I have only to contemplate the sun creeping lower in the sky and I can feel myself deflating.
Then the daydreams start coming, every day, like clockwork. In one, I fly to Greece for the winter. In another, to Hawaii.
In a fit of defiance, or maybe just desperation, I walk outside in my flimsy nightgown. And there, sitting on my deck high above Vine Street, I drink my cup of coffee as if I'm perched on a private lanai. A pitiful excuse for shameless misbehavior.
During the summer I can miss having a backyard. I had one once, love them still, but I'll probably never have one again. Instead, I visit my friends who have them, listen to them complain about the upkeep, and lie around on their chaise lounges without a care.
And since my nostalgia for a yard can, at times, give equal time to houses, I think back to the conversation I had recently with a friend who is building her "dream house" on Whidbey Island. Naturally, the whole thing is costing three times what she thought it would, which can turn a dream into a nightmare pretty quickly. I took her hands in mine. I wanted to say that dreams can only come from within us - not from houses - there are no such shortcuts. I wanted to say this, but I didn't.
Of course I have our city's dream, the Sculpture Park, as my backyard, right? I do love to walk there, if only to hear people's reaction to the art. And even if a lot of us can't quite bring ourselves to call some of the pieces "sculpture," there's plenty of grass and trees and rules about what we can and can't do ther - which makes me feel right at home, as if plunked back down in my dad's dream of the perfect Connecticut backyard, backlit by fretfulness, where we weren't allowed to play for fear we'd fall into his cherished rose beds.
That's the thing about public art. I mean, all this attention to art-by-committee while working artists are priced out of town? Substituting public-art for a charitable commitment to artists creates more rather than less alienation between a city and its artists - that's my belief. Why I've not, until now, thought more about the man, new to our building, who told me of his dream, I can't say. I can't recount the exact conversation for you, only how I remember it - how he dreamed of being a part of our "close-knit community."
It occurred to me to laugh out loud. Or to say how we mostly keep to ourselves this side of Denny rather than mingle. And that our walls are too near together for such a closely knit dream. See, our proximity demands we live farther apart. I also thought of saying that friends take a lifetime to build, and community is only what we make of it, ever. No matter where one lives.
It's just that, as I get older, I try not to spill on people's dreams. Dreams help our jaded ends meet in a brighter middle. People don't want to be afraid of what others will tell them about their dreams.
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