Dream a Little Dream

When I was a boy I had this dream. I saw myself seated at one of those elegant, concert grand pianos. Just me and a piano.

I don’t recall the “house,” at all. That is a term used to describe the large room where the audience sits, and refers to the people, themselves, at times. (A full house means that all seats are occupied. A “good house” is one that applauded a lot.)

I recall that I imagined playing Chopin’s “Polonaise,” once called the unofficial “Polish National Anthem.” I thought it rousing and triumphant and stirring deep in my soul. But I was a boy, we had no piano at all, and one piano teacher told Dad that my hands were too small to reach more than an octave. It was also the final years of the depression, the late 1930s. It was truly a dream that had no hope. I just didn’t know that it had no hope, and so I clung to it for a while. I could “make” music, people would know the melody, and I would be admired for my talent.

I had another, shared dream when I was middle-aged. As a matter of fact there were two dreams during that period. In one, a colleague and I talked often, and fondly of our dream to set out in two cars, as I recall, because we both wanted to drive. We saw ourselves driving across the continent, but soon enlarged that to more continents, and wondering how we might make it around the world. We figured we could utilize the narrowest spaces across water, no matter how many thousands of miles it would be “around” the many waters on earth. Of course, at our age, we were well aware of the futility of this dream.

Another colleague and I also talked regularly about “our school.” We saw a warm, friendly, welcome venue where kids could learn to “fly” in the sense of soaring to places of their own design. No administrators would be there (or needed) and all kids would be willing to do our bidding, of course. Naturally, at our age, we knew the school would never be built. Our kids would never know the close, kindly, personal bond that is truly possible between teacher and pupil. We knew, even as our talks wore down and became harder to describe and details grew distant, that this dream, too, was not to be. It eventually became too sad to bring it up again.

Three men, three dreams, and three escapes from the ugly ‘what is’ to the euphoric ‘what ought to be.’ I always thought we should devise a “service” where we could say goodbye to dreams. Some words offered by the dreamers, themselves, would surely be in order.