Take This Dream

My dad is a mystery to me. I know his name, can still envision his face (provided he hasn’t changed too much in 15 or so years), and feel like I’d be able to recognize his voice were he to speak to me today. However, I’m at a total loss to relate any of his favorite foods, whether or not he’s into comedies or dramas, or even if he watches movies (or television) at all. I don’t have any inkling as to what even constitutes a typical day for him. I’m not a part of his life, nor he mine.

Imagine my shock and awe to find him, his dog (I don’t even know if he really HAS a dog), and his truck starring in my most recent remembered dream.

The scene opens somewhere in the middle, as usual. I’m on a street in the neighborhood I lived with my brothers and mother when I was about 15. My dad and mom had been separated / divorced for 7 or 8 years by that point. Though he was still in my life, it was sparse and growing more so with each passing day. So, my dream opens with me on this street, in my current adult incarnation. I have Diamond. No one else from my current life is visible.

I’m walking Diamond down this street and we meet my dad and his dog, a greyhound puppy of indeterminate gender. Diamond goes nuts over this dog, she won’t back off from sniffing the dog’s butt, making the younger pup quite nervous, which makes my dad nervous. Yet, he never says a word. The dog sniffing and related dance goes on for some minutes when, inexplicably dad reaches into his pocket and hands me keys and points to a truck, his truck, I surmise.

In the midst of sniffing, dancing, yapping dogs, he motions to the truck, picks up the greyhound, turns tail and breaks into a full out run. A perplexed Diamond barks louder, then whimpers as they disappear from view. She looks up at me and I shrug. I grab her up and head for the truck. It is the truck from my youth. A 1965 or ’66 green GMC pick-up. I’m curious and excited. I get in and crank ‘er up. Vrrrroooooom. I drive around a couple of blocks, turn another corner and plop, find myself smack dab in the middle of a muddy field. Well, shit.

Every effort to extricate the truck from the mud fails miserably. I grow increasingly nervous. I look across the field to see another truck, full of people of indeterminate gender having some sort of party, or something and several start to make their way toward me, Diamond, and the truck.

As they draw nearer, my brain snaps me awake. I look at the clock-radio and realize that the song I thought was playing as part of the dream was not, or was but has leaked over to my conscious life.