Heat and Money
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?
-E.A. Poe
The idea that we live in a dream, let alone a dream within a dream, has always struck me as something marvelously interesting to thirteen-year-old boys. I say this having been a thirteen-year-old boy possessed of the demon who expresses itself in puns and riddles. I don’t mean that boy is gone—not at all—but at least today I repress the desire to pun in company. In the exact same manner, I try not to say things like, “Maybe this life is nothing but a dream,” as I understand it is not only anti-social, but it sounds pretty silly in most contexts.
But, for some fool reason I don’t fully understand, Sunday morning I listened to several YouTube readings of the poetry of E.A. Poe and appreciated them more than expected. When I came to “A Dream Within a Dream,” I felt both repelled and attracted not by the common thought that we are all characters in someone else’s dream but by the idea of a dream within a dream, suggesting to some the interminable repeating images in a mirror before and behind one.
I find myself focusing on the notion of a larger dream in which all of our individual dreams are gathered, like seeds in a pod, and which includes the biological, psychological and imaginative culture in which we all live on planet earth. If you wish, that may include all the known planets and stars, all we know of anything.
What lies beyond? Fear and nothingness? Dragons? More of the same?
I must have been in a dreamy mood to begin with because my mind drifted to something I heard on the television news last night. No sooner were the words “trickle-down economics” out of the commentator’s mouth than my great Aunt Alveretta on my mother’s side popped into my mind. Do you see how easily such connections are made? Though gone now, deceased, she lived in Indianapolis, Indiana, employed much of her life as an elementary school teacher. A sharp woman, my father said. My father appreciated smart women.
My father is gone, but there persists a powerful after-image of him in my imagination; I see him as in a dream, if not a dream within a dream within a dream, if you follow me. In this form, I can speak to him, but he cannot speak back, both a sadness and a relief. I have forgiven him everything and thanked him for all he deserved. I have confessed how much I loved him, and how much it hurt. None of this might be possible if he could speak back to me. For this reason, I can tell you three secrets about him without giving him the right to self-defense.
Once in a restaurant on a visit back home to California, all of us around a table, I realized my father had dropped out of the conversation, looking past my left ear with an unusually pleased expression. When I turned to see what he gazed upon, I noticed a woman standing by herself, waiting for a table in a striped top, a black skirt, some kind of black heels. Black hair, dark eyes, caramel skin. Red lipstick. Dangling a pair of sunglasses from the fingers of one hand.
My brother Steven, a preacher in southern California, told those gathered at Dad’s funeral that he would never again look into the eyes of an older man and find complete acceptance and unconditional love. Either he had a different father—he is, after all, fourteen years younger than me—or he doesn’t know the man who growled and snarled and flew off the handle, told dirty jokes and laughed with abandon, as tender to grandkids as rough on me. But Steve was born with a heart condition, and mother told father if he hit Steven she would leave him.
Once, sitting across the kitchen table from him, Dad flipped up the top card of a deck in his hand so only he could see it. I identified it correctly and he snapped it on the table face up. This continued through nine cards, until we both laughed and couldn’t do it anymore. Sometimes, I could read my father’s mind. For instance, before, during, and after the moment he delivered a backhand to the side of my head. I often made him mad by ducking just in time, a useful ability, but one which did not make me lose respect for my father’s backhand. I can say these things at all because of my specific form of brain damage.
Someone once quoted Dante to me, in Italian if you please, not to speak ill of the dead, but if you don’t, you’re in danger of losing them completely. I’m dedicated to not losing Dad, if only as a personal kind of punishment, his or mine I’m not sure. I want to remember him clearly, so family won’t sand the penumbra of his life so fine I barely recognize him. I’d know him anywhere, his character, his obstinance, his intelligence and sudden angers, his body, his hands, the way he stood.
I voted for Bob Dole when he ran against Bill Clinton because he reminded me of my father. What a confession. Here is my favorite Bob Dole joke from some late-night talk show host of another era: This winter it was so cold in Washington they gathered around Bob Dole for warmth.
Remember, he ended up as a spokesman for Erectile Disfunction. But that wounded arm, from when he was a hero in the mountains of Italy. I like that he was known for compromise. I knew he wouldn’t win. Something about him reminded me of my Dad. And like Dad, he is, as they say, no longer with us. Where he is at present I leave to speculation.
I remember now I mentioned my great aunt who believed, despite any evidence, that she and my father were related by blood. She even thought they looked alike. I don’t know why she wanted to be related to her niece’s husband or to look like my father. Even then that confused me. What interests me now is how the nature of that confusion has changed over the years, as you may imagine. Be that as it may, the fact that Alveretta respected my father’s intelligence may have influenced his appreciation of hers. Of course she did, he was a military officer who had more than once exhibited dedication to God and Country and more than once exhibited superior intelligence in her presence—we could tell by her wry expression. She had a valuable collection of dolls in glass cabinets, their beady little eyes following wherever I went. Mother praised the collection to us for its value. My sister Elizabeth was fascinated. I thought they were spooky.
My Aunt’s grown son had a little upstairs suite, but since he died under conditions mysterious to me at the time, she wanted to sell the house and move into an apartment. Something would have to be done with the doll collection. I can only say that in my child’s mind, a link had been formed between her son’s rumored suicide and those damned dolls.
But Alveretta taught my sister Elizabeth and I to play Canasta and spent hours in this activity, for which we loved her. She looked like a human being does after teaching all their lives, all the sensuality drained, replaced with a wariness that passes for mental acuity. She resembled, Eleanor Roosevelt, though narrower and without the humor playing through Eleanor’s face. Kind though not demonstrative, Aunt Alveretta demanded only that her niece and nephew were as smart as they were good-looking.
At that time Elizabeth was a pretty twelve-year-old girl, which makes me a pretty ten-year-old boy. Both of those characters, my sister and I, have been replaced by much older people who have stolen the identities of those youths and carried them into advanced age. I am seventy-six, my sister a year and a half older. She was a beautiful and studious young woman once, a role model for me in the fullness of her life of dedication, intensity, wildness and thoughtfulness. And, just to keep it real, the older woman that took the place of that pretty twelve-year-old girl can talk you into a coma—like Mom!
Since I mentioned Mom, it behooves me to say something about her. Remembering when and where something happened takes work when you’re a military brat who moved all over the world and the country with your parents. My mother, thankfully, was in there as a patient, attractive woman who grew up on the Indiana-Kentucky border with a father who never raised his voice and owned a grocery store and worked in the strip mines during the depression, and who (take a breath) was also Town Clerk, which mother told me was like the mayor.
Five salient observations about my grandfather:
He once owned a putt-putt golf course, and my mother would play with unpaired folks;
His wife, my grandmother, was named Blanche, and she died of breast cancer;
He had his name embossed on his wide, glossy red matchbooks: Claude Victor Teasley;
He died of emphysema;
He looked exactly like me.
When I visited mother’s hometown in southern Indiana while in graduate school, I saw that his gravestone, right beside his wife, my grandmother Blanche, had no death date. He had died in Florida, staying with mother’s sister Ruth; his body remained there. I never called her Aunt Ruth, as I rarely saw her and did not have a favorable impression. She seemed more common than my mother. When I told her about the stone, mother called the sexton and had the inscription completed. She said it made her sad. She was pretty much one hundred percent Irish descent, watered down by the American Midwest to Baptist.
Dad grew up on a dairy farm in a rural area of mid-Ohio where we spent some of the best vacation episodes of my growing up. I won’t try to describe Uncle Chester and his son Cousin Paul, as they are not really part of this story, but they and their wives and children were so wonderful I can’t truly express it anyway. When Chester visited us in California, he asked my father to stop the car just outside of Salinas. When Dad pulled over, Chester got out and walked to the edge of a recently plowed field of black earth, picked up a handful and studied it. When he got back in the car at last, he seemed bound in a religious silence.
Paul his son died in the flu epidemic, otherwise the kindest, most generous man I ever met. I might have known them better if my father’s Dad hadn’t lost his farm in Ohio during the depression. Dad’s parents divorced, he joined the army and went through enlisted ranks to become an officer. He had a photographic memory and an ability to organize that cut to the chase. See a thing for what it is and say so. Tell truth the first time, he always said, and take the consequences. I gave him a handsome, illustrated copy of E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime one Father’s Day. He read it in an hour and sat back satisfied.
“Father was really something, wasn’t he?” he said.
“Yes, he was,” I said.
He discussed it with himself for fifteen minutes. I got to listen.
Dad worked in Signal Corps, and at one time had a badge with crossed swords under a rose. “Sub-rosa activity,” he said. I once got a phone call at home, which I answered with my name, the same as his. “Bob,” said a decidedly adult voice, the kind I might have heard at my parents’ cocktail party, “McGeorge Bundy here. About the missiles.” I cut him off. “I think you want my Dad.” “Oh, yes, please.” This was the time of the Cuban Missile crisis, and I recognized his name as National Security Adviser. I once watched Dad burning his notebook on the back porch while I sat on my bicycle in the street, both feet on the pavement.
So, when she decided to move out of the spook house, Alveretta wanted Dad to look at a prospective apartment with her. I went along, attempting to fade into the woodwork as much as possible so I could go unnoticed. Soon, we stood within the white walls and empty white-carpeted floors of the apartment while Dad explained things, pointing up and down, stuff that held no interest for me. When he finally shut up, she had the time and space to express herself on the subject of whether she wanted this big, hollow apartment, and where she could put her dolls.
It seemed to me she couldn’t think of anything to say and didn’t want to admit it. When she arrived at her statement, she did what Dad had done, pointed at a silvery vent near the floor and then another. “I don’t like these,” she said. At that moment, the air became a wee bit smokier and wrapped itself around us like an invisible but enormous python or boa constrictor, whichever is bigger and scarier. That’s what happens when a metaphor coagulates. “Those are the heating vents,” Dad said. “What don’t you like about them?”
She pointed at several places where wall met ceiling. “I want them up there,” she said, looking directly at me. I had no idea what she had on her mind, but I feared whatever it might be. “I want them up there, near the ceiling, so the heat fills up the room.”
My Dad’s expression did not change. He looked at her without registering a reaction for a few seconds. After a dramatic pause, he raised his powerful and lovely square hands to hip level, higher on me, and lay them out palms up in sympathy and explanation. “Alveretta,” he said, “heat rises. I would have thought you knew this.”
My wonderful Aunt Alveretta looked slightly stunned, and then she said, “It does not!”
Not a second later she added a question, “Does it?” And then she put her hand to her cheek and looked at the carpeted floor. “It does, doesn’t it?”
Reel forward to 1976, the year I returned to Ohio after a lifetime away, Ronald Reagan versus George Bush senior for the Republican nomination for president. Reagan had become the most recognizable espouser of Trickle-Down Economics, or, as Bush described it in the run-up, Voodoo Economics. That’s what the news commentator from 2022 mentioned last night that got mixed up with Edgar Alan Poe and Aunt Alveretta. That’s when I remembered watching the original debate in which the exchange occurred, and what do you think came to me as Reagan explained Trickle-Down to benighted Americans in 1976 who believed whatever he said?
The idea of Trickle-Down is you let the big boys have whatever they want for dinner; the more they eat, the more falls off the table into our waiting mouths. So rich folks have so much money piled on the table some of it falls over the edges; what we catch, we keep. Social Darwinism. Take off all protections and restrictions, let the rich rage like lions, taking all they want. The better they do, the greater America will be, the more will fall off the table into our laps.
Ridiculous, right? But, Reagan took the presidency. He could have said Eat-Shit Economics and followers would have done what they do best. But at the time and during this debate, what suddenly came to me was the scene in Aunt Alveretta’s prospective apartment when I was ten. She and my father stand opposite with open space between, white walls and carpets, me as point of perspective. And exactly twenty years later, here is what I said to Ronald Reagan on television: “Ronald, money rises. I would have thought you knew this.”
More years ahead, 2022, last night, a news commentator mentions that former and now historical presidential race replete with trickling and voodoo and what came to mind was this particular moment from my childhood. I might have been ten years old in that white apartment, thirty when Reagan took the election, and seventy-six when someone mentioned it on television, at which time I remembered once again father and Alveretta looking at each other across the empty space of that apartment and that original moment became a metaphor for Trickle-Down Economics and this, in turn, had the effect of sealing the memory in amber so I would never forget it.
I wish in the process I could pass on all these people as if these words were a wire that carried a message that can’t be contained in an e-mail. You cannot meet them anymore, but their lives have been a thread and theme of my life. That’s what I thought of this morning listening to “A Dream Within a Dream,” by Edgar Alan Poe. My mother and father, my aunt and my sister and brothers alive inside my dream and trying to make them part of that long, strange dream in which we share. And with them voodoo economics, erectile dysfunction, and Poe’s dream within a dream. I wanted to get them down in case we need them in the future, though I can’t imagine for what. But maybe that’s just the perspective from my own personal dream. I can’t say how this might be important to anyone else. Because I’m not in charge of anything out there in the greater dream, of which we all are part.