Fighting with the Dreams

A year or so on in this never-ending pandemic from when I last wrote. Things keep shifting--it seems like maybe it is going to be over and then there is another variant, another surge. Things do seem better now, less scary--but I know as I write that that if I were immunocompromised or the parent of a child under five, I would feel much less safe. 

In the story I was just reading in The New Yorker, a father and son enact a familiar ritual, passed on from the father's father (who has recently died) to him and then shared with his son. The son, a child (maybe ten or so, don't remember), has had a nightmare and the way to make sure the nightmare does not come back is to draw a picture of the monster or whatever it was and to burn it in the sink.

I read that and immediately wanted to get up and draw my dreams and burn them. But drawing does not feel accessible to me. I mean, I suppose I could try it. The desire to make them go away is so strong. Anyway, I am writing this instead. 

The other night I was dreaming about my father, who died in 2011, over ten years ago. I dream about him frequently, and usually the dreams are upsetting--some scenario in which he did not really die, or he almost did and then came back to life and is in some other nursing home than the one he actually lived in for the last few months of his life, and I just cannot bring myself to go and see him--I don't want to go through everything again, I want it to be over--and I feel terrible about it, about not going to see him. 

Then, this one, the other night: I am out with him and maybe a couple of other people at a restaurant, but things are not normal--he can barely stand up on his own. I am trying to get him out of there and get us a cab home but I cannot leave him alone long enough to go find a cab. (We are in some restaurant that seems to be out in the country somewhere so I have to leave him on the porch while I go out to the road to look for the taxi.) Every time I get him into a chair and tell him not to try to get up he does and then he falls and I have to try to get him up again and he is all floppy. At first the people in the restaurant are helpful and then they seem to be getting tired of it. One of them, a man who works there, is trying to help him up and says, he must have had too much to drink. I say something like, no, that's not it, he's old. And my father looks up from the ground and gives me this rueful smile and shake of the head and it's so much like him that I am just falling apart even thinking about it.

The other thing that keeps happening in the dream is that because he is confused he gets up from where he is supposed to sit and wait for me and wanders off (somehow now he can walk) and then I can't find him and am out on the road, yelling "Dad!"

One of these times I yell out for real and wake my partner up and he comforts me. I am glad to be awakened and out of the dream but then when I fall asleep again I am back to some version of it.

Later in the day, we are lying in bed talking. 

I say, "I want some peace. From these dreams." 

He says, "But they're just dreams." 

I say something in response, I can't remember what, just maybe how upsetting they are, and then he says, 

"It's like you're tormented."

"Yes," I say. 

"So how do you address that?" 

I don't know, I say. 

"Maybe by talking to a therapist?"

"Yes," I say, "I could do that." What I don't say is I feel like I've had enough therapy to last me a lifetime and I don't feel excited about trying to start up again with someone new. 

Then J. says, "But it wouldn't change the fact that you have this sadness about your father."

"No, it wouldn't," I say. And then I do feel a bit more peaceful. For the moment, anyway.

Still Distanced

 Yes, I know, this is a most occasional blog. I don't think I have any readers anymore, even. But in case anyone is reading, hello there. 

I see that I wrote last about 11 months ago, at the start of the pandemic. It is astonishing to me how much still feels the same as what I conveyed in that post. I am not working from home completely now--I go into the office three out of five days, but there are so few of us who go in, and we go in on alternate days, so today I was completely alone there. 

In the summer you could see people outdoors, but these last three or four months of cold weather have felt isolating. I haven't seen my family in New York City in almost six months. J. and I see no one socially except one good friend of his who lives alone and who we know is very careful. During the weeek I am alone because J. travels to another city for work. 

Still, I know how lucky I am that we have each other, that we have stayed healthy, that we have our jobs and our two houses. I am still practicing piano and having lessons, sometimes virtually depending on circumstances and conditions, and I love it and feel that it keeps me strong and connected.

And there have been some beautiful snowy winter days here, as you can see.

Walking in the local park on a cold but sunny and calm day with the pristine snow to clomp around in feels like a blessing. 

Still, it feels like a time of waiting. Waiting to get the vaccine, waiting for warmer weather so we can even think visiting family, waiting for this thing to turn around and for people to stop dying from it. 

In the Time of Social Distancing

Somehow this feels like a good time to take up this blog again. I have been meaning to write every day, in a notebook, to record what this time has been like, and have not done too much of that.

So, maybe here, blogging, might be a way.

I live in upstate New York, far away from New York City, where I was born and lived most of my life, except for the last 7 or 8 years. It is scary enough here--but I worry about my friends and family, living in the epicenter. But they are going on with their lives as best as they can, as we are here, too.

Today, Monday, was the 10th "business day" for me of working from home--I started on Tuesday, almost two weeks ago. Ten business days, but fourteen actual days of working from home and seeing no one in the flesh except J., my partner. We had been staying at his house, about 25 minutes from here, all last week, and working from home together, which was comforting and cozy. But today he is on the road, because mostly he works in another state, and he was asked to come in this week. So I am now back in my house, which I love, but it does feel strange to be alone with all this worry, to not have the companionship for meals and TV and whatever else--walks, playing music, goofing around. And the hugs and physical contact. 

It is a struggle to stay active. We had been going for walks every day but yesterday we did not get out, and today I have done nothing active so far and now it is evening and I don't have any exercise equipment here. If only I could find that work-out-at-home set that I ordered from somewhere awhile ago, with the dance CD and the stretchy bands. 

Well, I will practice the piano and that will be good. And tomorrow I have a piano lesson, virtually of course, and that will be fun and comforting.

A Few Years Later

Wow, this blogging thing has kind of gone out the window, hasn't it? Someone I know posted a link to her blog, and it happened to be on blogspot, and then I saw that my option to comment identified me by my blog name, and then I remembered this dear neglected venue.

Well, here I am, still in Upstate City, and pretty happy here. Now, when I can, I play the piano. I have been taking lessons for about a year and a half, picking up from where I left off around 40-something years ago. I love it. I love the routine of it, the discipline, the feeling of my skills coming back. It's hard to find the time to practice as much as I would like to--it seems like the week goes by and then it's time for my lesson again and I've practiced not 5 or 6 days but 3 or 4 and I feel a little stressed about going to my lesson. And then I remember, I am an adult, this is for me, there's nothing to feel bad about. And I always enjoy the lesson, no matter what, and come out of it energized and happy.

My first piano lesson of the new, fall season is on Monday, a few days away. And before that, on the weekend, I am going hiking in the mountains with J., my beau. So, a good few days coming up.

Resuming

Hello, my dear readers, yes, I am still here. It has been 22 months, it seems, since I posted, but time goes very quickly.

It is a rare quiet Saturday for me here in Upstate City, one of those post-Labor Day hot, sunny days that make you remember that summer actually does not end until the solstice later in the month.

A lot has happened. For instance, I now, for the first time in my life, own a house, which has made me happier than I imagined it would. Built in 1912, three bedrooms, a front porch, deck leading to the backyard, sleeping porch off the back bedroom, and the kitchen and baths are updated. It is comfortable and comforting to sit here on my front porch on a sleepy Saturday, saying hello to an occasional neighbor walking a dog, listening to the breezes stir the leaves of the trees planted in front of every house.

Last night I went to a yoga class that I like but that I hadn't been to in awhile. I put my mat in the front row, as I like to, defying what seems to be the yoga etiquette of filling the back rows first. But I always take off my glasses for yoga, and then I can't really see the teacher unless I am in the front row.

When the teacher, who is a warm and, I have to say, kind of buxom and cuddly woman,  came and sat down pretty much right in front of me, I said, "Oh, I haven't seen you in a while."  She said, "Yes, in about eight and a half months." So then I knew that I was right in my surmise--she was pregnant, for the second time, and indeed, she did look about eight and a half months. I had my wistful feeling, as I always do, about people moving forward in their lives in that way, having babies and more babies, when that time has passed for me. But then when we were doing inversions, helping each other in pairs, and I was too shy to ask the guy next to me for help (or he was also too shy and also did not need help), T., the teacher, came over to help me as she always does. In addition to being round and soft and huggable, she is tall and strong, and when she stands in front of me and grabs my hips as I kick up, I get past that momentary vertigo and fear of falling and my legs go all the way up, and it is, I don't know, a bit like flying.

Heart of November

Okay, I'm back, having missed quite a chunk of NaNoWriMo or NaNoBlogMo or whatever it is. But it is still November, yes?

General impressions: We are heading toward winter. Snowflakes fell heavily all day yesterday outside the windows of the old house that is my office. It is dark at five o'clock. I know that that is what happens in November but somehow I was not quite prepared.

Today, though, there is that bright winter sun. I have been cleaning, and then I will go into the office for a few hours to catch up on some things, and then I will have dinner with friends. 

This month is a busy travel month for me. A conference in one Midwest city last week, and then on Wednesday I head out for another conference in a different Midwest city. Both cities are not that far away but require taking two planes from where I live, so travel becomes very tedious. I like going to conferences but it is also a lot of work and a lot of being on all the time. And then I come back to work and I am impossibly behind on everything. Thus my plan to spend some time at the office today.

Still, I am grateful, of course, for my job and the interesting and nice people I work with and the fact that I work with books. 

And so grateful to have a quiet day today, to catch up.

I wanted to get up super early today and get started on the big cleaning plans. But that's hard for me. I drifted back to sleep and had a dream about my father and my brother that was both comforting and sad, and so then I was kind of glad I had gone back to sleep, to experience that, and to have what I am feeling brought to the surface.

In the dream I was with my family at a beach, my whole extended family, it seemed like, my sister and my niece and nephew and their kids. And we were trying to take a family picture, with my father standing and holding my little nephew's hand, I think, but whenever I looked through the camera he was blurry and indistinct, kind of fading away. (My father died three years ago.) And then for a moment we were all distracted and then when we looked around my father was gone and we were worried because he was frail and old and couldn't walk very well. We thought maybe he had gone into the water, and I remember thinking, well, the water will support him, maybe he can swim even if he can't walk very well. So then we were in the water looking for him and calling out his name, kind of swimming or walking in the water, up and down parallel to the beach. Then the scene switched and I was in some sort of mall near the ocean, like a long series of interconnected stalls, almost like one of those covered markets like Redding Market in Philadelphia. I was walking through the hallway or the stalls and I was desperately calling out my father's name, his actual name, both first and last. Then sometimes I would switch to "Daddy." And then I heard, sort of behind a curtain, a familiar cough (which now I think sounded more like my brother, but in the dream I associated it with my father) and my father's voice said something like "Yeah" or "yes," very casually. I pulled aside the curtain and there were my father and my brother sitting companionably at a table in what seemed to be a diner. It seemed that my father had left the beach because he had gotten a phone call from my brother, who had just arrived from California and wanted to spend some time alone with my father before he saw the rest of us. In real life, my brother, who died a year and a half ago, had been confined to a wheelchair, without speech, for the last nine years, so to see him there, talking to my father, and looking like himself, his earlier self, was a gift. But I was so angry in the dream that they had made us all worry, I couldn't even think about being happy to see my brother. I said to my father, something like, "didn't you think???" and then I looked at my brother and it was a little harder to be angry at him, and I said, "didn't you think"? and he looked at me and kind of shook his head and there were tears in his eyes, and I felt like he was saying, "I'm dead and I've come back to visit, my powers to control things in this dream are limited, don't go away and don't be angry." But I said I had to go off and tell my sister and everyone else that my father was okay and maybe I'd see them later. 

And now I feel like, if only I had stayed. But of course the ending would always be the same.

Like I said, both comforting and sad.

Upstate Yoga

Here's a post for Day Three of Nanowrimo, barely under the wire (having missed Day Two).

Today I went to work, got quite a bit done for five or six hours, barely stopping for lunch, then went out at around 3:30 for a walk in the soft, gray November afternoon, which was not as cold as it looked from inside. 

Came back in, got some more done, then went to yoga at 7:00. Class was hard, and fun, and very, very crowded. Barely an inch between mats. I love this studio that I've been going to here in Upstate City, but I kind of wish it weren't so popular. 

At the beginning of class I was fretting about feeling too hemmed in but then I let go, as one does in yoga class, and just focused on the poses and the particular element  that our teacher was emphasizing. (It had to do with aligning one's head and neck in a certain way.)

When A., the teacher, mentioned the dreaded word "partner pose," I quailed and considered quickly exiting the room. I usually don't mind doing the partner poses once I'm in them, but lately I have not had the courage to get past that first moment of reluctance and shyness, especially when, as tonight, the person next to me is a guy. But, fortunately, my neighbor immediately found another guy to be his partner (we were supposed to choose people with a similar level of strength in our legs) and then I saw, from the row in front of me, that K., a woman whom I've gotten to know to say hello to in this class, and who is just a lovely and friendly and sort of twinkly person, was giving me the high sign (as my father would say). So then we did the little exercise together, which I am not even going to try to explain or describe, but it was fine doing it with her, and I felt grateful to her for reaching out. 

And then pretty soon we were winding down, lying still in the darkened room for shavasana, and class was over, and I felt peaceful as I went on my way.