Daydreams

I was just doing dishes and thinking about listening to some music on my i-pod. I thought that maybe I would listen to Journey, a favorite from my younger years. I was imagining how listening to an old favorite can, in a way, transport you to that earlier time, and all the images of my childhood surroundings started to come to mind: My bedroom with the receiver, turntable, cassette player and speakers set up on a six-foot long cherry dresser; the wallpaper that I picked out with tiny blue, red and pink flowers which my mother said was almost exactly like the paper covering my nursery walls in the home we left before my fourth birthday; the twin bed with the tall, cherry four-poster and the red and white toile bedspread  from an elegant shop in Petoskey, Michigan.There were also hardwood floors in a medium-oak shade and a beautiful Persian-style rug near the door. In addition, there was a massive walk-in closet, almost unheard of in houses made in the sixties. My room was also well-lit by two large windows on adjacent walls.

In this daydream, I really wanted to see Mom, Dad and my sister, Amy, again, as they were then. I would love to see my Dad when his hair was still mostly pepper, with just a little salt. I would love to see him when he was still strong, vibrant, in the middle of his very successful public relations career, on-call to field problems for his company at any given time. His flashing, dancing blue eyes never missed a trick. I’d love to see Mom’s face again, the way it was then, when the heavy load of troubles she already bore hadn’t yet become her undoing, as in the last few years of her life, when she seemed to have given up hope. My sister – sharp, witty, strange, but not yet labeled as a paranoid schizophrenic. Now, looking back, there were a lot of signs that something was not right with her, even from the beginning. But, during this peek into the past, I am willfully seeing her happy, in kind of an observant way, as though she is just enjoying watching everyone else. As a child, she always watched me and once confessed to a therapist (and later, my mother) that she constantly felt as though she came up short in comparison. At this moment, however, there is just peace and happiness.

If we ever can travel through time, this is where I would go: to my old house in southeastern Michigan, where I grew up, spoiled and catered to by parents who were raised with nothing following the Great Depression and wanted to give us everything. I didn’t appreciate it then, as kids don’t. I would love to be able to summon my young parents, once again, to sit on the black vinyl sofa under the Calder print, a reproduction of a statue that was outside my Dad’s office in downtown Detroit, and watch as Amy and I would “perform” yet another song for them.  I would love another chance to “interview” my Dad as I played a make-believe talk show host named Gladys Bagman and he pretended to be some very interesting celebrity, golf pro, or English gentleman.

I recently attended the Bat Mitzvah of my mom’s first cousin’s daughter, and having some extra time, we drove to the my childhood home since it was only about fifteen minutes from the temple.  My husband waited in the Trailblazer at the end of the drive while I walked up to the front door.  Even after all these years—about 40 – it still says, “Amy & Nancy live here. Yeah!” on the red brick under the house number sign to the right of the door.  I couldn’t believe that it was still there—that someone hadn’t tried to clean it off many years ago.  It made me happy to think that perhaps the people who live there now don’t want to clean it off.  Maybe they like to see it and imagine two little girls and some happy times and laughter that once filled those rooms.