Help me, Mommy.

I dreamed that I was in my basement, and could not see. I was in a panic. I hoped it might be temporary, maybe as a result of waking suddenly. I knew I was supposed to be in my bed, but here I was in the basement, and I couldn’t see. I knew exactly where in the basement I was; the southeast corner, in an area we have blocked off with low obstructions to keep the doggies out. Though I am 59 years old, gray-haired, weather-beaten, and scarred, I cried out “Mommy! I CAN’T SEE!” I may have said it more than once. Almost immediately, I heard my Mother’s voice; “Where are you, honey!” I answered “Over here! I can’t see!” I could hear my mother moving toward me. I reached out, and felt her hand touch mine. She said “There now, honey it’s all right. You have to get back in bed; Patty said.”

When I became fully awake, I lay in my darkened bedroom, listening to my wife breathing beside me. It was almost midnight. I had been in bed less than two hours. Considering past the absurdity of the dream (I am NOT blind, though I often feel disabled when I don’t have my glasses on; my Mother is 50 miles away and could never negotiate the steps to my basement), I remembered the immediate comfort that I felt when my Mother’s hand touched mine. I was still unable to see, and had no idea how I had come to be in the basement when I belonged in bed, but I was calmed when my Mother’s fingertips touched my hand. Everything would be all right.

I turned on the bedside lamp to look at my hands. Thick, wide, short-fingered and big-knuckled hands covered with many, many small and medium-sized scars and one very large one. I remembered them. Though gone for fifty years, Penny’s sharp Boxer teeth had drawn blood many times during our rough play on Capitol Street. Small, triangular scars less than a quarter of an inch long, most of them, though one was nearly two inches. I loved tussling with her. The rougher the better. No blood, no glory. She never played rough with the girls, and they probably never imagined her to be the huge and dangerous wild wolf that she was in my childish fantasies.

My wife’s breathing changed; I knew she was either awake, or very nearly so.

I turned my hands this way and that; there, on the left thumb, the long, deep diagonal crescent, all that remains, along with my memories, of the day on Brock Street in the summer of 1976 or 1977 when I sliced it to the bone with a razor knife while cutting a piece of expansion joint for my new patio concrete. Dad was there with me, to help me. It needed stitches, but I couldn't leave, as the concrete truck had just arrived. We had to pour, so I just bundled it up and stuck it inside my glove. I couldn’t know on that day that this big, bluff, lively, moody man, whom I have loved endlessly and whom I have also cursed so much and so often, would be gone from the earth in five short years. He would have been only fifty years old that summer, nine years younger than I am tonight. I had no idea how to do concrete. I needed Dad’s help. He had done ALL of the tradesman-type jobs. A professional plumber and steamfitter, he could roof, stick-build, finish concrete, apply sheetrock, wire houses, fix cars, solder, weld, use any tool effectively. He could do just about anything. He could figure anything out. And he was generous with his humble gifts, willing to help anyone, at any time. I needed him; how badly, I never knew until he was suddenly gone. He had my hands (or, more accurately, I have his), big, wide, strong. Pieces of him survive in the world. The scar on my thumb. The patio we built that day. Me and my sisters, and all of our children, and theirs. Letters to my Mother from a 17 year-old boy sailing the seven seas in the midst of a world war. The garage at 56 Johns Drive in Sunset that he built when we lived there in 1956. Lots of pictures, taken sporadically through the years, but spanning his life from infancy to near the time he passed away. Almost every day I drive by the old American Can Company, where he worked after returning home from the war. It's not really on my way, but I detour to go by there anyway. For most of my life, it has been a derelict old-time brick factory, empty and boarded up for so many years, forlorn and dark. Soon, however, it will be gentrified into a Technology Campus, whose students will no doubt appreciate the high camp hundred-year-old brick, but who will never hear the clanging of bright, new, silver cans streaming along conveyor belts, or see the strong, clean-cut young men who worked there in the forties and fifties, laughing and joking in the clamor and chaos of the factory. And my Mother, who keeps him in her heart every day and every night, who lived only to remain in his love and for her children, and who could never contemplate life without him.

I’ve had two vivid wonderful dreams of Dad in the years since October of 1983, and one that I haven’t shared with anyone because it wasn’t wonderful, and was very discomfiting. I think of my Mother almost every day, but I don’t remember having her play a part in any recent dream of mine until this strange rescue she made of her blind, panic-stricken son in the basement just before midnight tonight. I don’t know what it means.

But thank you, Mom, for making me feel safe when I was alone in the basement, unable to see. It was only a dream, but thank you for reaching out to touch my hand, for telling me that everything would be all right. And thank you for the hundreds of times in my life, through turmoil, trouble, and tumult, when you reached out to me in the same way, as a child, an adolescent, a young man, and now as an old man, to soothe me and comfort me and make everything better. I have been very much at home in your heart all these fifty-nine years. Sweet Dreams, Dear Mother. I love you.