childhood

chapter 1: my earliest memory

"Days up and down they come

Like rain on a conga drum

Forget most, remember some

But don't turn none away."

To Live is to Fly - Townes Van Zandt

One evening when I was 15, as I slept surrounded by Beatles posters and Car and Driver covers stapled to my walls, I had a dream. In the dream, I am a child and I am looking up at a stranger in my house:

"Is he going to be ok?" I asked the stranger.

The stranger responded, but his words weren't clear. The dream rewound. Now I was sitting on the brick fireplace hearth in our home in Midwest City, Oklahoma. I was two -- almost three, and I was holding my nine month old brother. People, the stranger included, were looking at us. As I held Scott, his head slipped from my grasp and fell onto the edge of the hearth. There is blood, and the pain-filled cries of an infant. My mother swoops up the baby, my father tends to Scott as well, and I'm left, once again, looking at the stranger.

"Is he going to be ok?"

We are at the emergency room. The nurse is talking to my Mom. Behind the glass, doctors are holding Scott who is screaming in a pitch and frequency that is terrifying. He is in pain.

And I awake.

I told my parents about it. I knew as soon as I awoke that the dream was more than just a dream. The story of Scott receiving three stitches as a result of my dropping his head on the brick fireplace had been told and retold through the years. I knew it had happened, and actually, some of the scenes, especially of being in the hospital waiting room and hearing those screams, had been in my memory all along. Occasionally the memory would come to the forefront of my thoughts, only to remain unconnected. But the dream brought my scattered memories into collective order. And, amongst other things, it serves as my earliest memory.

* * *

Reading these words again reminds me of something I pondered last night (12/4/04). To be honest, this thought wasn't self induced. Rather, I was reading the Epilogue to Cormac McCarthy's Cities of the Plain (the final installment of his Border Trilogy) in which an elderly Billy Parham discusses with a stranger, whom he believes might be death, the spiritual (or lack thereof) aspect of our selves. I am no longer a person inclined to believe in any notion of spirituality, but, perhaps unlike many persons of the same inclination, I welcome sleep. I've always thought that if some supernatural communication was to ever happen, it would be during asleep. I don't know why this is the case. Perhaps it is because my dreams (I can only speak for myself) have a supernatural quality about them. Anyway, I'm digressing from the point that set me to writing. That is, who are the strangers in our dreams?

The stranger in discussion with Billy argues that this is proof of the spiritual, because our brain could not possibly fully conjure these people while we are awake. Therefore, there must be something more to their existence than just a figment of our furtile imaginations. Personally, I believe that they are stereotypes conjured to fit the topic/subject of the dream. Yet, it is interesting that, at least for my part, a face and emotions are assigned to these persons. I've awoken completely in love with a person whom I've never met. Similarly, I've awoken terrified, absolutely terrified, by people whom I've never seen. I don't really feel that this worth pondering for long, but the part of me that longs for something spiritual, some connectedness to humanity and beyond, seeks these contemplations nonetheless. I am such an orphan.