I dreamed my mother was kicking a soccer ball across the front yard of a house she lived in as a child. In life I never saw her kick a ball or engage in any outdoor sports, though I heard talk of a softball league in Vientiane, and she was active in a bowling league in Tampa.
The soccer ball sighting filled a brief, nimble moment in a sweeping dream spanning what seemed like centuries but which likely inhaled just seconds of the night’s restless sleep. She was kicking the soccer ball (which had maroon spots) across a yard in Milwaukee, where I saw her through a window of the house we rented in Accra soon after I was born.
My dreams these years occur within enormous enclosed spaces — vast compounds comprising roofless arenas and covered shopping malls, living quarters both elegant and squalid, universities and boarding schools, athletic fields, lakes, deserts, circuses… Everything is connected through contiguousnesses of earth below, which fluidly heaves and arcs from space to space with God-like conversation.
In a dream some weeks ago I sat at the front of a tired, aching bus as it circled over a particularly sheepless valley of Ireland. The bus landed in the valley, where a small army of cartoon characters awaited. They had all opened their mouths, revealing several passages leading to the same motel room in Norfolk, Virginia. I had stayed in that room on a very rainy night in October, 2005. Then, as now, I wanted key to that room to be magic. I wanted the key given to me by the motel attendant to magically open any door into another place in time. The motel room door would open into my mother’s childhood dining room, where I might learn to understand mortal discrepancies between who she was and what she was not. Or it would open into my father’s silence, which fills the air today as it did that night in Norfolk. I was driving his car from Florida to New York, accompanied by the shocking silence of his recent death, which reigned with gruesome triumph.
I never saw photos or heard description of houses from mother’s youth. The only account of a space where she lived came from her sister, who once described to me the months after their parents divorce. It was a nomadic period in which their mother and my mother moved from one motel room to the next, frequently staying just one night and (as mother surmised later in life) not paying the bill.
John Updike once said that nostalgia is not a privilege for the elders, and that an eight year old could feel nostalgia for a time she never knew. I like to think I have no such sentiments for times preceding mine. Nostalgia is a form of bitterness which habitually heaps scorn on the present, deriding these times as inferior to all others, and which hails only the past as golden. Nostalgia seems like it should ingratiate but I find it tiresome.
Dreams of my mother’s youth caught me off guard. I rarely dream of her at all, and the circumstances of her youth never crossed my mind. She volunteered very few anecdotes from her years growing up in Milwaukee, Chicago, and Indiana. Through search of public census records I only recently learned her father’s name. He is referred to on her death certificate as “UNKNOWN”. The census documents — a timid little window into an unhappy home — lists 6 occupants at a street address which today is the site of a shopping center. I barely knew her mother but her sister and I have a bond.
While trying to rationalize my sudden interest in cemetery photography and forensic genealogy I concluded that my enthusiasm for helping others fill out their family tree served as compensation of sorts for my virtually nihilistic disinterest in my own lineage. I am like a genealogical sociopath whose lack of curiosity about my own heritage is not some kind of statement or deliberate attempt to sever ties. I just don’t care where I came from.
