8/24 - Dreams with Grandma Donna

These nights in the mountains, I still dream about Grandma Donna. She died when I was four. Three? Five? Some age before I knew how to keep concrete and discrete memories. There are only glimpses through a quarter-century of haze and new files that scramble the important ones from Way-Back-When. I need to defrag.

The impressions are there, if screened. A hurt arm. Sitting in her lap with a book in a house of dark wood and children everywhere. An uncle lifting me over a bed to give her a kiss as she lay dying of cancer in the Santa Monica home where I learned to swim. A home filled by aunts and uncles and Mom and Dad and my brothers and cousins, and someone – Aunt Val, I think? – telling me “It’s okay to be sad.” A home filled with her generations.

My dreams with Grandma Donna started almost six months ago. I was neck deep in the last throes of my Ph.D. program, with the final daunting stretch ahead: a four-month dash from March to June in which I had to finish experiments, prepare a paper for publication, and somehow elegantly compress five years of my life into a dissertation. It was then, when the pressure became so thick and tangible and the end so definite, that insomnia invited itself to my Santa Barbara studio and settled in for the show. In the precious few nightly hours that I did sleep during those last months, I often dreamt of her.

The dreams have been the same since they started. We sit. We talk casually. She’s healthy and I’m twenty-eight. She asks how I am, and I respond like she’s been here all along. Like there’s no rush to share twenty-five years of new memories before I accidentally wake up and our conversation is cut short. We talk about school, my brothers (“Scott has two little girls!”), my Mom and Dad. Painting. My plans for summer and whatever follows. There is no sadness between us, no sense or acknowledgement that we’ve been apart. We just sit, and talk, and she makes me feel at ease. She smiles often, and I don’t know if I know the gap between her front teeth from my own lost memories or from my Mom’s pictures of her. Maybe both. I don’t think it matters.

I finished school in June. The stress and insomnia disappeared without pomp the day of my defense. But these nights, as I sleep easily and long in California mountains, I still dream with her. Sometimes when I wake in my tent after a good little talk, and a million stars are just starting to fade and I can hear water rolling over ancient rocks in nearby creeks and Mattie is curled against me, I lay in high places looking up at the rising sky and wonder if I’m a little closer to her up here.