The World According to Chuck

I don’t spend a lot of energy trying to change the past. I don’t even care all that much for the subjunctive tense. Spending too much time in my own head, musing about “should” and “if,” is something I try to avoid, for pretty good reasons and spoken from experience.

I’m hyping this trip (and hyped about it), though, in part because I want to look through the door a little, remind myself that I’ve managed to string together some years now and I’m still breathing. I want to see new places but also old friends, in other words.

This is a sad story, then. I don’t indulge in this sort of thing much anymore, but sometimes it’s helpful to recognize a twinge of regret, if only to avoid making the same mistake. And this is sort of about a mistake, and sort of about the past, and mostly about

The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of
(Originally published 8/72002)

I dream a lot, or else I remember my dreams more than most people. The subject has come up in groups often enough for me to accept this as fact, although I can’t say that it makes me feel special or even interesting. Mostly I feel weird about it, as if I were double jointed or had three kidneys or a bad cowlick that no one could fix. You never know what you’ll end up with but I’d rather not talk about it.

I have to sometimes, though, so my wife and I have developed shorthand to let me get things off my chest and spare her from speculating on my sanity. “I had The Pool Dream last night,” I tell her, or The Basement Dream or The Freeway Dream or The Graduation Dream, and she nods thoughtfully and then announces that she really, really has to jump in the shower now. She’s very clean.

The other night, I told her, it started out as a version of that old reliable, The Actor’s Nightmare, but then it turned into a Kurt Dream. It had been a while.

I met Kurt Streif in the seventh grade, but we didn’t become good friends until our sophomore year in high school, when he did an extraordinary thing. I was a little shy and insecure (imagine that), and Kurt decided I should audition for “The Christmas Carol” at school. He was shorter and sort of roly-poly, but his will was strong and he pretty much forced me. As it turned out, I got a part and he didn’t, but if this seemed unfair to him he never let on.

He picked me up every morning to drive me to school, and usually dropped me back at the end of the day. We became fixtures at each other’s home, allowed to walk in without knocking and search through the refrigerator without asking. We double dated to the prom and cruised around on Friday nights when we had nothing better to do.

We roomed together for a couple of years in college, and then I got flaky and he met new friends and we just drifted. We kept in touch, and he was always around to help me work on my car or give me a lift, but life happened in there somewhere. One day he knocked on my door unexpectedly and said, “I heard you got married,” and I had a flash then, a sense of something not right about this, but I just hemmed and hawed, embarrassed.

A couple of years later we met at a wedding reception. He was feeling melancholy; all his friends were getting married, and he held my six-month-old daughter in his arms and said, “I should know her.” He was sensing it, too, friendship tossed in the trash can as if it were useless just because we grew up.

I saw him about 10 years ago, at a retirement party for a mutual professor. He had mellowed; his edges were softer and he smiled more. He’d married a woman with two children and he was solicitous of them, making sure they were comfortable at a gathering of strangers. I showed him pictures of my kids and house and he nodded and laughed at my stories.

This is the Kurt in my dreams, by the way. Calm, peaceful, always happy to see me, and no matter how hard I try to explain he never seems to quite grasp the fact that he’s dead.

“I have some bad news,” I heard on the phone three years ago this month. I knew that when I heard his voice, an old college friend from years ago, but I didn’t know what and I didn’t know how bad. Having a good heart doesn’t necessarily mean it won’t be a diseased one. You never know what you’ll end up with.

Accepted and expected futures are nice dreams but still dreams. We put off calling or writing letters, we leave things unsaid for a more convenient time, some reunion when we toast our memories and say, “I never told you this, but…” and then an old friend drops dead and we sit at the computer and weep. We wear the chains we forge in life, these unspoken things, and they weigh us down with regret. So I have these dreams.

I’m always in some sort of trouble in them. I’ve run out of gas or gotten lost, and suddenly there’s Kurt, standing by his truck, smiling. He tells me to get in and he’ll give me a ride, and I do and I relax then, knowing I’m safe and heading for home. It’s a comforting dream, a peaceful one with a familiar feel, and it’s marred only by the fact that I always wake up before I have a chance to thank him.