FEAR No. 055 – Dreams To Remember

I’ve got dreams
Dreams to remember

–Otis Redding, I’ve Got Dreams to Remember (1968)

When I was a kid, I was surrounded by an abode of women. Residing in a two and a half family house, there were three generations of us. That many women would (and did) drive sane men crazy. What’s worse, every woman carried some degree of Pack Ratisitis. It’s a very common disease. Among the elderly.

Luckily, Pack Ratisitis unearthed some pretty sweet booty. One of those treasures was an old year-by-year memory book of grade school years. By the smell of it, I figured it was more than twenty years old. (I have a knack for knowing years by must. My nose is awesome. Don’t question my nostrils.) I couldn’t believe my luck. I not only had just the kind of family that collected everything under the sun, I had the kind of family that collected every school picture I’d ever taken since birth. Add the one, carry the two, and I had just enough photos to cover grades one through four.


Each page dedicated to a grade was marked with a placeholder for a wallet sized photo of your mug, followed by a small questionnaire. What’s your favorite color? What’s your favorite pet? What do you want to be when you grow up? Year after year, I’d answer the same way: blue, dogs, veterinarian. I can’t remember the year, but at some point, I stopped documenting my photos. Stopped answering the questions. By the time I’d had a few years of high school under my belt, I revisited the memory book. My last known grade of documentation still had me loving blue. Still had me loving dogs. But the last question, the how-do-you-want-to-spend-your-adult-life question. It was blank. Peculiar. It troubled me. Had I stopped wanting to be something? Did I want to be a bum the rest of my life? I did, didn’t I? Oh, dear God, I want to be a bum. How ever will I find a blue box big enough to live in with all my dogs?!

At some point, it dawned on me when I’d come to an impasse. I took stock of the classes I was taking. What subjects were giving me the most trouble? Math and science. What subjects were the most necessary to be a veterinarian? Math and science. Nerds. My dream, deflated by Algebra and Biology 101.

I’m not sure how many of my dreams may have lost their traction because of a roadblock, but they did. Then the roadblock, fueled by enough cant’s and wont’s to create a bonfire of fear, sat in a memory book somewhere and collected must. It almost makes you wonder why children want so badly to become adults. To embody the innocence of dreaming and believing you can be anything you want to be, only to allow small holes of doubt and failure to burst your bubble, is disheartening. It’s downright frustrating. Yet everyday, in spite of what I’ve set aside in a jar to gather dust, there are those who have persevered in spite of this very letdown. I mean, we have a black president, for goodness sakes. You don’t think that’s a coincidence, do you?

Who’s to say that ship has sailed? Who’s to say I still don’t have what it takes to live out a dream or two? I may not be a veterinarian (I still loathe math and science, after all), but was that my only dream? I want to have the courage to go into that memory book, grab that little girl in those pictures and say, “It’s alright. I still remember your dreams, and I still believe in you.”

I hope she’s still there.