I keep a journal of my dreams. But long before I began to keep the journal, I had a dream that gives a certain shape to my life still. Even though I never wrote it down, the dream remains as clear in my memory as if I’d had it last night. Clearer—because I don’t really remember much about what I dreamed last night: except that in it I was walking freely: and I haven’t been able to walk freely now for a long time.
When I woke up, my legs hurt. Do you suppose I could actually have been walking? Why not? It could be. I believe that dreams are real, as real as waking life: so in my mind, it could be.
Hey. Anything at all could be. Can you grant me that much?
***
Marty.
It was a very long time ago, maybe forty years, maybe longer. It was when I was first married, and that was fifty years ago, in 1953, and now it is the year 2003.
Three years into The Millennium. Are you supposed to capitalize Millennium? I’m not sure. But oh! didn’t we celebrate the Millennium? Oh, we did! All of us, all over the world—watching celebrations around the globe on the TV.
I think maybe the Eiffel Tower shooting off fireworks from its entire surface was the best. But the London display was pretty good; even though they didn’t get the London Eye done in time.
The London Eye, in case you don’t know, is a huge, huge ferris wheel that puts you—going up on it—eye-level with Big Ben, the great clock. Well—even higher than Big Ben, my daughter Margaret says. But eye-level with Big Ben is as high as I can think. Without an airplane, that is. Margaret lives in London now, she is an architect there. She can think a great deal higher than I can.
Margaret and I are going up on the London Eye on September 15, when I go to London to visit her.
This is the last time I come, Margaret, I said, when she had finally twisted my arm enough. Get your head around that—this is the last time.
The bribes she offered were pretty spectacular. The London Eye, the Globe Theatre, and a week’s stay in an honest-to-God castle in Scotland: with day trips around the countryside, by hired car, to Edinburgh, to all sorts of places. Folks! An honest-to-God castle!
The love of royalty, majesty, in us, dies hard.
Okay, I said. I’ll come. But remember: this is the very last time….
Will you come again if I get married? she said.
No, I said.
Well, I won’t. Her getting married doesn’t mean that much to me. I went to London once to see her architectural designs displayed in the Royal Academy—I couldn’t miss that, could I? This time I am going because she wants me to see the work she has done on the Tate Gallery gardens, and the Tate Britain renovation. I wouldn’t want to miss that. Well, would I?
But marriage? No. Not that important.
A grandchild? Maybe. But no. They could come here.
I am not just a curmudgeon. Not just. Though there is something quite curmudgeonly about me. But this refusal to travel any longer has come about because a) I never did like to travel, I like to stay in my own back yard, my own house, which is in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA. God, can I believe that my kid lives in England?
And b) because I’m getting old. My body is getting old. This happens. Stick around. You’ll see. It happens. You think it won’t, but it will. Unless you die young, of course, but that’s a whole other track.
I don’t think I can come, Margaret, I said.
I can’t walk much any more. (Well, I can’t. I told you about that early on.)
We’ll rent a car, she said. We’ll fly to Edinburgh and then we’ll rent a car there. You won’t have to walk.
She said.
You haven’t got a driver’s license, I said. You let it lapse.
I’ll get a driver’s license, she said.
Okay, I said. If you get a driver’s license, I’ll come.
I thought I was safe, you know.
I thought she’d never do it. In some things, she’s a terrible procrastinator.
But she did. The last time she was home, which was last Christmas and New Year, the Millennium New Year; her father came too; Bud; I believe we all thought that if on the stroke of midnight the whole world was going to slide off the back of The Great Turtle, why, at least we would all go together—anyway, Margaret got her driver’s license during that visit. She borrowed a car from a friend of mine and sailed through the test like, well, like a hot knife through butter.
I believe that the thought about the Great Turtle, or its equivalent, was at the back of Margaret’s mind when she came home for the Millennium. I know it was at the back of mine. A little tiny bit. Yours? Come on now, confess. Margaret’s father, my ex-husband, Bud, disclaimed any such thought. He is a rationalist, always has been.
It was just hell being a mystic married to a rationalist.
I think of myself as some kind of grassroots mystic, you know. I mean, I haven’t made a cause of it, I haven’t become a priest, or a nun, or founded an order, or anything like that, but still….
And with my bad legs and my plantar fasciitis, there is no way I’m ever going barefoot any more. No discalced styles for this old lady.
***
Hey. Look it up. It’s a real word.
***
I also think of myself as a sort of Christian Marxist. No Christian alive would recognize me, but I like to think that maybe Christ would. I mean, in terms of what G. B. Shaw said: wrote: The only trouble with Christianity is that it’s never been tried: with that idea in mind, I think I am a Christian, or try to be. Within my limits. Which are considerable.
***
Marty. Back to Marty. A movie called Marty came out a long time ago, starring Ernest Borgnine. It was his first real success, and, for my money, his only one. Bud and I went to Mankato to see the movie.
Mankato was our Mecca at that time. We were living as caretakers in a woods—
847 acres—near New Ulm, Minnesota; in the summertime it was a Girl Scout, 4-H Club, birdwatchers camp; in the winter it was almost totally isolated. New Ulm didn’t have a movie theater then and the Twin Cities were too far to drive on a whim. So Mankato it was for us—28 miles. We were so unbelievably poor that sometimes when we got the idea that we wanted to go to Mankato to see a movie—generally to relieve our depression, we were also unbelievably depressed, or at least I was, living as a new bride in a crude log cabin in the woods with no phone, no TV, this was actually pretty much before TV. And no other contact with the world for weeks at a time, a city girl? of course I was depressed—anyway, when we went to Mankato, we would sometimes—often—
have to scrounge through every pocket in every piece of clothing we owned to find money.
Hey, Bud, I found a quarter!
Hey, Joan, I found a half-dollar! (In those days we had half-dollars, I always thought they were very nice, very useful coins, much better that that silly-looking gold dollar they came out with a few years ago. For example.)
Joan—that’s me.
Six pennies….
And we would get together all the glass returnable bottles we could find and we would stop at Domeier’s grocery at the edge of town and turn the bottles in for cash and be on our way to MANKATO!
MANKATO! The word still sends a thrill of anticipation through me, a thrill of hope. Maybe, just maybe, once we have slid over the edge of the known world—just the other side of Mankato—maybe we will find an answer, a new world, a better life, a reason for going on. A reason for staying in the marriage….
And sometimes, if we turned out enough pockets, sold enough bottles, scrounged deep enough, we would buy a pint of ice cream and take it with us into the movie and eat it with two spoons, which of course we brought from home.
***
The night after we saw the movie Marty I had the dream.
In it, I kept seeing people from my past—high school and grade school, that was really the only past I had at that time. They were all moving in one direction. I asked them where they were going. No one would answer me. They were all dressed very poorly, in thin clothing; in rags; and there was snow on the ground, the air was very cold;
they should have been dressed better, those tatters couldn’t be keeping them warm enough.
Finally I saw that they were all forming into a long line, a long column, maybe three or four abreast, and marching—well, shuffling, or drifting, more than marching. Moving slowly along. And as they moved along, they sang, and their song became a dirge, in no language that I knew, maybe in no language at all, maybe just sound. Humming, keening, moaning: in unison: a tragic OM. The music they sang, while it was sad, sadder than anything, was also beautiful, beyond my telling. I can compare it to no music that I have ever heard. But tears will come to my eyes even now, remembering that dream-music.
I ran along the edges of the column, plucking at the rags of the marchers. Who continued to pay no attention, just kept walking on, singing their marvelous song. By now it was a long, long column, reaching farther than my eye could see.
Finally a woman dropped out of the column to tell me what it was all about. The marchers were going, she said, to a place on a frozen plane, where a man had lived for many, many, uncounted, uncountable, years. The man’s name was Marty.
She told me that we were not on earth, that we were on a far star, an outreach of earth, where people had gone to found a new colony at a time when, by the quirks and quarks and terrible errors of humankind, earth had become uninhabitable.
Out on the plain, this man named Marty had for all these years sat alone and thought. Yes, thought. Just thought. And his thought was what powered this star, this whole colony of people. His thought gave the star its light, its warmth.
Why are you singing this sad song? I said.
Marty is dead, she said.
And she told me that all these tattered pilgrims were going out onto the plain, which had begun to freeze when Marty died, to pay a last homage to him, to grieve for what was lost. Now that it was lost, now they understood what they had had; and what they no longer had and could not have again.
Our world cannot survive without his thought, she told me. Little by little, since he died, the warmth has been ebbing. Soon our whole world will die, will freeze. We are going out there to die where he is….
And she slipped back into the ragged column and after a while was lost to my sight. The wonderful, wonderful music went on, swelled and sank, increased and diminished, went on and on. Still goes on in my head, whenever I remember.
And I stood by the side of the road as the singing marchers went by, and I wept for the world that was lost, even though it was not my own world. In the dream, I wept.
***
Years later I talked to a shrink about that dream: Fred, his name was. The shrink’s name.
I was in therapy because I couldn’t find a reason for my life. I talked and talked about how smart I was, how talented, how squashed I felt in marriage and motherhood. By that time we had moved, Bud and I, and Margaret, who was six years old then, back to the city: Minneapolis. Mankato no longer figured in our lives. The marriage was in trouble. So was Margaret. So was I. I think Bud was making it all right: Mr. Detached.
Fred said: What was the movie about?
I said: It was about a working-class guy, not very good-looking, not very smart, shy, who hung with a bunch of guys who wanted life in the fast lane. These guys talked all the time, bragged all the time, about women they were banging. Or hoping to bang.
Marty didn’t have a girl; no girl would have him. He felt like a total loser. But one day he saw a woman—Carol, was that her name? maybe her name was Carol—and she began to interest him. His fast-lane friends laughed at him, told him that Carol was a “dog.”
Well. Anyway. In the end Marty stood up to his friends, asked Carol to go out with him, and she did, and they had a nice time. It was understood that the two of them would stay together, would get married and make a life together. It was understood that Marty had chosen a better part than his friends: the way of the ordinary.
***
What do you think the dream means? Fred said. Fred was a little short social worker guy, I don’t think he was as tall as I was, and he had the kindest eyes I’ve maybe ever seen. He was smart; but it was the kindness that shone.
I don’t know, I said.
You do, he said.
I knew what he wanted it to mean. I knew what I didn’t want it to mean.
Your unconscious is smarter than you are, he said.
Hell, I’m willing to grant that. But what did my unconscious say? That’s what I still don’t get.
Do you think you are ordinary? Fred said. Lay your cards on the table now.
There was a very long pause. Then: No, I don’t, I said.
And yet, worry over it as I will, like a dog with a bone, the dream had an effect on me. Still does. Though I claim that I don’t know what it means, still, it is there, like yeast in the bread.
Although the marriage is over, has been for many years, twenty-five anyway, and I never married again, I still choose the ordinary: over and over. I write stories—not such an ordinary thing to do; no matter in how small a way, it is still the path of the artist, and the artist stands aside and watches—but I write, always, about ordinary people. I write about small events. I value the small and the ordinary. I stay home.
But still. But still. Something in me wanted Margaret to leave me. Something in me wanted her to choose the high road, to fly. And she did; she is; flying. Can’t I have it both ways? Can’t the dream mean what it says—that the thoughts of an ordinary man—or woman—all the thoughts of all the ordinary people make the warmth in the world?
But maybe the genius is the reason. The genius is born. He—she—has to fly: has to. Or die.
I don’t know. All I know is that I have chosen my life. I have chosen my path. I’m pretty happy most of the time. I think a lot. I am thinking about you now. I am—forgive me—praying for you.
I believe this is my job in the world.
I am doing my job.
Margaret is doing her job.
What is your job? Do you know what your job is?