I feel like I'm in my old bedroom in our house on Cleveland Road - but is it? It's bigger - the furniture is in the wrong place. My bed is pointing the wrong way. It's night, I'm woken by some sort of alarm going off in the house. My brother/my son (a common composite character from my dreams set in my earlier days) has inadvertently set if off. I jump out of bed. My father is in the corridor, tapping at the keyboard. Not only does he manage to switch it off, he also rectifies the intermittent fault that caused it. He walks into my room and explains in a calm and gentle voice that the alarm has been fixed. I look at my father's face; it is at least 20 years younger than how I remember him before his death. And I look around the room. Could this be that posh house on Edgehill Road that my parents couldn't quite afford back in 1970?
 |
| In Your Dreams |
I later learned that had my father only known that he'd be soon be getting a company car, my parents would have been able to afford it. Very nice. Big, quality, 1930s house. In my dream, I feel I have stepped into an alternative universe...
I ask my father about this paradox. Am I looking at a life that could have turned out that way? He looks at me, giving me a knowing smile, and nods. No, tak ("Well, yes"), he replies.
At that particular moment my father are both engulfed in a rapidly expanding ball of Cosmic love, exploding in white brilliance like a Big Bang. I feel the most profound sense of love for my father, I feel his profound sense of love for me, I feel the Cosmos radiating profound love in all directions and all dimensions.
The sensation is so powerful that it wakes me. I'm sitting bolt upright in my bed in Jakubowizna, gasping with emotion at what I had just experienced. And then something struck me as I replayed the scene in my mind. In the dream, my father's forehead was shiny and smooth - he was bald - as bald as me - in this version, no unruly grey fringe. I look at my phone. It's 02:00 am.
After pondering this dream - this amazing phenomenon, I glide back into a deep sleep.
In the morning, I recalled a dream that my father told me about; he had had it just weeks before his death...
His brother Józio had survived the Warsaw Uprising and ended up living in London... except he didn't go to our church at the Polish Catholic Centre (POK) in West Ealing. He went to another church in another parish. One Sunday, Dziadzio drove his brother to that other church, dropped him off outside, then returned to POK. While he was driving back, he remembered that the clocks had gone back, and so Józio would be waiting outside that other church for an hour... In another parallel universe?
This time last year:
Utter, utter gorgeousness
This time two years ago:
Hoar frost and proper ice, Jeziorki
This time five years ago:
Alcohol, servant not master
Cleveland Road - not a million miles away from where I used to play tennis in the seventies at the public courts in Pitshanger Park, (often followed by a jar or two at The Kent).
ReplyDeleteSending best wishes for Christmas and the New Year. Have the coolest of Yules.
@ Michal Karski
ReplyDeleteAh yes, the dear old Kent - as my mother used to call it, my second address.
Now probably £8.95 for a pint of London Pride.
Many thanks - let me reciprocate season's greetings and indeed gratitude for your contributions!