by Sandra Lowen

Created on: November 17, 2009

REFLECTIONS: DREAMS

We spent so many hours, Mel and I, lying on our backs in the tall grass in the park, staring up at the sky and thinking our various thoughts. The hike there wasn't so bad, though with my asthma I was usually puffing hard before I got halfway up the first knoll and grateful for the cool moistness of the ground behind the Amphitheater. Sometimes we'd gather up the leaves science teachers sent us there to collect, sketching the flowers in vivo and duly noting which were monocots and which were diclinous and which looked so pretty and smelled so delicious that we really didn't care.

The sky was full of dreams. One caught sight of wisps of them in the puffy clouds: horses, houses, hearts. Mel wanted to be a physicist; he said because he felt called to find a cure for the cancer that was killing his grandma, but I suspect because 'physicist' was such a funny word to pronounce. I wanted to be a doctor, kind of like Tom Dooley in pre-war Southeast Asia, only I wanted to go to darkest Africa and heal the natives. Mel laughed at that; he said I was more likely to wind up in somebody's cooking-pot, which he supposed would be healing for the natives, in its way.

My real dream was to be a wife and mother; to waft angel-like down the right-side aisle at Greater Rising Mount Zion, swathed chin to train in white tulle. Standing before the altar, which would be fragrant with the scent of honeysuckle, would be the Unknown He. We would share our words before God, the elders and those assembled, and, rings exchanged, veil lifted and first kiss discreetly traded, we would stroll to triumphant organ music up the left-side aisle and into our radiant future. But Aunt Pearl always laughed at that; she said I was nobody's cook and a terrible housekeeper, and highly unlikely to land a man of any substance. And Daddy added insult to injury by saying, Who's going to want a woman as ugly as you? Mama would have told me I was beautiful and smart and talented, that I would make a wonderful wife and mother, but Mama was dead and could no longer speak for herself. Briefly I thought Mel might be my Unknown He, but when he discovered love it was not with me.

Patti captured his eye early on in high school, and then Darlene and then Brenda. Then some guy convinced him he was gay and he never joined me in the park again. He got to research, but the illness came upon him before he could find his grandma's cure, and when next he lay stretched out in the grass, his face was not open to the sky.

Me, I got to be a doctor, but not the medical kind, and I never got to Africa, at least not so far. Wars and their rumors kept me out of the real hotspots, and what would I do there anyway, without medical skills?

Ah, but I did fulfill one dream.

Greater Rising Mount Zion is gone, now, but I did walk, swathed chin to train into the arms of a He whom I now know. And he speaks Mama's words every day: You are beautiful. You are smart. You are talented. Our dreamed-for child lies with us in the grass that could stand a good mowing, and we think our sundry thoughts and dream our various dreams.

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