Saunders--Memoir Beginning
For years I had a dream that recurred periodically. It came to me at unpredictable intervals. It would come to me out of nowhere, and it always took the same form. In the dream, I’m a very small boy. It is night and there’s a full moon, so I can see far in every direction, even though it’s the middle of the night. In this dream, I’m hanging from the top of a very high bridge. I’m hanging from the top of a suspension framework by my hands. I have no idea how I’ve gotten here. I’m just here, in this very precarious position. I can look down and see there is foaming, roiling water crashing against the bridge’s supports. In the moonlight I can see there are rough waters in all directions. I’m holding on for dear life, and have no idea how to get down, how I got where I am, or what’s going to happen next. I’m terrified, naturally, but I don’t know what to do.
Suddenly I notice my father is approaching. He is a giant version of himself, several hundred feet tall, much taller than the bridge. He’s wading through the water slowly. He approaches the bridge and then begins to shake it. I scream for him to stop, looking down and seeing the water below me, fearful of the terrible drop from where I am to where I’m inevitably going to end up. My father continues to shake the bridge, and I continue to hold on. The dream ends here.
I had this dream for the better part of twenty years or so—from the time I was about six or seven until my mid-twenties. I always took it to be an indication of the generally troubled state of my relationship I had with my father. My father was gone much of the time while I was growing up, but when he was around, he was usually either brutally violent, sullen and withdrawn, or asleep. The dream, I told myself, was my childhood self’s way of imagining how much he terrified me with his relentless bullying. I took the dream as simply a mental snapshot of the way things were between my dad and me.
My father dropped dead of rage at age fifty-two. He dropped dead while at work, and from what we could learn about the circumstances around his death, he appears to have died of stress. In the years that followed his death, it took me a good deal of time before I could fully mourn his death, so complex were my feelings about him.
One day, some years after my father died, I was talking on the phone with my sister, and I thought to mention the old dream about my father and the bridge. Though my father was dead, I still had the dream. I’d never told anyone about the dream, no one at all. On this one occasion, however, I thought to tell my sister about it. After listening to my retelling the dream, my sister told me, in a voice that sounded full of emotion: “Michael, your dream was pretty close to something that happened.”
According to my sister, one day when I was about five or six, my family and I—father, mother, sister and me—were driving the road that left Key West heading towards Miami. I was terrified of the road, because I was terrified of traveling over water. Whenever we approached a bridge, I began to wail with terror. On this one day, my father had had enough of my terror fits. At the edge of the Bahia Honda bridge, he parked the car, yanked me out of my seat, and dragged me up the catwalk to the top of the suspension bridge. There, according to my sister, he held me upside down by one foot, attempting to show me how safe I was from harm. My sister tells me that after witnessing this, my mother and sister noted that when I came back down from the bridge, I was completely silent. No more crying when we crossed bridges.
Listening to my sister tell this story, I was, of course, stunned. I was stunned mostly because I had absolutely no recollection of such an event ever having actually happened. Even so, I couldn’t deny the dream. It had persisted for years, and I had never discussed it with anyone, so my sister didn’t know about it until I talked about it this first time. How could something like this have happened to me without my being able to remember it? I had no idea. Nonetheless, after talking about all this with my sister, I never had the dream again.
Suddenly I notice my father is approaching. He is a giant version of himself, several hundred feet tall, much taller than the bridge. He’s wading through the water slowly. He approaches the bridge and then begins to shake it. I scream for him to stop, looking down and seeing the water below me, fearful of the terrible drop from where I am to where I’m inevitably going to end up. My father continues to shake the bridge, and I continue to hold on. The dream ends here.
I had this dream for the better part of twenty years or so—from the time I was about six or seven until my mid-twenties. I always took it to be an indication of the generally troubled state of my relationship I had with my father. My father was gone much of the time while I was growing up, but when he was around, he was usually either brutally violent, sullen and withdrawn, or asleep. The dream, I told myself, was my childhood self’s way of imagining how much he terrified me with his relentless bullying. I took the dream as simply a mental snapshot of the way things were between my dad and me.
My father dropped dead of rage at age fifty-two. He dropped dead while at work, and from what we could learn about the circumstances around his death, he appears to have died of stress. In the years that followed his death, it took me a good deal of time before I could fully mourn his death, so complex were my feelings about him.
One day, some years after my father died, I was talking on the phone with my sister, and I thought to mention the old dream about my father and the bridge. Though my father was dead, I still had the dream. I’d never told anyone about the dream, no one at all. On this one occasion, however, I thought to tell my sister about it. After listening to my retelling the dream, my sister told me, in a voice that sounded full of emotion: “Michael, your dream was pretty close to something that happened.”
According to my sister, one day when I was about five or six, my family and I—father, mother, sister and me—were driving the road that left Key West heading towards Miami. I was terrified of the road, because I was terrified of traveling over water. Whenever we approached a bridge, I began to wail with terror. On this one day, my father had had enough of my terror fits. At the edge of the Bahia Honda bridge, he parked the car, yanked me out of my seat, and dragged me up the catwalk to the top of the suspension bridge. There, according to my sister, he held me upside down by one foot, attempting to show me how safe I was from harm. My sister tells me that after witnessing this, my mother and sister noted that when I came back down from the bridge, I was completely silent. No more crying when we crossed bridges.
Listening to my sister tell this story, I was, of course, stunned. I was stunned mostly because I had absolutely no recollection of such an event ever having actually happened. Even so, I couldn’t deny the dream. It had persisted for years, and I had never discussed it with anyone, so my sister didn’t know about it until I talked about it this first time. How could something like this have happened to me without my being able to remember it? I had no idea. Nonetheless, after talking about all this with my sister, I never had the dream again.
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