I want you to know, first of all, that I hate dreams. In fiction, they’re too often used to convey psychological depth. And in reality, we stupidly rely on them to explain subconscious desires. But this one has stuck with me so long, and speaks to so many conscious issues I have, that I have to share it:
I have traveled back in time to the mid-1970s, a year or so after my own birth. It is Western Massachusetts, and I am on a dark street cut through by railroad tracks. There is a car parked on the tracks, and in the car is my father.
As I approach him, I can see there is a look of terror in his eyes. When I question him, he explains to me that he can’t handle his life—the book he’s writing, The Minutemen and Their World, isn’t coming together, he probably isn’t getting the job he applied for at Amherst College, and he has no idea how to take care of his young son (i.e., me). Emerging from the car and gripping me by the shoulders, he stares into my eyes, then turns and flees into the night.
At this point, I know what I have to do. I’m about his age. I know how to write. I know, in a general way, how to handle my mother. And so—because we look, and especially sound, enough alike—I get in his car, drive home and take over my father’s life. I finish his book and accept the job at Amherst, knowing full well that I couldn’t have done so without the upbringing he provided me. But if it was me, not him, all along…?
That’s when I wake up, with a weird feeling that’s equal parts ickiness and inevitability. Because, well, it’s all true—metaphorically. Although I never set out to follow in my dad’s footsteps, we apparently wear the same size shoes. We do essentially the same job—narrative writing—but from slightly different angles and in somewhat different environments. We enjoy domestic life. We are patient—until we aren’t. Outwardly, we’re calm and cheerful, but it’s really just an expression of inward angst. Oh, and we jog.
So why does this bother me so much that I not only have eerie dreams about it but am compelled to read meaning into them? Apart from the obvious Oedipal interpretation, it’s probably environmental, the difference between growing up in the postwar prosperity of the 1950s and enduring the dystopic 1980s. Dad entered adulthood believing that making it was not only doable but desirable, whereas I’ve always been deeply skeptical of the whole endeavor. Not that I was some crazy punk, but when your cultural touchstones are Black Flag, Pee-Wee Herman and the Jerky Boys, middle-class stability is hardly what you strive for.
And yet, I like to imagine that the dad of my dream bears some relation to my dad in reality, and that there’s some part of him that’s deeply freaked out by the choices he’s made. Which makes me wonder: Who is this man who’s seemed to me to be a pillar of calm my whole life but may actually be as troubled by the prospect of adulthood—and fatherhood—as I am?
Now that’s a dad I don’t mind emulating.