HE DIED SEVEN YEARS AGO and WAS IN MY DREAM YESTERDAY MORNING

Yesterday morning I woke from a dream.

Someone I knew years ago was in that dream. So unexpectedly.

I knew he had died about seven years ago. I hadn't been thinking of him. I hadn't been thinking of him when I'd learned he died years ago either. I hadn't had any contact or knowledge of him in years before that. 

We had not been speaking for some time. It wasn't that we were angry. We just had lost words. He was a man of few words. Uncomplicated and simple you thought, until you heard his lyrics.

I'm not claiming to be a psychic. I think everyone is a bit psychic. For many years now it's happened that I've learned that someone who was once in my life and who I haven't thought about in years, has died. Usually something odd happens. Like I read a newspaper I don't usually and see an obit. Or I have a thought about them. So I check the Internet.  

A little more than seven years ago, one afternoon, I suddenly thought "I wonder if he ever put out a CD?" So I went on the Internet and instead found out he had died, about three months earlier. In his case there was no obit. But there were memorials. There were postings in on-line newsletters. There was a YouTube video of an event where he was given an award that made me tear up. Once athletic and strong, he was weak in a wheel chair, only able to stand for a moment to say "Thank You." Once a man who slept around and had too many women, he had found the one for him. He had married and had children since I knew him.

I contained sadness.

This man was in my dream yesterday morning.

We were in a restaurant. Maybe a salad bar. Not fast food. It was bright and airy. I looked at him and the sun seemed to be shining on spots of his pale skin. We were both standing there, looking into each other's eyes. He was youngish and healthy. His sleeveless tank showed off natural muscle. He was silent.  So was I. That continued. In my mind I was thinking I had recently met up with him in another dream but I couldn't remember it. I wanted to talk to him. Arrange a time. He knew that. I felt he could read my mind. I felt there was something I didn't know.

Then I saw a cameo of a woman. I think I know who this woman was, though I can't remember her name. She and I were friendly. I don't know if she's still alive.  In the dream, she spoke. She told me that he was going to a certain city in Texas and to a certain type of medical facility. She was very exact.

I woke up.

I immediately put in the name of this city and the words she had spoken in my search engine.  I was astounded by what I read about this place.

I realized I had been meaning to send his best friend a letter for the last seven years. I hand wrote it. Then I searched for an address one can send an old fashioned hand-written snail mail letter to.

And no, the man who was in my dream does not have a CD out. Not one.  No YouTube videos of him singing. No web site. Nothing. His wife and children also seem to have disappeared. 

I fear his music is lost. That he let it go to have a life different from the one he was living when I knew him.

I can hear some of his songs in my head.  Hear him singing like a choir boy.

C 2020 Christine Trzyna All Rights Reserved

HE DIED and I IMAGINED HIM ALIVE FOR YEARS NOT KNOWING

As a teenager, I attended art classes on Saturdays at a famous museum and then a famous university. At the museum each week an honor roll was called. I was on it frequently. I also remember many of the names called as if it were yesterday. I think they called them alphabetically.  Hypnotize me and take me back to that time and I could announce the whole list.

Some of these people were my friends or friends of friends. We all had a small sense that we were special because we had been invited selectively from all around the county.

In the end almost all the people who got full scholarships to the famous university classes were male. I sometimes wonder about that. Was it sexism? Was it sexuality? Was it that the people who were behind these classes just thought that men artists had more potential and would be more serious about pursuing art? There were many women on those honor roll lists. 

So one afternoon back in the day, when I was visiting my friend Sandy, my favorite classmate, who lived near her friend Robert, a name called, a person who got the full scholarship, she introduced me to Robert. He was a very tall teen from a German background in a mostly Jewish neighborhood. 

We went over to his house.  We sat in his living room. He and Sandy were chatty.

I remember that day because of the finery about the way he spoke. The thinness of his fingers. A seriousness about him. And also because he had a slobbering Saint Bernard with a small barrel under his chin.  (Why do people make Saint Bernard's carry barrels?  Maybe this dog carried Robert's cash or stash?) The dog got on my lap and slobbered. They all told me this was because he "liked" me. I hated his slobber. I wanted him off my lap. You would never guess at that point in my life how much I would come to love dogs. They all thought it was sort of funny that the more I resisted the Saint Bernard, the more he "liked" me.

Every once in a while I would think of Robert, such a promising artist. Had he gone on to afford the extreme tuition of the university? Did he still paint? Was his work represented in galleries?  Maybe a museum?

So, one day I had the urge to check. I put his name into the Internet and up came an obituary.  He had been dead for years. He had died young in another city and state. The obit suggested that he had long had family in this other state. I wondered when he moved. What he did for a living when he was alive.  And what killed him.  Was it a car accident? A strange disease? Cancer of some sort? AIDS?

Then it bothered me, the way I had carried him around as a live person when he had been dead most of my life.

Even as I write this I see his face.

C Christine Trzyna All Rights Reserved

YE GHOST

Do you like to be afraid?

Mystics say that this time of the year is the best time for contacting those who've passed to the other side. And for them to contact us.

So maybe this why there is Halloween, Hallowmas, All Saints Day, All Souls Day, and the Day of the Dead celebrated in various cultures in late October and early November.

I'm not at all into horror and gore or the outrageous party scene that has emerged in recent years as a celebration for Halloween. I'd rather stay at home with a candle and a book.