SPECIAL GUEST POST from Don: FOOL of DREAMS

“FOOL of DREAMS”
copyright 2023 by Donald Whelpley

It was a Wednesday.  It was always Wednesday, and already too hot.

The lazy breeze swayed the corn in the field behind the house making it sigh.  Jack, the coon dog, was laying on his side in the shade on the front porch and it wasn’t even noon.  The only critters moving about were the trio of crows over the Johnson farm riding the thermals in circles above the trees on the hilltop.

Once it had been better.  Once he had a good job, a wife, and plenty of friends.  His dreams often populated with characters from those days, saying weird things about stupid stuff that never did and never could have happened.  Last night his grandmother was throwing babies at a wooden target and talking to a friend who was not even born when she died.  What was THAT dream trying to tell him?  

He figured it was his brain trying to tell him to get up and go to the bathroom.  He did.  Yet when he laid down again he couldn’t get the sound of thudding babies out of his thoughts.  Then he realized it was just Will.  Will spent all the time he could fixing up the fixer-upper down the road, an endless task like his dreams.  Will was hammering sheet rock into place at 5:45 am.  Who does that?  Seriously, who?  Will does.  Maybe Will’s dreams woke him up, too, except he decided it was his brain telling him to get up and hammer sheet rock before heading to work.

Back when he was freshly married and in love with being in love, he saw a day when he would take charge of his plans.  Farming was what he yearned for.  It sounds trite, but he could think of nothing else he wanted to do.  He could be his own boss.  He’d flip though implement catalogs and check prices on acreage with a small farmhouse.  He’d have to wait a while for the dollars to stack up first, he realized.  His bride couldn’t see herself as a country girl and did not want to talk about it.  It wasn’t long before he realized she wasn’t interested in most things he thought were “cool.”  She moped about the apartment on weekends demanding they go “partying” or “dancing.”  Both of which meant digging into his dreams for the cash.  She left on an over-warm Wednesday, too.  He was not sad to see her walk out the door.  She did not love him or his dreams and he wondered why he had wasted 3 years with her.

Unfortunately, that relationship tainted his desire to pursue other women.  Would they love him or just his money?  It wasn’t that he had a keen love for the green stuff, but every dollar was a step on the path to his future hopes.

Now, of course, he was “living the dream.”  And the dream was not turning out quite as he had imagined.  He had sunk everything into it.  He worked hard every day.  Payday was coming, he hoped, but paydays weren’t as regular as they were when he lived in that apartment with his wife.  Finances were so tight that he refused to turn on a light, nor did he use the air conditioning or fans.  He ate rice or beans or potatoes (with an occasional slice of ham) for lunch and supper.  He wasn’t complaining.  If all went decently he would have some money to repair his roof this winter (like Will had last winter at his house), as well as buy seed and fuel for spring, and pay the taxes.  If things went well, he’d have enough to buy the 20 acres behind his.  The bank didn’t have a lien on his farm because then the bank would be his boss.  It was all his.

Actually, as odd as it seems, he was satisfied.  There was no other word for it.  When you are your own boss and your boss says, “So what if it’s hot, there’s work to do,” then you do it and your boss is pleased with you.  

I said he was satisfied.  He was.  This was his dream and he was living it.  Yet, a disquiet was growing.  I also said his nights were often disrupted by strange visions.  Most were easily forgotten, or so disturbing (like the babies) that he dismissed them.  A few were recurring.  In fact, the same three.  One was of himself, old, unable to handle the farm anymore but no where else to go.  He hated that one.  Another was him searching the dank basement, in the dark, looking for a tool he knew was there … he could not find it.  When he awoke on those mornings he was convinced he had that tool … but he was always too busy to look for it.

The third dream was more disturbing.  In it he found more than satisfaction.  He was swapping jokes with friends and often laughing.  Sometimes he woke himself with his own chuckles.  Lately he had been thinking about THAT dream when eating lunch alone at the old kitchen table, a pile of implement catalogs on one corner.  Sometimes a feeling washed over him sitting on the front porch after a late supper allowing the cooler breeze to whisper sleep through his hair.  He called himself a fool often at those times as he sipped cool water from a jug he kept in the fridge.  

The three dreams did not come all the time.  Sometimes whole weeks would pass.  Rarely he had all 3 in a single night as he tossed and turned.  On the days following those nights he had trouble working.  His boss didn’t like him then.

It came to him in a flash one still Wednesday evening on the porch.  “I’m a dreaming fool,” he said out loud.  It was loud enough to rouse the dog, who looked at him no differently than he ever looked at him.  “No differently.”  That was it.  He had thought that owning his own farm was his dream.  He remembered now that what he was doing was only part of his dream, certainly the bigger half.  The other part is what his night dreams had been repeatedly telling him.  He had desired something else long ago…what was it?  

As clear as the sun going down on the west end of the county he remembered: Joy.  

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