On My Mother's Side

Disclaimer:  My facts are iffy at best, but in this case it's the sentiment that counts.

I never knew my mom's grandmother.  Fanny Goldstein came to America from what her daughter would later describe to me as either Poland or Russia.  My mother said, "Bubby used to say 'some days Poland - some days Russia.  It doesn't matter, they all hated the Jews.'" Like the changeable weather in New England, land possession wasn't a stable thing.  This is the stuff that Fiddler on the Roof is about.  The villages her family  - my family - came from were subject to Czarist pogroms and are part of the long story of the Jewish diaspora.  Fanny came - by herself - to America as a teenager, one among millions who arrived by crowded ships at Ellis Island.

Fanny moved to where people spoke her language, Yiddish. For her that meant Brooklyn.  Sometime in the late 1910s, she met and later married Samuel Goldstein, another first generation immigrant Ashkenazi Jew  (and as wasn't uncommon then, he was also her cousin). The two would have several children, but only three daughters survived infancy:  Martha, Nettie and Mildred.   Mildred was called "Mashie" and she later decided to change her name to Marcia.   Marcia would become my grandmother.  I've heard many stories celebrating Fanny; nearly all of them come from my mom.  My mother called her Bubby, the traditional Yiddish name used for grandmother.  As happens as generations come and go, traditions fade.  For whatever reason, I never called my grandmother, Bubby.  I called her Grandma.  My sister's kids knew her as GiGi  - for great grandma.

(Left to right:  Cyd Weldon, Marcia Weldon, Susan Weldon)

Today, June 2nd, would have been Marcia's 89th birthday had she not died somewhat suddenly a few years ago, in 2007.  It's only as I've grown older and more contemplative that I've begun to consider the complexities of a person's life.  Long before I gave thought to the variegated lives of my older relatives, they were simply these loving people that swept into my life for weekends or perhaps a few weeks at a time at somewhat regular intervals. (Much the way I now drop in on the lives of my young nephew, cousin, and/or nieces.)  They were there to entertain me.  They took me to Disney World, the zoo, and the beach.  They had no depth of character for I had little ability to discern any.  I didn't give a moment's thought about how they came to be who they were.  Hell, I didn't even really know what kind of people they were other than they seemed to love me an awful lot.  Back then that was enough.  Now, however, I like to imagine them in full, have to imagine it for the truth is now buried and colored by time.  After all,  how they got to where they were literally precipitated me.  We all like good stories and our presence alone signifies a pretty unique and sometimes compelling set of what some call coincidences.

My grandmother was born in Brooklyn in 1921.  Though I don't remember her ever telling me much about her parents,  I sensed how she felt about them.  She loved them.  It might be fair to say she adored them.  My grandmother didn't tend to elaborate when answering questions.  As an early teen on a summer stay in Florida, I might have sat at the white linoleum veneer kitchen table, a bialy with cream cheese in front of me, and asked her about her parents. As I recall it, she held special praise for her dad.  "He was a wonderful man," she might have said and left it at that.  Now that I think about it, the manner in which she spoke of him is the same as my mom does.  I don't know enough about him, but wish he'd kept a journal that I could devour now that I'm ready for it.  And from the way all that knew her speak of her, it's beyond apparent that Bubby was as beloved as one could be.

(bialys)

Marcia Goldstein met my grandfather, Hyman Weldon, sometime around 1940 or '41 when they both were in different Brooklyn high schools.  Hyman was dating a girl named Bertha and Marcia a boy named Harold.  In the end, Harold and Bertha became a couple and luckily for me Hy and Marcia did, too.

The Weldons tend to dominate my mother's side of the family story  - and to be sure there is ample reason.  My grandfather, the late Hy Weldon came from fertile parents and was the youngest of 9 children, and the youngest of the 7 Weldon brothers (The others:  Ruby, Nathan, Harry, Frank, Martin, and Morris.)  Hy's parents, William and Sarah Weldowsky (that's the best guess at what their last name was before it was changed to Weldon), were Ashkenazi, too; they also emigrated to Brooklyn and it was there that Hyman and Marcia fell in love and were married.  There are a few old photos that my mom and aunt have of them in their courting days.  They always looked so young, so thin, and so happy.  Things were simpler for them then.  They hadn't had children yet and the first order of business for Hy was finding a place for him and Marcia to live so that they didn't have to stay under his in-laws' roof and sleep in the same bed with her sister.

The Weldowskys and the Goldsteins were poor - hard working but poor.  I later heard my grandfather describe it something like this, "Sure we were poor, but everyone was poor so you didn't really notice or pay attention."  He paid attention to Marcia and in 1942 they were married.  My mother was born in April of 1943, my Uncle Norman in July 1946, and my Aunt Cyd (she legally changed her name from her given Cindy, which she never felt suited her) in April of 1953.

(Hyman and Marcia Weldon)

These were some heady times.  My grandfather was medically ineligible to serve during WWII.  I seem to recall it was flat feet (or was that from a movie?).  It could have been his colored blindness - he and at least two of his brothers were colorblind.  Hy worked and Marcia was a homemaker.  My grandfather had many odd jobs in his youth, but eventually found a profession that sustained him and his family for a lifetime.  He was a paper hanger.  In August of 1953, he moved his family from Brooklyn to what Wikipedia considers the "father of the modern suburbia," Levittown, Long Island.


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My mother is an Aries, a fire sign.  It is fair to say that she might not have been an easy teen to govern.  My uncle, as I understand it, endured great teen hardships to live up to his father's high expectations for him, his only son.  And my aunt was the youngest, the baby.  Ten years my mother's junior, Cindy wasn't even 10 before her older sister moved out.  Uncle Norman joined the United States Coast Guard after he graduated high school and then slowly but surely drifted away from his parents and his siblings.

I've only a handful of remembrances of Uncle Norman.  I last saw him about seven years ago when I was living in Southern California.  He was - and maybe still is - living in La Brea.  We met in Long Beach and drove together to LA for a Dodger game.  My uncle loved the Brooklyn Dodgers as a kid and it was a long held family myth that he moved to LA shortly after the Dodgers did to be closer to them.

(1955 Brooklyn Dodgers)

When I was at the Dodger game with him, I gently probed about what it was like to grow up in that house, the Weldon house.  He didn't reveal much, was consciously vague about those years.  When he told me that he was fairly certain he wouldn't be seeing his mother before she died, I let that thought linger and then we watched the rest of the game.  Sadly, his instincts proved correct.  Though they had communicated regularly, if but infrequently by telephone, Norman did not travel east either before or after his mother passed away.

The lion's share of my limited knowledge about the Weldon years in Levittown come from my mom and my aunt.  Ten years apart they had appropriately different slants on it.  My aunt remembers a house more removed of her siblings while my mother recalls the one filled with them.  My mom was  (and still is) - an ahead of the curve kind of woman.  Innately and instinctively, she sniffed out prejudice and iniquity.  She cared and cares little for any kind of discrimination or abuse.  She is not one to conform for conformity's sake.  I think it fair to say that she questioned authority and there's no reason to suspect that parental authority was any different than any other.  When she got pregnant and married her first husband in 1964 she certainly knew that marrying a black man in the early 60s was unusual and controversial.  While today most of us give little thought to interracial couples, back then a lot of people did.  Including one Hyman Weldon.   My grandfather essentially disowned my mother.  The reasons are far too unknown to me to do justice to the circumstances by speculating further.

In 1964, Marcia Weldon would have been 43 years old.  This was a woman I'd never met, never knew.  I wouldn't know her, really know her for twenty more years.  In 1964 Marcia's oldest daughter was ostracized, her son was soon to leave the nest after what I have been told were some tumultuous teen years and Cindy was just 11, what we'd call a tween today!  My grandmother must have had a lot on her mind.  Though Hy was the master of the house, Marcia had her ways of working behind the scenes.  I am told that she often spoke with the wives of her husband's many brothers to smooth over what have been described as many family squabbles.  And when Marcia's oldest daughter was living in Manhattan with her newborn daughter - Marcia's one and only grandchild, she was going to be damned if she wasn't going to see them.  My aunt tells of traveling from Levittown to Riverside Drive on the upper west side of Manhattan to visit her sister and niece.  My mother shared the apartment with three other young women with whose help she tended to the colicky infant .  My mom's husband, Tony, was in the army and stationed elsewhere, thus leaving my mom much to her own devices.

Sometime after that visit, Marcia must have made her one and only marital ultimatum.  One day, sometime around my sister's first birthday, Hy and Marcia drove to Manhattan.  My grandfather entered the apartment crisply, as I imagine it.  He asked to know in which room he could find the baby.  Getting his answer, he walked to the room.  My mother and grandmother waited in the hall for about ten minutes.  Finally he came into the hallway with Elise in his arms and said "Pack.  I'll wait in the car with the baby" They complied and packed Elise's things into the car and brought her back to Levittown.  For several months, maybe as much as a year, Elise lived with Cyd, Hy, Marcia and Fanny.  My mother worked in Manhattan and made the trek to Long Island often.

(From left to right:  my sister Elise, my mother Susan, my grandmother Marcia and my great grandmother, Fanny.)

My grandmother made that happen.  It wasn't something that she wanted to talk about.  My grandfather certainly didn't want to discuss it.  It happened and as far as they were concerned it was history.  My mother wasn't as inclined to gloss it over.  It took them years to figure out how to be together and not have that sad part of their mutual history, my grandfather's casting my mom out - hanging in the air like pungent cigar smoke. I am certain had my grandmother not orchestrated that maneuver those many years ago, I would never experienced the loving relationship with my grandparents that I did.

When I was still a toddler, my grandparents made a familiar shift to Weldons -  moving from New York to South Florida.  By the time I began to have my own memories of my grandparents, they were well ensconced in Pembroke Pines.  While they were still able to brave the effort, they made trips north to see us upon occasion, but mostly it's my trips to their retirement condo complex (complete with par 3 golf that wove between the buildings) that I recall more vividly.

The late 60s were a tumultuous time.  Things were changing rapidly and so, too, did they for my mother.  She and Tony split up.  Shortly afterward she met a charming young academic at the wedding of a mutual friend.  She said, "Don't marry me Kenneth, I'm a lousy housekeeper."  But Ken Ring is nothing if not a romantic, rarely heeding better judgement in matters of the heart.  Ken was a recently divorced single father - and primary caretaker - of his daughter, Kathryn.  As Susan made regular visits from New York to Connecticut, the two young girls became loving playmates and then sisters when Ken and Susan were married in 1969.  I was born in December of that year.  I like to think of myself as 'the missing link.," the genetic glue of our family.  But back to those Weldons....

When we were old enough to travel alone, my two sisters and I went to see our grandparents in Florida, but as my sisters - both several years older than me - began to have other summer plans, I made the two week sojourn alone.  Truth be told, I liked having my grandparents all to myself.  My grandfather would show me his closets full of camera equipment, he'd take me to the billiard room or occasionally to one of his job sites.  Later at night I'd lie in their bed falling asleep to Johnny Carson until they'd kick me out to the pull out couch (a Castro Convertible) in the den.  In the morning, after bialys and often after my grandfather went to work, I'd hang out with my grandma.  While she cleaned up after breakfast I rested in their air conditioned bedroom, watching mindless television.  Grandma would soon come in and sit down and I'd squirm into a position where she could gently scratch my back with her sharp nails.  Then she'd ask me if I had a BM yet.  The grandma I remember was very concerned with bowel regularity.

(Hollybrook, Pembroke Pines, FL)

Later in the day, she'd take me down to the pool to show me off to friends.  Or we'd go next door to Sylvia's and she'd have a chit chat while I tried to discern how two condos shaped exactly the same could be furnished so differently.  (Remember, my grandfather was a paperhanger; there was a lot of wall paper in my grandparents' condo.)  Sometimes she'd drive me around town to my great uncles and aunts.  Many times it was both my grandparents with whom I made the rounds.

Uncle Frank and Aunt Ruth.  Frank was cool with a great head of hair (grandpa used to insist that he dyed it) and he often slipped me a few bucks.  Aunt Ruth was as evervescent a woman as I'd ever met.  With a shock of bright, curly red hair, she treated me so kindly and lovingly I often thought out of all her great nephews and nieces, I was her favorite.  We all thought that.

Uncle Morris and Aunt Ronnie were a hoot to me.  Uncle Morris was the second youngest of the Weldon brothers and displayed the kind of youthful vigor that belied his sometimes troubled health.  Unlike Frank who wasn't nearly as tactile with me, Uncle Morris was the guy who would lift you off your feet in spite of how his back would feel later.  Aunt Ronnie, Morris' wife, had a thick Hungarian (I think) accent and long before ebay, was making a few extra dollars by going to every rummage sale in S. Florida and then reselling her finds.

I'd visit the children of my grandfather's siblings, and hang out with their children, my second cousins.  And always, always there was time with my great aunt Claire, my grandfather's eldest sister.  Her voice was raspy and her eyes deep set in that eastern european way.  She claimed never to be hungry but was constantly nibbling, often from your plate.  She controlled the room and she was as much an idol to my mom as she was a thorn in the sides of her younger brothers.  I loved to watch the family dynamics.  Though I had - and have still - little knowledge of whatever dynamics were in play in their lives, I discerned through the loud discussions and their talking over each other that their intertwined relationships were long in the making and at times contentious.

They were siblings born of the early 20th century, now living in South Florida in the 1980s.  How strange it must have seemed to them.  They grew up in the shadow of World War I, were children of working class Jewish immigrants, came of age during the Second World War as Jews - the lucky Jews whose families had the forethought to abandon Europe decades before the Holocaust.  They saw the miraculous invention of television, were witnesses to conflicts that divided the country - Korea and Vietnam; they watched a man land on the moon (an event that preceded my birth by six months), and they lived through too many assassinations.  How complicated their lives must have been?  How very little did I know.

After I turned 16 and got a summer job, I stopped going to Florida for summer vacations.  I saw my grandparents somewhat less.  I wrote letters to them and it was often my grandmother who wrote me back on behalf of them both.  I sent them letters from Germany on a high school exchange trip.  I sent them letters from college.  My sisters did, too.  I know this because after my grandmother died, when we went through my grandparents belongings, we found a box with all of our letters, all of our postcards.

As far back as I can remember, my grandmother was never in great health or without discomfort.  Afflicted with untreated scoliosis, she stooped over from the waist.  The older she got, the more she stooped until she was nearly bent at a right angle over her walker.  When we went to Disney World, we rented her a wheelchair so that she wouldn't have to do all that walking.  (Grandpa loved the wheelchair because it often allowed us to get to the front of the long lines.) Though she would have only been in her late 50's when I began to have memories of her, I never recall her seeming or acting young or youthful.  The closest thing to spirt she could evince was when we cajoled her to sing a few bars of Bing Crosby's "I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas."  Singing, stooped over, my Jewish grandmother wouldn't exactly belt out the lyrics of White Christmas but it was about as much mirth as she could muster.



My father was visiting just the other day and I asked him how he remembered his mother-in-law.  My dad said that he had always gotten along with Hy, but that Marcia was a bit of a tough nut for him to crack.  He said, mostly in jest, but with a hint of truth, that he saw her as a joyless woman who had a good sense of humor.  I can see this.  I see it in some pictures. My grandmother's smile in photographs was flat and even.  But when something did hit her funny bone, she couldn't help but chuckle.  More than once, I saw a twinkle in her eye - the twinkle usually reserved, I thought, for her eldest grandson or perhaps for anyone else who was swift enough to glimpse it.

(Marcia at right with Elise and me)

My grandmother was more opinionated than strangers could initially perceive.  She didn't keep her thoughts to herself, but let them drip out of her like a slowly leaking faucet.  One would be hard pressed to miss the signals.  Like many a mother, she worried.  She worried about her grown children and her grandchildren.  She worried about the health of her physically deteriorating husband, too.  Years of physical labor combined with as many years of smoking (filterless Camels for a long period of time) left my grandfather weakened.  When his health began to fail and it looked like the slow decline was ahead, my grandparents left Florida and moved to Connecticut - just down the road from my mom.  After years and miles of separation the family was coming back into each other's daily orbit (My aunt and cousin moved to Connecticut shortly after Grandpa died).  Now when I came home to Connecticut from Boston or Europe or wherever I was living, I could see everyone.  No stop to Mansfield was complete without a visit to my grandparents.

The tiny assisted living apartment they moved to became stuffed with a lot of the Florida decor.  White vinyl bench in front of the couch; white ceramic cat next to the sliding glass door; glass candy dishes and paper weights.  The painting of the old man looking over his glasses, fixing a watch (or maybe he was building a model ship?) and smoking a pipe hung above the same desk that had been in the den in which I'd slept more than a decade before.  Years passed, and eventually so did my grandfather in the winter of 1994.

My grandmother was 73 and for the first time in her life she was going to be living alone.  I was in graduate school at the time, in my mid-twenties, trying to figure out how and where to spend my own life.  Wherever I was, I made sure to check in with grandma from time to time.  I liked the way she bluntly asked me things like what was I going to do for money and did I have a girlfriend.  I liked the way she confided in me about her concern for her own children, but then would shrug off those worries with a dismissive sigh.  She denied it to her death, but instead of saying "Oy" or "Oy vey" she'd say "Oysh," often when siting down, getting up, or when I said something intentionally absurd.

In the the first years after my grandfather died, my grandmother was noticeably sad.  Without his health to manage, time passed more slowly.  She read a lot, religiously watched As the World Turns (I think it was) and became a huge fan of the UCONN Husky Basketball teams.  She spoke to my mom and aunt almost daily and had the opportunity to get to know my one and only first cousin, Sam - Cyd's son, who was about 13 when she died.  For years when I would go visit, at first alone, but later with my wife, my grandmother would be sitting on the couch with her legs stretched out.  "Come in," she would call when I knocked on the door.  By now it was a lot of effort for her to get up, so Linda and I would go to her couch and greet her.  Next to her couch, on that white vinyl bench, were scores of medications and a notebook in which she diligently recorded her blood sugar (or was it her blood pressure).  Shortly after arriving, I'd go into her bedroom to rotate her mattress for her and Linda would adjust her walker to a proper height.  There were usually a few jobs she had for me, taking out the trash or reaching something on a tall shelf.  I know she relished our visits, though they rarely lasted more than an hour (she'd dismiss us summarily when the conversation lagged or she was tired).

When I got married in 2004, it was a major concern how to accommodate my grandmother at the outdoor ceremony and reception.  She was limited in terms of being able to walk and greatly concerned about where the bathroom was.  Rolling the wheelchair around the uneven grounds proved difficult and my brother-in-law is likely still scarred from being her bathroom attendee designate, but she had a wonderful, wonderful time. She told everyone how much fun she had.  I hadn't seen her gleaming that much since my sister married in 1991, back when her beloved Hy was still by her side.

Just weeks before she died, Linda and I came to Mansfield and celebrated her 86th birthday with her.  We took her out to the local Chinese food restaurant and were joined by my mom, aunt, cousin, and some friends.  As was usually the case, it took a lot of convincing to get her out of the house.  It wasn't a small undertaking for her.  She came and enjoyed the meal - she was social in her own inimitable way.  When the bill came and it was time for figuring out people's tabs, there came the kind of cacophonous eruption of Brooklyn accents reminiscent of all those family meals in South Florida.  My grandmother leaned over to me and asked if my cell phone had a calculator on it.  When I confirmed to her that it did, she didn't miss a beat, "Then use it!"


It's been nearly three years since my grandmother died.  Hard to both believe that it's only and already been three years.  When Linda and I would visit, she would - as only an octogenarian can - bluntly inquire as to the state of our baby making efforts.  She worried about us, about the troubles we were having starting a family.  I knew that she hoped she'd live to see us have children, but more than that, I knew she wanted it for us, whether she lived to see it or not.  She died five months before Linda and I adopted Max and just as I never knew Fanny, Max will only know his great grandmother on his father's mother's side from pictures and stories.   I know how much joy seeing Max would have brought her just as I know how much sadness would have filled her heart if she'd lived to the day Leo was stillborn.  In some ways I am glad she passed before I had to share that news with her.  I am not sure I could have spoken the words.

Happy Birthday, Grandma.  We miss you.

The Dream

In the hazy state of consciousness between being fully asleep and fully awake, when the colors of the room are all in shades of grey, Mitchell's mind slowly separated the layers and images of the dream from the early morning chirps of warblers and tanagers outside his window.

In his dream, Mitchell had been riding on a school bus. It was the kind of dream that seemed so real that the realization of it as something his brain had created in sleep was startling and disconcerting. He'd felt the vibrations of the bus as it rolled down a dirt road, felt them course through his skin, muscle, and bone like that of a bass guitar whose regular hum buzzes steadily below a melody. Through the windows, he'd clearly seen the woods whisking by - strobe images of strong tree trunks interspersed with ferns and saplings. Mitchell was seated toward rear of the large bus, but other than the driver, whose face he could not see, he was alone. He had the distinct feeling that there had been other people, children, on the bus before, but that he was the last passenger. This had been the case when Mitchell was in grade school and he felt sure that this was the case now. Though in his mind he felt he was all of his 40 years, in the dream he felt he was looking through the eyes of his younger self.

As the bus dipped into ruts and bumped over the uneven road, Mitchell felt his body alternate between pressing firmly into the vinyl seat and losing its weight. The smells of summer were rich in his nostrils and Mitchell recalled wondering why he was riding a school bus in summer. The verdant trees formed a cathedral canopy over the road and light filtered in as if through stained glass. There were occasional bright reflections of sunlight coming from the bus metal that drew Mitchell's attention. It was as if there were someone flashing nautical morse code signals to him; the light flashes were regular and specific, but Mitchell couldn't decipher the message. He felt a sense of regret, but couldn't assign it to anything in particular. The fact that it was broad and vague lingered as Mitchell watched the woods go past.

The trees nearest to the road were blurs, but when he widened his gaze, everything seemed to slow down. In the distance, deep in the woods, he thought he saw a face. Somehow the face kept pace with the bus. It came and went with the alternating reflections of light peering down through the trees. Then the face came closer and Mitchell saw that it was his own adult face and that it was being reflected in the glass of the window through which he was looking.

All of a sudden the woods receded from the road. Just as on a high speed train, where the terrain changes quickly - like you're stationary and a vast panoramic scene drawn on a broad canvas is flying quickly past. The woods were now far off and between Mitchell's window seat and the trees a field appeared, grew, and widened until it filled his entire span of vision. The field began as tall, wispy grass and then instantly became filled with bright wildflowers of purple, yellow, and orange. Then he saw a lake. Somehow the lake stayed in the center of his view even though the bus continued forward. The water's surface was wrinkled by wind blowing across it.  On the opposite shore of the lake was a solitary dock harboring a small rowboat. From this distance, Mitchell could only see the figure of a person reclining in the vessel. The hat adorned head was resting in the crook of the bow and crossed legs were visible as they stretched toward the stern. Mitchell could feel the undulating water below the boat as if it were him in the boat. Then he felt that undulation as the bus bounded down the country road.  The lake finally began to move and passed from view giving way to open meadows and infinite rolling hills rising one behind the other in the distance.

The bus began to slow and Mitchell's attention turned toward the windshield. Past the seats in front of him, which now appeared as pews, past the driver who now wore a minister's gown, through the windshield which now was stained glass (though somehow still transparent) Mitchell saw ivy covered iron gates, ornate and grand. He couldn't see past or through them and to either side were Robert Frost stone walls. The walls were grand and obviously ancient - the sort that made Mitchell wonder at the skill of the craftsmen who assembled them so long ago.

The bus continued to slow and as it did Mitchell could now make out the individual notes of sound that had been filling his ears. The rushing of wind past his window ceased to make its whoosh. He could hear the bus engine, the squeaky leaf springs of the suspension. He heard the the sounds of individual rocks and stones being crushed into the hard-packed dirt road below the tires. Then the bus creaked to a stop. The driver reached to his right and pulled the door lever handle slowly. Mitchell saw the rubber closure of the two bus doors separate and widen. The driver didn't turn around but Mitchell understood he was to exit.

Mitchell slid from the window to the aisle and pulled himself up by the back of the seat ahead of him. He walked forward. He felt his hips brush against the alternating seats as he passed them. As he neared the driver, he could now see the his reflection in the rearview mirror above. It was the face of an older man, deep crow's feet alongside Paul Newman blue eyes and several days of white stubble were the indelible features. The old man winked, kindly and knowingly. Mitchell ducked down low to try to get a better look at the gates through the windshield. Above them he was able to see only the long frame of a slate roof atop a building far behind the wall. When Mitchell reached the front of the bus and turned to address the driver, he was gone.  This did not cause Mitchell any unease. He simply turned to his right, gripped the hand rail and stepped confidently down the stairs out of the bus.

When his feet touched the ground he became aware that he wasn't wearing any shoes. He felt the pebbles and dirt between his toes. The earth was warm from summer's heat. Smells of lilacs, wild berries, pine, and grass enveloped his senses. As Mitchell approached the gates, they slowly began to open. Through the widening gap, he saw a long gravel drive bordered by a wild and unkempt garden on either side. It led to a large and wide two story stone manor. Stairs from the drive rose to a front porch that stretched the length of the building, wrapping out of view around its sides. Six granite pillars supported a roof shading the porch. There were six empty chairs on the veranda, three on each side of the stairway. The chairs were wrought iron with pristine white and comfortable looking cushions. Next to each was a small matching round table. The chair to the far left was the only one upon which the afternoon sunlight shone. On that table, Mitchell saw a pitcher of what he knew to be iced tea. A glass full of ice stood next to the pitcher. As Mitchell took this all in, a figure appeared at the top of the steps. It was a woman, also barefoot, in a sage colored dress  and a wide brimmed summer hat.  The hat covered her eyes from view and all Mitchell could see was a beneficent smile.  Though she did not speak, he understood that she'd long been looking forward to his arrival.

From behind him, Mitchell heard the bus doors close. He heard the bus shift from park to reverse. The bus began to to beep loudly - the reverse warning alarm.  Beep...beep...beep.  Mitchell turned back to look. The sun's reflection in the windshield was blinding and Mitchell could only manage to squint at the diminishing outline of the bus. Beep...beep...beep. Mitchell stared as the bus slowly and steadily faded from view, disappearing backward  into the woods. Strangely, the sound of the bus' reverse alarm wasn't becoming more quiet as it receded. Instead the beeping grew louder and louder. Beep...Beep...Beep. As Mitchell tried to make sense of all this he turned back to the manor just in time to see a thick fog roll swiftly in and obscure his view of the barefoot woman in the summer hat and sage dress. The beeping grew louder and the fog thicker. Finally he couldn't see anything but shades of grey.  BEEP...BEEP...BEEP.  Then all turned black as if Mitchell's eyes were closed. Only the sound of the alarm remained.

The alarm. Mitchell opened his eyes, saw his bedroom in the grey light of dawn. He reached to the nightstand and pressed the button to silence his alarm. Mitchell's wife stirred briefly beside him and then he heard her exhale deeply in the manner he knew meant she was soon to be deep in sleep again. As Mitchell became conscious of what was real and what had been a dream, he closed his eyes to try to cement what he'd just experienced. The sound of bus, the sight of the woods, the lake, and the man in the boat. The kindly bus driver with white stubble and crows feet. The feel of the dirt between his toes and the scent of lilacs. And the woman in the sage colored dress. The harder Mitchell tried to imprint these images in his mind the faster he felt them slipping away.

Then the cat on the bed stirred and rose to press her head lovingly against Mitchell's shoulder as she purred. The dream that had just been so real - the sounds, scents, and sights - faded from Mitchell's senses and were replaced by those of his bedroom. He smelled coffee being automatically brewed in his kitchen. The sounds of the morning birds outside mixed with the occasional whir of a car or truck of an early riser passing down the road. By the time Mitchell heard his young son plaintively calling "Daddy" from his bedroom, the last visceral sensations of the dream were nothing more than crumbs - so minute as to barely resemble the whole of which they'd just been such an integral part.  Mitchell rose slowly and slid his legs off the bed.  The once familiar smooth, cool hardwood floor pressing against the soles of his feet now felt strange, though he no longer knew why.