This is a post from a now defunct dream journal that I am reposting with my husband’s permission:
The following is a narrative in first person-form from someone who was generous enough to share their life with me in last night’s dreams:
“I was born in 1926 in San Mateo county. When I was growing up I had a mum, a dad, and a little sister. My mum and my dad were dark-haired and slight of figure, the both of them always smiling. But otherwise they were opposites. She was always quiet, clinging to the background and smiling like she had a little secret that only she needed to know. My daddy was loud and boisterous, like his wavy hair that mum could never get to stay straight for even an evening. He wanted to get as much out of life as he could, he was always trying something new.
“I was, too. All my boyhood heroes were scientists, and I wanted to be one when I grew up. I was always taking things apart to find out how they worked. I was never in so much trouble as the day I killed one of our hens this way, trying to figure out how it worked on the inside. I was six at the time, and didn’t realize that animals couldn’t be put back together the same way as telephones. My mum screamed when she found us, me sitting on the kitchen floor calmly dissecting a hen with a miniature scalpel I’d gotten for Christmas the year before, while the cat watched on greedily and polished off organs that I was done looking at. In retrospect, I do kind of see her point, and why they took away my biology kit and grounded me for two years and yelled and lectured until my ears rang. But hey, I was curious, and it was interesting. That old hen had three hearts in there, you know that? No one believes me, but I saw it all up close an’ I should know. I still don’t feel as guilty about the incident as I probably should.
“My daddy died when I was nine, in a freak hot air balloon mishap at the San Mateo County fair. It was not long after that that the Hindenberg was in all the papers, and not having been there to witness my daddy’s death, I had the two events confused for many years. One night I dreamed that my daddy was flying in his zeppelin, and I was flying alongside in a glider, screaming at him to stop. But he couldn’t hear me, and down went his zeppelin in flames onto the dusty track of the fairgrounds, and I kept flying on and on, unable to stop or land, on past the golden gate, on past the hills, just on and on.
“But it was just a normal balloon he died in. And that was the end of our life as we knew it. The whole family had been pinned to his personality, and we just couldn’t really be a family without him. My mom was always quiet. She got stronger and harder after daddy passed, but it wasn’t enough. I learned later that she was half Spanish and had grown up down there, but we didn’t talk about things like that then.
“There were lots of things we weren’t supposed to talk about. Weren’t supposed to talk about how we missed daddy, or how we were hungry or how my mum was stitching old clothes together because we didn’t have the money for new ones, because if we did, people would come and split us all apart. Well, they did anyway a year later, my mum and my sister and me, all to different places. They did things like that in those days, either they found some family or they found an orphanage. Single working mothers didn’t really happen, not like now, not til after the war. So we got split up, and really we got lucky cause we were all still close together sort of. I ended up in Cupertino which was just a farm-filled little village back then, my mum stayed in San Mateo, and my sister got shuffled around a lot between my aunts. But things were never ever the same again. They couldn’t be. My childhood died along with my daddy in a brightly colored blue balloon on a sunny July day.”