Deferred Dreams

This. has been marinating. for awhile. You might say I've been "deferring" it. I've tossed it in some oil, let it soak in some herbs, been afraid I'd burn it if I threw it on the stove. I'll cook it up now, I guess. You'll forgive me if it's dry, if you come down with a little readers' salmonella. I'm a quasi-vegetarian--never really figured out the chemistry of meat.

It started, I think, back in the middle of the school year. An email from a former student, C. If you knew C, I think you'd figure out immediately why we get along. I'll sum it up like this: One of my old lit professors said to me when I ran into her about 7 years out of college, "I hope you've taken some time out of the heavy reading for a little bit of fun stuff." My reply: "The heavy reading IS the fun stuff, Maude. I actually enjoy it." C is like that, and she and I often end up in some deep conversational territory in circumstances where others might just stick with "How's it goin'?" Our emails are no exception. We talk about what we're reading, the deep thoughts the reading brings to the surface, and not much else. (At this point, you'll want to remember that I sometimes get so caught up in work during the school year that I forget to have fun (i.e., read), and you'll also want to remember that I am NOT editing these blog posts, so just ignore the typos). So C emailed me when I was "in it," and told me she'd recently been to a production of "A Raisin in the Sun" and attended a post-show conversation with the actors. C closed her email with a question: "Mrs. C, what do you think happens to a dream deferred?" If you're lost here, read the footnote at the bottom for a (painless) mini-lit lesson and link. Here's the thing--this email from opened a wormhole that hasn't yet closed. Since it's still marinating and I have more questions than answers, let's just follow the trail.

1. Well, "1" is the above. So...

2. I was deferring dreams all over the place when C's email reached me, and I knew it. Specifically, a trip to Europe and a trip to Indonesia. On one hand, I knew there would never be another summer where my kids were 6 and 2. On the other, I was having trouble convincing myself that the opportunities would still be there when my kids were old enough to come along or understand what it is that sent me to that small Indonesian town so different from what we're used to here in our air conditioned bubbles.

3. and 4. (Willa Cather and M and Anchorage) A few days after C's email, I assigned Willa Cather's "Wagner Matinee" story to the class without re-reading it. I had never taught the story before, in fact had not read it since college. I wanted to add some Cather to the class, though, and the story was in the lit book, and I remembered that I liked it, but not much else. The night before the story was due, I sat down to review it and come up with some ideas about things to talk about. I started reading and lost. my. breath. A story about a woman who gives. up. her. dreams of performing music to follow her husband to the prairie. The next day, the students shared thoughts on the story: "It doesn't make sense." "Why did she give up everything she loved to move to the boring prairie?" "Why would she completely stop playing the piano and listening to music?" "People just don't DO that." While they reacted, I thought about my friend M and realized this wormhole had started maybe, instead of when C emailed me, when I reunited with my friend M a few months prior. We were spending a weekend in Michigan, hadn't seen each other in about 8 years, and one of the first things I asked her was, "Where's your guitar?" Her response: "Oh, I haven't played in years."

There are many, many wonderful and interesting things about my very kind, well-rounded, intelligent friend M, so I don't want you to pity her as I tell this story. It's not as though she set down her life and her joy when she set down that guitar, but you have to understand that when M plays the guitar and sings, the entire room will stop and listen, even if there's a DJ with people-sized speakers three feet away or someone's doing handstands in the corner. So as I'm hearing my students' responses to the Cather story, as I'm hearing them say this never happens, I take a minute to tell them about M, and they listen. Then I ask them, raise your hand if you can think of something your parents loved when they were young, but then gave up. The room. was filled. with hands: "Painting." "Violin." "Water polo." More. And (I don't think I imagined this), there was this shared moment of understanding. This is what literature is supposed to do for us, right? Make us see how human we are, how similar? And without M and her guitar, without C's email and Langston Hughes, without the wormhole, would we ever have found ourselves there?

5. Re: that song M plays. Well, M plays/played/is going to play again MANY songs, but the one my friend K and I loved, the one we wrung out of M's fingers and vocal chords anytime there were six strings and a wooden box in the room, was Michelle Shocked's song "Anchorage." Lyrics here: http://www.lyricsondemand.com/m/michelleshockedlyrics/anchoragelyrics.html
If you don't know this song, read the lyrics. This is a song about...deferred dreams. A woman gets married and moves to Anchorage, then writes a letter, in the form of a song, to her friend who didn't get married and who pursued her dreams to become a musician. When this first started marinating, I told my friend E about all of the above, and she knew the song. The next day, she called me from a coffee shop: the song was playing on the stereo in the coffee shop. I have never before heard that song on any stereo. I have only heard it from M's smiling mouth. And I'm writing this blog entry because of a promise to M: I will pick up my pen and she will pick up her guitar.

6. Really, this wormhole is why I applied for the grant, why I'm doing all of this art in my garage. Most people who get these grants travel somewhere exotic, send postcards to the people back home, but I'd rather pursue the art here, with those other dreams, the living, breathing people who live with me physically and emotionally. Some days, the juggling is tough, but I'm beginning to see that the problem is that I should be blending instead of juggling, right? A smoothie instead of a sideshow.


7. I didn't respond to C's email (still haven't), because I don't have any answers. How many letters to how many people have I written in my head and never sent? I'll send her this entry and hope she'll forgive my several months' radio silence. It's a tough question, and the teacher in me wants to offer some brilliant answer. At the IB conference this week, though, one of the speakers reminded me that my role as a writer is not to answer the questions, but to ASK them. So I'm asking C back, and I'm asking M, and asking all of you, and it's the same question Langston Hughes and Lorraine Hansberry and even Robert Frost rolled around on their tongues: What does happen to those dreams we set aside? If we choose to set them aside, do they cease to be dreams? Do they come back and haunt us? Do they grow into something else entirely? "Crust over like sugar(y) sweet(s)?"









Note for the non-lit-nerd people: A Raisin in the Sun is Lorraine Hansberry's play about the squashed dreams of African Americans before the Civil Rights movement. It finds inspiration (and its title) in the following poem by Langston Hughes, which was written decades before the play: http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=640