REMOTE TERRITORIES
Lately my dreams, which I thought were a remote landscape that I didn’t understand and entered with trepidation and confusion have become a familiar place that I seek out when I fall asleep.
My dreams are not all pleasant; sometimes I wake up sweating; feeling panicky and flustered but still they are a place I welcome.
My Dad died over a year ago.
He lived far away from me, for me, in England. I only saw him about four or five times a year and it was only in the last decade that I set aside childhood grievances and learnt what it is like to appreciate and respect and, of course, tease him.
My Son is not dead, far from it, but I do not know where he lives. I think he may be somewhere near Russia in Georgia. It is so long since I have spoken to him or seen him that I cannot imagine what he would sound like or look like. I imagine he could walk past me in the street without me recognising him. I am not sure if I will ever speak to him again, or hug him, or cook him a meal or, now that he is well into adulthood, pour him a whisky and settle down for the evening.
They are both in their different ways remote from my world; not really part of it at all.
It grieves me.
Sometimes I look at my partner’s children and think I have given them more of a childhood than I ever gave my son. Sometimes when I read my Dad’s memoir I see someone I did not know; especially those wonderful early years of his adulthood and the strange terrors of his childhood.
But every night I settle down; turn off the bedside light and if it is not raining too hard open the bedroom window. I will listen for the last sounds of the rooks settling into their spring time nests and hope that if I wake in the early hours I will hear the hoot of the owls that hunt in the woods across the road. Dash the dog will settle on the floor but often I will wake to find his heavy weight on my feet or if he is feeling especially weird will find him stretched out besides me with his hairy face next to mine, slowly crowding me to the edge of the bed.
Alexa will play the world service into my darkened room and often I will not hear it until just before it switches to radio four and the shipping broadcast starts but at other times I will hear fascinating programs that become even more fascinating because my dreaming mixes into them and I do not know in the morning what is fact or dream.
Often though, my dreams bring me to my Son and my Dad; my Dad most of all.
He is usually not the centre of the dream, he may have just asked me or my brother to sail a yacht across the Atlantic or he may be walking down the street in a Mediterranean town, lit bright by the sun. or maybe he will be at a family gathering but he will be there and he will be alive; alive and not dead.
And alive in a way that makes me think he is a much nicer man than ever I knew he was when he was alive.
It comforts me to see him and hear him speak. I look forward to his arrival. I even look forward to those times when my dreams turn sour and I wake up with a jerk when something awful happens to him.
My son is more elusive. He slips into my dreams. I can’t quite see him and know that he doubts the wisdom of being there, but then someone, maybe my Mum, will reach out to him and give him a cuddle and tell him how silly he is for staying away from the family for so long and I think I might give him a hastily bought bottle of whisky; grin a little, hope I too can hug him and welcome him home.
And then they are not there.
But I know tonight the chances are high that I will see them again; the people who shaped my life so fundamentally, the people I loved very much; one of whom I will never meet in real life again and the other who I also doubt I will see again or if so only for fleetingly formal encounters.
But my dreams are a different land with so many different possibilities. I like the ones where we are sailing most. My brother often joins me then too. I wonder if, in his bed in a different country, he also encounters my Dad in a different form to the person we once knew. I hope so.
(First performed at Ubelong Glasgow 21 04 21 see https://www.facebook.com/UBelongGlasgow/ )
(Photo, Alan Morgan and Jill Morgan, presumably in Antigua)