When you dream about people you know, particularly the ones who are supposed to be dead, what do they look like? Every time I dream of them, like last night (and I'm writing this just after I woke up), they always appear younger.
Not only that, but they look the same as I remember them until the point of recognition, then things change. Get to that later.
There was a friend of mine from college, I hadn't seen him in easily 30 years. He was a mentor of sorts -- couple of years older than I, he was smart enough to have been a doctor. Instead, he was a hippy. He bought a '61 Harley Davidson, a former police bike, and we used tool around the Chicago expressways at two or three in the morning. The bike was like being on a comfortable truck, so yo to all you old Harley riders.
What did I learn from him? Sarcasm. But with a point. At a young age, only 20, 21, this guy was already fed up with the way the world worked. He saw the writing on the wall and knew things weren't going to change. His life was a combination protest against the absurdities of society and also the pure romance of a free-spirited Easy Rider. If things were different, he might have sported short hair, a stethoscope and a lab coat, instead of looking like a Hell's Henchman and riding a Harley.
I lost track of him, except that I remember he was busted for hauling marijuana, I think in a semi-trailer! Yeah, that would have been him. BTW, no drugs -- one afternoon, we threw a refrigerator off the third floor of the old, condemned tenement that was the Student Union building at college. We called the yearbook staff on the 1st floor and warned, "don't look up."
BTW #2 -- we ran the campus newspaper. Our former advertising manager appears regularly on TV here as a bankruptcy attorney. Plenty of stories there, but for those of you in the know, the attorney is a good guy and despite the jokes, has helped a LOT of people. And he reveres the guy I'm writing about.
A few years back, on a whim, I started looking for my friend, the Harley guy, on the Net. I was amazed, yet not surprised, to find that he headed of a division of Harley Riders up in Alaska. As expected, he was sort of a sophisticated drifter. The group he led was doing something like Toys for Tots. That's where I wasn't surprised. HR are a great bunch of folks, generous, and they include many police.
But I laughed, as my friend looked almost the exact same -- his full beard was even longer, big black leather vest, same round wire rim glasses. Older. That's him in the photo on the far right. Far right, ha-hah! Anything but! Also, he is called "Rev." in the picture. That's a chuckle. I remember the day in the newspaper office when he filled out the mail-order seminary degree form to get out of going to Vietnam.
Not long after that, I found his name again. He had been killed. Not one to stay in one place too long, he'd moved from Alaska to Grand Junction, Co. Fatal error, with Fate taking the upper hand. The news story said he'd been riding his cycle on a highway when an 85-yr. old woman pulled out from a side road, not looking carefully, and ran over him. My friend died in the hospital, hours later. Yeah, with his boots on.
Another BTW -- if he'd have lived to see the Pirates of the Caribbean moves, he WAS Capt. Jack Sparrow, only less confused. Once, when water started spouting from the ceiling of a huge, brick-lined pit at school that served as a lounge and study hall, my friend stood atop a ledge, raised himself to his full height and boomed engagingly, "Don't panic! We've struck an iceberg and sprang a small leak. There is nothing to worry about. Don't panic!"
In the dream I had this morning, we were in a high school and I was asking for permission to turn the lights up in a certain room. Who knows why -- it was a dream. I was told to go and find my friend. As soon as I was told this, he appeared out of a sea of faces. At first I saw him as I remembered him in college: beard, hippy. But as he got closer, he grew younger, like I mentioned at the start of this column. The anomaly, if it indeed was an anomaly, is that he became clean shaven -- his beard disappeared, his hair was short, combed, and forgive me, he wore a beanie like some did as college freshmen, before the leftist movement and Vietnam protests had taken hold in the Midwest.
Shocking, how my friend looked. I saw him closeup. He carried a stack of schoolbooks under his arm. The was no blur around him as dreams are often portrayed. The "blur" was that he appeared out of a sea of activity -- changing classes -- and that's what isolated him.
I wondered why he appeared so clean cut. After all, I knew my friend well as an iconoclast; a renegade with a soft heart. But maybe he looked like that in the dream because he'd found a world where things were as he desired them to be. And he was functioning as his true self. He was happy.
(photo at top by Gigi Pilcher)
