I Cried To Dream Again and Will Become "A Nomad"

April 7, 2014

     It has been a month since my last post, thanks to my decision (this time certain) to sell my apartment.

     The confidence to leave New York has been a long time coming, but I am buoyed by knowing that in the United States, there is somewhere I can call "Home", even if I haven't found it yet.

     For some reason, the desert appeals to me.  In Lawrence of Arabia, Major Lawrence explains that he likes the desert "because it is clean".  Something of the same attitude has a place in my thinking: the desert is challenging, it is beautiful, it is empty.  That is why the desert fathers, starting with St. Anthony, and followed by the pillar saints, went there to meditate.  Perhaps there I will find the peacefulness that New York cannot supply and that I crave.

     A wise man told me that when we are young, we crave excitement; when we are old, its absence.  It is not as though I don't want to be active, or experience exhilaration.  In the last analysis, it comes down to too many memories of a life that is gone everywhere I look in New York.  And a desire to escape from them.

     Last night I had a dream that Bill and I were separated --and we shouldn't have been.  The setting was Manhattan and it was in the good weather.  Bill drove a red car and we had lived together, but something tore us apart and we parted company.  I remember seeing him drive away, the car's top down so I could see him slowly passing out of view, before turning and returning to my tiny apartment.  There I was surrounded by my things, the light streaming in through the window around five o'clock in the afternoon in summer, when New York is at its most dreamlike .

     In my new digs there was an old lady on the floor where I lived who wanted me to talk to her, which kept me from returning to my apartment as soon as I wanted.  When at last I got away from her, I called my friend Claudia, my law school classmate, someone who knew both me and Bill very well.  The telephone I held in my hand was connected to the base by a coil, making the time of the dream the period before mobile and cell phones.  It was as if I were thirty years younger and my romance with Bill was in its fieriest days.

     I was frantic, telling Claudia that I wanted to reach Bill, to be with Bill, to go back to being together.  My dream emotions were so strong that they woke me and ended the dream.  As I began perceive that what I had felt so strongly was only a dream, I also realized how fresh our break-up seemed in my dream: I remembered Bill's special warmth of personality so intensely, it was as though he were returned from the dead.  When I finally opened my eyes and fully realized I had only been dreaming, I cried to dream again, sobbing uncontrollably.  It took several minutes for me to regain my composure.

     So the dead live vividly in our subconscious, in a way that is not like conscious recollection.  Which is why, as my dream reached its peak of intensity, it was so painful to feel Bill simultaneously so close-- yet so far.  Just to increase the poignancy, as I write this, someone just called, asking for him, probably an organization to which he had contributed in the past.  I had to say "He died three years ago", which compelled the man calling to tell me that he was sorry and that Bill's name would be taken off the organization's list of people to call.  "Death cancels all appointments", Mark Twain said; it winnows telephone lists, too.

     Leaving Manhattan will hopefully offer the opportunity for my life to take on a brighter coloration than it has over the past five years, the years of Bill's patient confrontation with his cancer and the three years that will have elapsed since his death on May 13 of 2011.  So many friends have carried me to this point: Now I have to travel on my own.

     Where my new home will be, I don't know.  Initially, I will go to France, leaving May 28.  I am taking my Boykin Spaniel puppy, "Beauregard", with me.  We will spend four days in Paris, where Beau and I will dine in style: at Taillevent, Jadis and Au Vieux Comptoir, before taking the train to Montpellier on the morning of June 2.  From there we will drive to Caunes-Minervois, where my new-old house awaits.  I hope to have a peaceful summer, returning to New York in the fall and resuming the project of selling and emptying my apartment.

     In 2015, I will be going to the desert in February and March --to Palm Springs, California actually.  Bill and I travelled there four or five times, as he has a cousin who owned a hotel there, and there are now quite a few of his relatives settled there.  I was born in California --in Oakland, in fact.  (Oakland is the place Gertrude Stein said had "no there there".)  Perhaps 2014 will be the year I explore "the big Kahuna", as it is known in political circles.

     As I will be traveling and have no fixed domicile, I will be a nomad.  So I close out this blog as the "Lone Wolf" is soon to become "A Nomad".  That is, I plan to start a new blog under that name once I arrive in France and am able to continue the postings.  To all of you who have followed the blog, my great thanks.  It has been a pleasure to write for you.