I’ve seen light. I’ve seen the early morning winter light filtering through a crystalline Jurassic palace of frozen rainforest in Washington State— and it took my breath away. Every step tinkled with the cracked and crazed enamel of ice that encased every twig giving the sun diamonds at every angle. I’ve seen the sun rise quiet, languid, slow and bright with fire over the ocean in a way that connected me to all color, all people, and all time. I’ve stood in the light of hospital rooms where people die, and are born, and thought the flat light mean on the one hand and miraculous on the other. And I’ve watched the black night sky punctured by crisp white stars while lying on my back in the cool grass with the one I love and thought that nothing could be brighter. All of these lights made me feel wondrous and warm in profound ways.
But the light that made me feel the warmest happened in a dream.
I dreamed I was walking on a long road and was being vaguely escorted by a friendly presence that was saying reassuring things to me. I noticed that I was drifting into my old neighborhood, as it was when I was young, and that it felt really, really satisfying and interesting. I could not have been more interested in anything than in observing Salah’s Corner where the older kids used to hang out, and Sergeant Street across the railroad tracks where we’d put coins on the tracks, and the raspberry bushes alongside the tracks that gave us such big red tart fruit. Here’s where we made little huts underneath the branches of this kind of giant bush, and here’s where Jimmy lives, and here’s where we played cards in the grass on summer days near that picnic table.
And the magic was that things in the dream were exactly as they were back then. People began to come into view, and I vaguely recognized them. We turned a corner and began to walk up Willow Street. My street. The light shifted, and I saw a group of kids at the green metal fence. I recognized them. Scott Kilman, Phil Hobbs, Frankie Enslow. Then the presence beside me let me know somehow that I was also in that group of kids, and that we could walk past, exchange a few words, but that we must not linger, and that the boy wouldn’t recognize me as his adult self. I looked again, and saw myself standing there. I was about 16 or 17, casually leaning up against the fence with my friends on a soft summer afternoon. I definitely remember that shirt.
I began to breathe fast and inquired quickly and urgently: was there really only to be a few moments? Yes. Let’s go. So we began to walk past and stopped and talked to the kids. I have never felt such elation and such urgency! We kept the conversation normal, and they treated us as if we were familiar and normal adults in the neighborhood. I felt my escort presence scrutinizing me, waiting for me to use the moment, to say something. The light got stranger and stranger, a cross between all of the other kinds of wondrous light I’d ever experienced. I told Kevin in some vague way that he is a really good person, but I couldn’t get much more out than that before I found myself walking away with my escort again in the dream. I don’t remember anything else we talked about at that brief encounter.
I woke up. I was emotional–it had seemed so real. I had missed a chance to impart real wisdom, and I wanted to get that chance back, to give him advice on life, to reassure him, to be close to him and tell him so many things.
I have never felt so lit up as when I talked to Kevin at the fence that day.
Penultimate 