I’ve had several similar dreams that actually came to pass specifically as dreamed – but most were more symbolic and none came true so soon after the dream. Perhaps the most memorable was the one that set me on a course to becoming a practicing Catholic adult after a stoically faithful-to-my-parents atheistic childhood and adolescence. I was the only atheist kid I knew – even my sister and only sibling rebelled and attended church with the family up the hill from us, receiving the sacraments of the Roman Catholic Church in the era when Quo Vadis and Ben Hur were the big Hollywood production company Oscar sweeping blockbusters.
I was a year or two out of high school, involved in heavy drug and alcohol abuse, without a girlfriend and unable to connect with one since I lost the first and only girl I thought I would or could ever love. My friends and I had been hanging out with Mike C—–‘s friends who were a very able Beatles cover band. They were going for a weekend to visit someone at a college in Worcester, Mass. The whole weekend is a blur in my memory. I know we went to see the city of Boston, but spent most of the weekend in an apartment smoking pot, drinking and taking uppers. I remember a quite lovely brown haired young woman who was obviously interested in me, but I just couldn’t get past my inner inertia to try and communicate with her. This behavior was of personal concern, because even the alcohol and drugs did not loosen me up. I felt I was falling into a lonely and depraved pit that I would never escape from.
There was one beam of light that seemed to momentarily shine on me. There was a little turntable in the apartment, and they had a copy of James Taylor’s very popular “Sweet Baby James” album, and an acoustic guitar. I had been teaching myself to play along with that very record. I picked up the guitar, tuned it, turned on the record player, put the needle down on the first song and began to play and sing along with the JT. Mike P—–, drunk, high and stoned, like the rest of us, began to listen and then get that amazed stare that is common to those in that state of medicated mindlessness; he began to proclaim, “Look, Chuck is James Taylor!” Soon everyone in the room had become consumed in Mike’s infectious mesmerization. And I got the notion that I might have some musical talent after all.
The next day – a cold late-winter Sunday – we drove home. I got dropped off at my house at the corner of Gleaner Lane and Bloomingdale Road, at the bottom of the “hill” that in most other regions wouldn’t be noticed as more than a slight rise. But it was one of the few such rises in this mid-Long Island flatland. This “hill” had somehow represented to me the edge of the future that I had heard so much about in school and on television and in movies. There was not much talk of the future in my household. That would involve faith and hope and give rise to the necessity of love – and these things were not allowed to dwell in the heavy and dark atmosphere that permeated 103 Bloomingdale Rd., Levittown, NY 11756 in those times.
I guess because I couldn’t see over the hill when I lay on the floor looking westward out the double-paned window panels that lined the outside back wall of our and all Levitt houses, it was an able metaphor for the mysterious future that I would one day meet. I spent hours as a young boy just laying by the attic window on the other side of the house; it was a similar sized single panel that had its base on the floor on the east side second story. From there I could watch the wind and the birds in the trees, see the house across the street and the roofs of the houses beyond. And I could watch the traffic that often got heavy on Bloomingdale Road, especially during Grumman rush hours –this the biggest single employer on Long Island for many years with it’s main headquarters just across from the multiple intersection at the northern end of Bloomingdale. Grumman traffic was so heavy that the braking wheels would eventually leave depressions in front of our house at the stop sign at the corner, no matter how often it was repaved.
The future on the other side of the hill was never bright in my eyes. Others were looking for great things from me. I had an intrinsic ability for learning, especially in the natural sciences. I would get A’s in these subjects, and rarely studied. I quite often went home on the bus from Island Trees High School with no books, as I would get all my homework in these courses done in class or study hall. But the future to me was a dark and dangerous wasteland, full of things foreboding and unfamiliar. I did not want to go there.
That began to change the Sunday night that I returned from Worcester. My parents had purchased our first color television. And the first thing I saw on it was the network premier of the movie Born Free. It touched me and for the first time in years I actually cried at the end of this movie when Elsa, the lioness, returned from the wild with her cubs to show to her own human surrogate parents. As I had done many times as a young boy for sheer survival purpose, I hid my tears, went into the bathroom to sob quietly and dry my eyes, quickly stealing up to bed before anyone noticed and inquired into the nature of deep emotions the were welling up from inside, as if it were a violation of some sort of insular commandment.
It was 11pm. I got down to my briefs and undershirt and, turned on the electric heater, as there was no household heat upstairs; I got under the covers and turned out the light. I suppose I dozed off, but what I saw was not like a dream – it was too real and vivid. It was a darkened landscape, and prominently in the foreground was the oval of a head facing me. Before my mind’s eyes in an incalculable instant in time passed the faces of everyone that had ever really cared about me and reached out to help me with their love and concern and prayers – not out of familial obligation, but out of pure and simple loving kindness. Instantly this changed to a brilliant blue sky. I was standing out on Gleaner Lane, looking up the hill to the west, as I often did while hitting self-pitched soft ball fly pops to my father on summer afternoons.
In my dream I saw a brilliant blue sky as I stood at or about “home plate” at the bottom of the hill. There was a high, elongated and brilliant white cloud and I began to scan it from bottom to top. It had a shape; it was the figure of a robed man having a crown on his head, his left hand on his heart and his right hand raised in a blessing. It was the form of Jesus Christ standing in the posture of the statuettes my friend’s mothers had on their car dashboards and in the little shrines in the dens and hallways. I shuddered, said in a frightened whisper “It’s God!” and sat up in the dark, shaking. I turned on the light, and It was just me in bed in my room. But I was afraid to lay my head back down on the pillow.
When I finally got up the courage to turn out the light and lay down, every time I dozed off, I saw brilliant and beautiful sunsets on the water. As I write I can feel their brilliance light up inside me. This happened several times before I fell off to sleep.
The sunsets returned for two more Sunday nights in a row, each different and each gorgeous. And they ended the following Wednesday night with a vision of a noon day sunlit thunderhead that somehow let me know that I was destined to rise up into the clouds with the rest of the blessed one day. This image was disrupted by my friend Tommy T—— knocking on my closed bedroom door. When he came in, he saw I was napping and he told me not to get up, but he had something for me in his closed fist. I opened my hand and he dropped into it several guitar picks he had procured especially for me. And then he left.
The next day was Holy Thursday, the following Sunday being, of course, Easter. No more visions on Sunday nights, but I then and there embarked on a years long search through almost every major religion of the world and every Christian sect, finally finding a home in the Church of most of my childhood friends and families, my parent’s forebears, and yes, my sister. I have played the guitar and sang solo in restaurants and at catered parties for pay. And I am a career commercial fisherman, having seen literally thousands of serene and spectacular sunsets over the water. I carry a camera on board and have photographed dozens. And ever since that “Born Free” Sunday night, with few moments in exception, the future has looked bright and full of promise.
I now see the people whose faces flashed before me that night as my heroes — the tragedy of my dysfunctional, alcoholic, hopeless, faithless and loveless childhood that left me to be, as the Baltimore Catechism of the Roman Catholic Church put it, a “near occasion of sin” for the children of the devout Catholic parents in my Levittown neighborhood, was actually the God-willed occasion of bringing out the best in those people and for no other reason than that I needed their loving care, without which I surely would have perished in the pit on the other side of the hill.
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