DREAM

So you get down to the last couple decades of life and you’re still thinking about that perfect place to live out the rest of your life. For many of us seniors that would be a place where we would find lots of peace and quiet, far from the clutter and din of this madding world. I have always dreamed of a cabin, on a cliff, on the north shore of Lake Superior, with lots of windows looking out over that beautiful body of water. A seasonal home it would be, so there would be a plan in place that would get you to some place warmer for the brutal winters, where you could sit in the sun and dream about your happy return come summer, to your rustic home by the lake. The trouble back then was, it was only just my dream. But then she passed and I started thinking about the limitations old age has saddled me with and I realized that although my mind and spirit are still willing for this kind of adventure, physically surviving by myself up there in Gods country, at least for me now, has some serious doubt’s.

As a kid it was always “pipe dreams” my mother called them when I told her what I envisioned for my future. In her mind, those dreams were something that never would happen and she was convinced that I was moored in this, “Grass is always greener on the other side of the fence” mentality, which just translated to--it will never happen. But oh’ so many years later, here I am still dreaming about it and yes many of my dreams in life have come to fruition because I never gave up on them. I firmly believe if you want something bad enough you have a good chance of getting it-- within reason. Not that I’m going up to the north shore to look for lots this summer because I’m enough of a realist to know that the days of taking my chainsaw and hacking a trail out of the woods and building another home in some Northern Minnesota Shangri-La are behind me and I also know the means of paying someone else to do it is slightly beyond my pay scale.

Right now I live on a nice lake and I go south for the winter and for many people, including most of my friends and family, they say, isn’t that enough? Without seeming ungrateful I can only say that my dreams changed because they weren’t always just my dreams, because I shared my world with another. Now that I don’t anymore my dreams seem to play out most often at living in unspoiled places.  Dreaming is cheap and easy and inactivity makes me restless, so I dream on. So what is so spoiled about where I am? It’s spoiled in my mind because it’s so easily accessible. I want quiet and privacy. Not listening to wave runners buzzing around the lake like angry mosquitoes and hearing my neighbor’s conversations. Maybe there was a time when that was all right and what we both wanted and we is the magic word but as I said it is no longer we-- it’s now just me.

I see my life as a book and for a guy who has wrote many books there comes a time when you have to write the last few chapters. They don’t have to necessary be brief or hold a spectacular ending but they need to insinuate someplace that the story is drawing to a close. What is a close? It’s when there are no more stories to tell that are relevant. You don’t have to kill off the characters, you can have them riding off into the sunset. But in the very least of it, you aren’t going to talk about it anymore.