I'll See You in My Dreams

Last night I had a curious dream.   My friend Sally and I walked through the galleries of the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia.  We wandered through room after enormous room but none of them had paintings on the walls.  I said to Sally, “Keep going.  The collection of paintings is magnificent.  If we keep going, we’ll find it.”

We walked for hours and never found the paintings.  We were still searching when the radio came on, playing Debussy’s Violin Concerto.  (I always wake up to classical music.  Better than the depressing morning news.) 

I would have loved to see the Hermitage with Sally.  Sally wanted to see Europe, but Hugh, her husband for 60 years, did not want to go anywhere.  Sally appreciated fine art, and although she did not drive and lived on a farm near Decatur, Texas, 40 miles northwest of Fort Worth, she managed to see every special exhibition at the Kimball, Fort Worth’s excellent small museum of European art.  
 
I have been to the Hermitage twice and did not see half of this enormous palace of the czars,  with one of the World’s greatest art collections. A big room with nothing but Rembrandts.  Nearby another devoted to Rubens.  I don’t know how the Russians managed to take it all down and hide it during World War II, when the Germans kept St. Petersburg under siege for over a year.  I would love to go back to St. Petersburg and spend a week going to the Hermitage every day until I saw the entire collection. .  

Now neither Sally nor I can go to Russia.  Sally died last year.  With dialysis three days a week, I can not take any long trips. When my children or grandsons come to visit, like Sally I have them drive me to Fort Worth, also 40 miles from where I live in East Dallas, to see the art museums.

I don’t know what the dream meant.  Mary Adams, my therapist in Albuquerque, was a Freudian.  She could have interpreted it, but she died a couple of years ago.  Besides, I don’t really care what a psychiatrist would say about my dream. 

The dream haunted me all day.  I decided my dream was about dealing with loss.  The loss of Sally, my dear friend for 70 years.  The loss of my college friends, Margaret and Norma.   The loss of friends from Albuquerque: Isabel and Inez, Manny and Lou, also Charles and his wife, Florence. Frances and Doris lost their husbands, Carl and Ramon, who had been kind to me after John died.  The loss of my Pennsylvania friends, Marian and Mary.  The loss of Sue, a friend from Montclair, who was killed in an auto accident on the day she planned to come to see my new apartment.  At my age, I expect to lose friends.  But not that way.       

To me the significant thing about the dream was that we kept going.  On and on.  Through all those empty rooms – not at all like the elaborately decorated rooms of the real museum.  I was confident that the paintings were there somewhere, and I was going to find them. .  

At Montclair I knew an old black lady, whom I met in the dining room.  She moved slowly, leaning on her walker.  She struggled to hide that she was in constant pain.  Whenever I saw her, she managed to smile and said, “I’m still kicking.  Not very high, but I’m still kicking.”

Me, too.