dreaming

Lately I have had the most incredibly, vivid dreams. They amaze me with their clarity and feature people who have not normally appeared in my dreams, including members of my family (who have always been notably, conspicuously absent). I won't detail them, but several have actually been cathartic, worth a thousand therapy sessions apiece.

This morning I woke ridiculously early, probably a vestige of my re-setting of my own diurnal clock, something I had to do because I had jury duty yesterday (it was not unpleasant, and best of all I was dismissed at about 3:20 pm, having not even been called for a single jury "voir dire"). As is my morning habit I was listening to WNYC. The hosts were asking people what their favorite summer song was. I thought immediately of that song "Sandy" (not it's full name) by Bruce Springsteen, and then I thought back to the time when that song was in the air.

I was still in high school, naive but not simple, knowing so little of the world and yet content in the way that one is when one feels he understands his surroundings. My world was so circumscribed that I did understand it then. I knew how to negotiate and flourish and succeed in a way that I feel I have never been able to do since.

Do we all feel that way about youth? While I was baffled and troubled by so many things, in fact I could drive all over the southern half of my state without knowing the names of the roads; I could go to a party and know half the people there; I thought that the best thing was riding on a summer night with all the windows open on our way to the lake to smoke and drink and get high. And when I thought of all this--and of course the familiar comfort of my family and the neighbors and the junked cars in the yard next door--I felt incredibly anguished, like I've lost something that I can never reclaim and will never know again.