I had a really strange dream last night. It was a dream about the house that I grew up in. Place is something that is hard to put your finger on, because places change. The earth remains, but geography, too, changes. We actually have so many changes, micro-changes, if you will, going on all the time. Our hair grows and falls out, our skin ages, roads erode and are repaired. Yet sometimes, we find comfort in what remains the same. I’m not entirely sure what all this big house over on Sheridan Avenue represents to me, but it must be more than I realize, because this dream has shaken me a bit.
Actually I have recurring dreams of walking the street of Sheridan Avenue between 40th and 42nd streets, and the way almost always leads up the sloping driveway to my childhood home. This is the way I walked to school, over and over and over. Starting in kindergarten, all the way up to high school, when I would walk (and not take the bus). So, for many years I walked those blocks. For many years, this home was the safest place I knew, and ironically, not always the most safe place, too. This was the home where I’d lay sleeping as a kid, and my older brother, locked out of the home late at night, would climb up to my second story window and knock on my window to go let him in. Scared the bejeezus out of me, to find my brother there, but I obediently got up and let him in. Strange things could happen in a house with 8 kids.
This is the house where my younger brothers could behead my Barbies and get away with it. The house where I threw my Chatty Baby doll out my second story window because kids in the neighborhood said they’d catch her, and she’d be OK. They didn’t and she wasn’t, and when I held her smashed little body, crying on the staircase, my mom had no sympathy, just “What did you think would happen?” And yet those stairs held comfort for me in their solidness, the high ceilings in that home left me space to imagine. The very walls were the protection that I longed for.
So last night, when I dreamt that this home had become a restaurant, and the whole end of the block a mini-mall, I was furious and bereft, crying out to no-one in particular, “But this was the home I grew up in.” There was nothing of a family home left, only a bar at the front end, where I could see in, and what I just imagined as little tables filling in all the spaces in the rest of the house. There was no more ownership, no connection left to who I once was. As I get older, instead of wanting to let go, I want to hold on. I want to hold onto all the places I’ve been, all the people I’ve known, I want to cherish and be grateful for all of my life. How do we gather up the “all of us” I wonder? How do we stay connected on this changing planet, in changing bodies, with changing relationships? I don’t know what the pull is, but I do know, that I need to drive over to Sheridan Avenue, and just sit and know that that big house is still there, and it is still a home. A place that was once, my home, full of dreams, full of wonder, full of fear, full of me, full of us.
