Dream: "I reckon I am"

[corrvin]

So this was another of those dreams taking place in a decayed urban setting, one where civilization has gone steeply downhill and nothing is what it used to be.

In the early parts of the dream, I was older than I am now-- say, 50? 60? And somehow we had just found the keys to a very nice car, one we had been keeping mechanically working for years in hopes we would find these very keys. So we-- some younger people, teenager and young adult-- and I went for a drive.

We had come to a very crowded sort of mall/ apartment house place, and I was alone and going through it. No one seemed at all glad to see me and I was wistfully thinking about "the old days" and how nothing was as it once was.

Then in one place, I came to a bed, and in it, under the covers, was an old man, someone I knew and respected, and he began to talk to me. At first I tried to make sense of him, but after a bit I decided that maybe he was old and... "talking in another world" was how I thought of it. I sat with him and listened, and his voice had the sound of someone who had grown up in another time, among his own. (A lot of us these days grew up with TV and radio for our examples, and we're ashamed of our voices, ashamed of where we're from.)

He told me a little about his old dog and how he had said to his dog, "Are you gettin' along all right?"
And his dog had answered him, saying "Well, they give me water, and coffee cake, I reckon I am!"

And the old man said "And then he just looked at me happy as can be and he just dissolved into thin air, right over there" pointing to the side of the bed. "Ain't that a miracle?"

I went over to the far side of the bed and looked, and there at the side, under a blanket with his head poking out, was an old, scruffy cat. I picked him up and held him, and he wasn't tense and in pain, or crying, just old and weak... and almost cold. I knew then that he was dying, and that the old man was telling me something that was true and I wasn't hearing it right.

I interrupted the old man and said "Please let me take him to be put to sleep, before he suffers."

The old man said to me, very urgently, "You've got to see! It's a miracle that it is this way!" Here he was, powerless, with this old pet, unable in his own mind to even really understand that it was a cat and not a dog, unable to really do anything, and somehow through this they had comforted each other, and neither was hurting, and they had gone this far together in the way of dying.

And the old man reached out, and petted the cat a little bit, and smiled at him, and then put his hand down because that's all he could do.

All I could say, then, was "Yes! It is. And it's for us to live out the miracle." And I sat on the bed, with the old man who was dying, holding that scruffy old brown cat, rocking back and forth slowly.

---

There's an old Christian superstition that the "dumb" beasts are given the ability to talk, but only on Christmas Eve, and only for that one night. It's probably good that I was never told this as a child, because unlike the dubious charms of "trying to see Santa," I would have hidden and listened until I nearly froze to death for that.

As I was coming up out of the dream, it came to me that I'd softened what I meant, what I said to the old man.

What I meant was "It's for us to outlive the miracle." That there will be those, for every good thing, who see it from beginning to end, and who live after it, and it lives in memory. For each of us to take comfort, one in the other: that the one never has the sorrow to see the autumn fade, that the other will know the coming spring when it arrives.



And now, I'm going to go bring my scruffy old spotted cat to bed, and see if he'll help me get back to sleep.