month ago, my grandparents were visiting Chicago. My grandmother on that side is still alive but is physically frail and would be unable to make this trip. She relies on an oxygen tank and cannot walk very far unfortunately. My grandfather passed on when I was in college, a couple of months before I was married. I can’t visit him in real life, either.
In this recent dream, I wanted to go visit this ice palace but I wasn’t sure if my grandparents could make the trip to the end of the green line. My younger cousins on that side were visiting too, except they were the same age as when he died, even though I was my current age of 26. My grandfather and I were watching these two boys playing. I think they were digging through the dirt for bugs and my grandfather motioned me closer. He asked me to give him a hug and he said, “You better give me a hug because you’re busy and this is the last time you may see me alive again.” And I embraced him and I didn’t think it was odd or remember that he wasn’t alive anymore in reality.
We didn’t get to go to visit the ice castle in this dream at all. We didn’t think it would be open and we didn’t want to take my grandparents way out there. I woke up and I felt sad I hadn’t gone there. I went to my computer in a sort of dream like state and tried to google the place but I realized that I didn’t know what it was actually called. So then, I googled end of green line Chicago. But there’s nothing like this place at the end of the green line in Chicago. And then, I realized that it didn’t really exist at all. That isn’t all, though. Because, when it hit me finally that it was all a dream, I remembered that my grandfather had died. All I could do was sob. Sob and get it out and paint.
He was right, of course. I was always busy, especially when I was in high school and college. I didn’t reserve as many special moments to share with him. And when he passed on, all I could do to cope was immerse myself in the philosophy of the Tralmalfadorians. (Thank God my experiemental fiction class introduced me to Kurt Vonnegut)
I want to tell you that a part of me still needs this place to exist. It should be obvious why. I keep thinking it may exist in Russia because of the colors on the pillars. I even looked at pictures of the Kremlin for a couple of weeks afterwards, thinking maybe a place around there might be reminiscent. For now I just have this painting, though and it makes me so sad because it doesn’t do my dream justice at all. I started painting it right after the dream and it just kept getting more and more difficult to remember.
But for now, until I can dream again, here. This is my grandfather:
