Loading ...After Thanksgiving, we started to talk about religion and people’s differing beliefs and my dad shared this little tidbit with us.
When my dad was very young in the 1940s, he used to dream each night about being a grown man in the early 20th century (around the 19 teens or 20s). And every morning when he woke up, he would feel a tremendous sense of loss. Every single morning, he wanted to be back in his “old” life, not in his current life. During this time period, there were no televisions around and my father had never been to a movie, but in these dreams, he and his family would play tennis. The thing was, however, my father had never in his life seen anyone play tennis. In fact, he had never seen a tennis racket, but he would dream about the tennis matches his family would have. The very first time my father ever saw a tennis racket (in a store front down town), he begged his father to buy the racket because he knew it was connected to him in some way. But his father (having just come from the Depression and having very little money) told him that he had no reason for such nonsense.
As he got older and started “to believe in nothing,” as my father put it, the dreams ended, and he never went back to that life again. In fact, he never learned to play tennis.
Or perhaps, re-learned it.
Buy me a beer!
If you enjoyed this article please with your favourite bookmarking tool, or donate to assist with site maintenence and to keep tarot readings free. Thanks!
Email this post to a friend
458 Views
Recently:
- Story a Day: Beggars Would Ride
- Story a Day: Born Into Light
- Story a Day: Deep Fried Moose
- Story A Day: Roscoe Falls Reflections
- Story A Day, or Thereabouts
- Happy Birthday Bas!
- Night: not just for sleeping anymore.
- Lads of the Legion
- The quality of light at sunset.
- Ladies of the Legion II
Comments
This entry was posted on Saturday, November 24th, 2007 at 11:54 pm and is filed under liminal, mystical. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Holy crap! Its a post from Richard!
Damn - its terrible your dad never got to learn to play tennis. Thats interesting stuff though.
I can’t even talk about the conversation my family had over Thanksgiving dinner, unless I want to insult several races and a dozen or so nationalities. I just sat there wishing it was over.
Sorry to hear that your Thanksgiving conversation was so typically Southern on Thanksgiving Day. Our conversations have been like that in the past, but for some reason, Dad got nostalgic and commented on how he wished that he could talk like I do and wondered if he could have been a better father.
I told him I thought he had been a great father, especially considering the sacrifices he had to make for his family. That has been an inspiration to me as a father myself.
And I said that he still is a father — so none of this “had been” stuff!