A Strange Dream
Sun., June 26, 08:07 PM
I had a really strange dream the other night. What’s so strange about it? Well, you see, I don’t dream. That is, I assume that I still dream (because you have mental problems if you don’t), but I sleep so soundly that I almost never remember them. I have rather believed that, as I get older, there are fewer unresolved issues that I can’t manage while I’m awake.
But one morning I woke up remembering that TB had been in my dream. He was just sort of walking through – I had no details about the rest of the dream – and what I remembered was my surprise: “What the heck is he doing here?” Indeed, why should I dream about someone I hadn’t given more than a passing thought for about forty years?
In the past I have mentioned my high school friends, Bunny and A. Bunny and I had fortuitously met early in junior high school and had remained very close friends. In our first year of high school we met A, who had gone to a different junior high, and she soon became a buddy to the two of us. And she introduced us to TB.
TB was an all-around nice guy, and he was a permanent member of our larger group. (Boyfriends might come and go, but we never had a party without TB.) It happened that TB had escorted each of us – A, Bunny, and me – to our first formal dance. In different years, you understand, but he had. A used to point out that demonstrated what a really nice guy he was; he not only stayed on good terms with each of us, but we remained friends with each other!
During our senior year in high school, TB was usually my date, although we certainly weren’t steadies. I was very fond of him, but I knew the relationship wasn’t going anywhere. There are some combinations that will never be compatible. I was a passionate fan of the Brooklyn Dodgers, and he rooted for their bitter enemies, the New York Giants!
Our last date was the Senior Prom, though our group was still together. I said to Bunny that the whole thing might make a cute short story, something about a high school “flame” that “sputtered out” at the senior prom. She agreed, but I never wrote the story.
To begin with, it wasn’t over. A month or so after we graduated, Bunny and TB were seemed to be gravitating toward one another, and by the time we went off to college, it looked like a done deal. This story would have a sweet ending, I thought. Bunny, TB, and I were off to UConn, and A was going elsewhere. We didn’t know it then, but her life and her values drifted away from ours.
As it turned out, it was a tough period for TB. Unexplained illnesses were bad enough to force him to drop classes a couple of times, and his poor health put added stress on Bunny. He changed his major to one that was less demanding, and it looked as if things were going well, even though he would graduate a year late. They had announced to their parents that they planned to marry after graduation.
(It was very important at that time to finish your college career in four years, with the same group of people with whom you had begun. Unless you had a good excuse, perhaps being an exchange student or being ill, it was kind of disgraceful not to graduate with your class. That’s a constraint that students don’t seem to have any more.)
One weekend in our last semester – Bunny’s and mine, that is – we were at home rather than on campus. Maybe it was Easter week. In any case, I remember being in my mother’s kitchen on Sunday morning when the local news mentioned that a UConn student had been seriously injured in an auto accident the night before. All of my family pricked up their ears – was it someone we knew? – and then the name was announced. It was TB. Shortly after dropping Bunny at home, on his way to his parents’ house, his car went off the road and rolled over. (This was before every car was required to have seat belts.) When Bunny phoned, I asked “how is he?” and she replied, “he isn’t.”
A witness, the driver of a car traveling behind him, said he just went off the road. There was no other vehicle or anything else that would cause him to swerve. There didn’t seem to be any mechanical problems with his car.
Both A and I went to Bunny’s home, just it sit with her, the last time that all three of us were together. It was heart-wrenching. I think that for all of us, it was the first violent death of anyone we knew. And worst of all for Bunny, she wasn’t quite family, not really accepted as part of the family’s mourning. At least they allowed her to attend the funeral, which was private. The rest of us didn’t go.
Well, as I said, this was more than forty years ago. After TB died, I just couldn’t write the story. It’s probably just as well. I was planning it as fiction, but I don’t write fiction that well. Bunny is resilient and didn’t spend her life grieving. She went on to earn her master’s degree and eventually married and had a family. She told me that, even though TB had walked through her dreams for a couple of years, she had managed to talk herself out of it – in her dream – and no longer suffered the pangs. I guess, somehow, we all move on.
I take a certain amount of comfort from the Hasidic tale I wrote about a few years ago. TB was one of those good people who died too young. And why did he turn up in one of my dreams – young and healthy as we remember him? I guess it’s just time to tell the story.
