"Sleep"

I had a dream when I was a kid.  I climbed a tree and turned into a hawk.  I looked out at the world from that high place and felt free.  I started flying, and another hawk joined me.  We spent a perfect summer day flying together and I loved him.  Eventually we went back to my tree but I didn't want to wake up or for him to go away.  He promised he'd find me when we grew up.  That dream gave me hope for a long time.

Flying dreams are the best, though I had a different kind of flying dream when I was married.  I was flying around with a friend and my husband wanted to join us.  I told him it's easy, come join us.  He kept jumping and trying but couldn't do it.  I suppose my subconscious was telling me he wasn't my hawk lover and the marriage wasn't right, but at the same time I felt so much joy in the flying.  Was my subconscious telling me to be true to my nature and find my own kind?

I value the information in dreams.  I wasn't ready to get divorced, but the message stayed with me.  I felt the inevitability of where the marriage was going.

Sometimes I wake up and write my dreams down.  Once, I got a pencil and paper and fell face first into my pillow, writing the dream left-handed in the dark as I fell asleep again.  That made for interesting reading in the morning, especially since I wrote several lines over each other.

...side trip into my dream folder.  I'm not sure what to make of "Chocolate fish hand.  Kind of pathetic, but sweet too."  Where did that come from?  My waking mind doesn't think stuff like this.  I don't think I'm creative enough awake to come up with a chocolate fish hand, but I think dreams exist to help us.  They give us a different way to look at things that we shove out of our day thoughts.

People long gone still haunt my dreams and effect my waking life.  I had a moment like that this week when people were talking about an 11 year old girl killing a baby.  That's horrible, and I remembered Vaughn.  He was a horrible boy who regularly threatened to kill me, kill my family, kill my dog and make me watch.  He left dead animals in my yard to emphasize the threats.

Vaughn has been in my dreams all my life even though he drove his car into a tree and died years ago.  When I have a Vaughn dream I know the fears I'm facing in the present are visceral, important.  The fear and rage I feel, but keep tightly clenched inside, hurts me.  Dreams provide the lesson that I have the power to do something about it.

We all have this -- the power to recognize our issues in our dreams, the power to face it, the strength to come up with solutions.  Our dreams are the product of our own minds.  We don't have to explain them to anyone else.  It is the most private of all aspects of our ourselves.  They are our joys and our fears.  They are us at the most essential level -- even if it's a chocolate fish hand, but mostly I like flying.

This eagle is ancient history.  I did it for a printer who wanted to show customers thermography, a heat process which makes a special powder turn into a glossy, embossed surface.  It's usually used on business cards.  This was printed as regular 4-color process, but the dark brown and white were added on top in thermography.  Even though I did this for a job, I think it's also a good example of how to get printed samples of your work.  Talk to a printer and maybe you can both end up with a sample to show potential customers.

"Heights"

Sometimes I wonder where the magic dividing line lies between telling my stories and trespassing on somebody else’s privacy. For instance, my sister climbed a fire tower when we were little. Our family was camping in a remote place where fire towers exist. These are monumental structures where you can climb up thousands of steps above the tree line to make sure there isn’t any smoke in the forest. I’m not really sure why they build these things since I’m pretty sure there’s never been a forest fire east of the Mississippi or north of the Great Lakes, but we have fire towers, and my sister decided to climb one. She climbed it from the outside, which was basically a suicide mission on roughhewn timber scaffolding. So this is Sis’ story, except since Sis was a trendsetter for me, I followed. Then it became my story too.

Sis said once that I’m always the hero in my stories. Well of course! They’re my stories. If she wants to be the heroine, she should write her own stories. Why would I point out stupid stuff I initiated? There’s no glory in telling about the time I convinced my little brother to put a darning needle into the electrical outlet, even though the results did satisfy my scientific curiosity. It just goes to show that I had a sense of self-preservation not shared by at least a couple of my siblings.

For some reason, our parents didn’t approve of our spirit of exploration. I got yelled at for electrocuting my brother, and Dad almost had a heart attack when he saw Sis and I hanging off the fire tower. I suppose it’s kind of amazing he didn’t have a heart attack when he ran up all those thousands of stairs and through the supporting scaffolding to pluck us off the thing.

So is that Sis’ story or mine? At that age I’m not sure I really understood we weren’t two incarnations of the same person, or maybe she was my wicked twin, or possibly the person I wanted to become. My siblings were at least as important to my formation as our parents or anyone else in our lives. I have two older sisters, and both of them provided examples for me to follow with friends, boys, and fire towers. How can I talk about my experiences without crossing that magic line of discussing their lives too?

This subject came up recently when someone (not Sis), called to censor this blog – ironically the “vocal” week when I described how I had been told to be quiet too many times. It isn’t that I’ve said anything untrue, I’m just not supposed to talk about certain things. For instance, saying that my childhood friend was killed or calling my skinny grandma (SG) “evil” is out of bounds. It doesn’t matter that my friend’s murder was in the paper and is common knowledge. Shhh. It doesn’t matter that I disliked SG, my censor liked her and that’s the important thing. Besides, the internet is forever. Time for a refresher course in “Be quiet!”

No.

In some ways, writing takes more courage than climbing a fire tower. I was young and athletic when I climbed the tower, and pretty sure I wasn’t going to die doing it. Writing can open me up to criticism and expose my tender feelings, but as I told my censor, I have a right to my feelings. If it goes down in infinity that I loved Fat Grandma (FG) and disliked SG, why can’t I say so? FG fed me homemade blueberry waffles, and SG tried to make me eat the rabbit that I played with that day. SG put chopped carrots and celery in Jell-o, and FG made cookies. SG hit me, FG hugged me. Really, isn’t it easy to see which side of this I would choose? If it goes into the permanent internet record that SG hit me, is it my fault for writing about it, or hers for doing it in the first place?

Mostly, I like this blog to be a happy place. I can rise above and mostly talk about happy topics. I know people don’t want to be brought down by my ghosts, but sometimes the negative stories are funny, and people like to laugh. I mean really, once you get past the horror of carrots and celery in Jell-o, can’t you laugh about it? Well, even if you can’t, there are always cookies…

Grandma Lee’s Date Roll Cookies

Cream:
1 cup shortening
2 cups brown sugar
3 eggs

Add:
4 ½ cups flour
½ teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon cinnamon

Roll into a rectangle, then spread with this cooked and cooled filling:
7 ounces of chopped dates
1 cup water
1 cup sugar
1 cup chopped nuts

Roll into a log, wrap in waxed paper, and chill.Slice into individual cookies and bake 10-12 minutes at 350 degrees.