April nocturne

I am real busy. Finishing up the first leg in a short string of shows, lots of obligations mounting. Bills adding up, brakes are failing, deck needs painting. I guess things are pretty normal right now. Won't be a lot of time to write but as a few of my friends have privately noted, I have been pretty loquacious lately and maybe it ain't such a bad idea for my gums to stop flapping for a while.

Two of our closest friends, R & D, have split the scene for greener pastures and we are going to certainly miss them.

I dreamt about both my mother and father last night. Unusual for me, has been many years since I have had such a dream, if ever. They split up around 1961 or 1962 and they have both departed this mortal coil, my father a year ago last week. A strange dream.

Google was selling ad space to our lives. Everywhere you walked there were channels left and right, side columns really, which Google would fill with extraneous pictures and information in order to fill in the blanks in our thought processes. Some of the stuff was germane but certain things were inapplicable, like a Siri or Google search when they mishear your command and give you some hilarious approximation that is totally off the mark.

I am not sure how my Dad fit in to the whole scenario but we were fighting some dragon together, some project against all odds which we often did in the construction business when we worked together. My father was so brilliant, so tough, so formidable. It was nice to visit with him last night, to touch him once again in my slumber.

We ended up at a casino which is fitting since we played a lot of blackjack together, he a master mathematician with an innate ability to figure probability.

*
My mother's dream was even more powerful. She was naked and in the process of childbirth. In a great deal of pain, I fetched a cold washcloth and cooled her head, administered comfort as well as I could. I guess someone with a  psychological bent could input all sorts of questions from the dream, was I witnessing my own birth?

My mother, who also died a year ago, not long after my father, and I had a serious emotional disconnect, for all sorts of reasons that I need not go into. I experienced a deep connection with her in the dream that was mostly lacking when she was alive, an appreciation for her physical and emotional pain and a compassion that I regret not necessarily always feeling or expressing in life. Cathartic dream.

It is impossible to see your parents or even yourself, exactly as others do. My father had one close friend, Norman Lawrence, the loss after his passing was so great that he never made another. My mother had a million friends, affected everyone in her orbit, but it was a somewhat different experience for those of us who had peeked behind the curtain. Many found her irrationality delicious, it was a bit tougher for those of us on the inside.

They were both brilliant people and I miss them both and have to thank them, our parents are totally responsible for our being on this earth and both of mine worked hard and sacrificed for me and for the rest of the family. We are all imperfect and we all do the best that we can.

I cried for months after my father died, have yet to shed a tear for mom for some reason. Watching the intense emotional spiral of her breakdown was so devastating to me in high school, it forced me into a role that I was plainly incapable of dealing with, I saw things no kid should ever see. But I can't forget that she saved my life on at least two occasions and loved me deeply, as did my father. Who can ask for anything more?