After flying over the lake of his childhood summers, Kurt Vonnegut remarked: "That wasn't the real Maxinkuckee down there. The real one is in my head."
That quote has really meant something to me through the years, as I try to conjure apparitions of my past and make some sense of them.
Kurt Vonnegut died four Aprils ago at the age of 84. With my calendar boldly proclaiming APRIL, my thoughts are haunted by the ghosts of my parents, and the vignettes of my early life that now seem so distant as to belong to a movie I saw in a previous existence.
But, my grandmother, father, and mother all died in consecutive Aprils. Dad was just a few months older than Kurt Vonnegut.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
I had a dream in which my parents were alive again. I was riding my old red bicycle (with chopper bars and banana seat!) near my childhood home, though I was my full-sized, fat, adult self. My sister and friends and cousins (who appeared in the dream) were all adults, too.
At one point in the dream, it was revealed to me that my mother had died the night before, and I simply hadn't been told until that moment, because others were shielding me from the grief, cloaked in the motives of their good intentions.
Friends and family were gathered in a neighbor's large home. I sorta wandered through it in a stupor, not really speaking to anyone. It was on my mind that I needed to find my dad and comfort him, though I never saw him in the dream.
I woke up sad.
But, of course, it has been more than fifteen years since my mother died. It somehow never occurred to my dream-self that I'd already buried both parents -- that my father preceded my mother in death, and would therefore not have been a survivor of her death, as he was in the dream.
How do dreams do that? How do you convince me of things that are not so, foist me into some alternate, anomalous existence populated with circumstances incongruous to the reality I know.
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