Reflections on a Thousand Dreams

Another birthday, another occasion for life reflection. As always with me, there’s a soundtrack, and as often is the case it comes as a surprise. What, for instance, possessed me this year to grasp on to a 50-year old Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young song as the theme for my 74thbirthday? Where’d that come from? Don’t really know, but for most of the day I couldn’t get it out of my head: Carry On / Questions
One morning I woke up and I knew that you were gone.
A new day, a new way, I knew I should see it along.
Go your way, I'll go mine and carry on.

The sky is clearing and the night has gone out.
The sun, he come, the world is all full of light.
Rejoice, rejoice, we have no choice but to carry on.

The fortunes of fables are able to sing the song.
Now witness the quickness with which we get along.
To sing the blues you've got to live the tunes and carry on.

Carry on, love is coming, love is coming to us all.

Where are you going now my child? Where will you be tomorrow?
Will you bring me happiness? Will you bring me sorrow?
Oh, the questions of a thousand dreams, what you do and what you see,
Children, can you talk to me?Upon further reflection, I re-imagined this as a song about parents and children, rather than lovers, so I substituted child and children for love and lover in the last verse that appears above and cut out the original last verse, which was too overtly about lovers for me to finesse.  As such, the lyrics now read like an amorphous description of my broad existence as both child and parent. I loved my parents and have written about them with clear-eyed affection. I have never held them responsible for any of my flaws or failings, though I could easily draw lines from theirs to mine. I’ve always used theirs to explain mine rather than excuse me or accuse them. That being said, this reflective moment has made me so very aware of how much I set out to not be like my parents...and how well I succeeded.First, both my parents worked in factories and carried the weariness and numbness of factory work home with them. There were no occasions when we heard exciting tales of grand developments or breakthroughs at work. The drudgery of it was palpable at the dinner table and the few times where I actually got to visit their workplaces did nothing more than impress upon me that Charlie Chaplin was not much making things up in Modern Times. It also filled me with a determination never to work in a factory and to do everything possible from an education standpoint to make sure I was equipped for work elsewhere. At the end of my working life, my resume revealed that I did not entirely escape the occasional demeaning job, but I did succeed at never stepping foot in a factory. Then there was money. Not only was money always in short supply in our home, but awareness of the shortage was heightened to an almost debilitating degree. The incredible lightness of his bank account was a constant burden my father carried with him to the end of his days. Any new demand for money…for everything from home repairs to gifts, from new used cars to a college education visibly made him wince with pain at his financial impotence. Mom handled it differently, as mothers do. She may have been the first ever to utter the expression, “We don’t have much but at least we have our health”--which I believe she stated every one of the 12 days before every Christmas. All of which made me determined to acquire a degree of financial literacy and security. It is the reason that at this typically precarious stage of life, I can enjoy a rich, stable lifestyle, no where near as vulnerable to life’s vagaries as my parents constantly were.  Finally there were the domestic quarrels. In our home the quarreling was as ritualistic as church on Sunday morning. Every Friday Dad would stagger home late after boozing it up following his night shift. Mom would be at the kitchen table lying in wait. I would be up in bed at 4, 5, 6, 7 years old and beyond, already knowing what was to come and what my role was to be. An hour or so of yelling and screaming and then one of them would call me down to join them at the table as mediator. My Dr. Phil-like precociousness would eventually buy us all peace for the night. Dad would try to sleep it off until late the next morning, but then in reaction to mom’s silent treatment he would be off to his favorite local bar again. Saturday night would be a repeat of Friday night, and then Sunday and church and the family dinner and the week of work and school ahead would return us all to normalcy until the next Friday night when the cycle would begin again. Most of my boyhood was like that, which filled me with a determination to make a marriage with a totally different dynamic. In that, Lorna and I have largely succeeded with relatively few breakdowns given our 54 years of marital bliss.  Marie and Cliff...at restOn reflection now I know I couldn’t have done it all without your example, Mom and Dad…no seriously.
And that’s where the lyric from Stephen Stills and company fits in:One morning I woke up and I knew that you were gone.A new day, a new way, I knew I should see it along.Go your way, I'll go mine and carry on.
The sky is clearing and the night has gone out.The sun, he come, the world is all full of light.Rejoice, rejoice, we have no choice but to carry on.

Housekeeping Note:I have opened a Nobby Works dedicated page on Facebook in order to resolve ongoing issues with Google's comment function for this blog. Google seems so busy taking over the world that it has no time to address a simple problem that effects all the bloggers who use its platform. I hope that the new Facebook page provides an easy commenting option for those who've been frustrated in the past by an inability to share feedback. It's been frustrating on my end as well. I know this contradicts the recent blog post where I announced I was quitting Facebook. I have in fact deleted my personal page and will run this new one strictly as an adjunct to the blog. (Besides, as a humanist, I long ago learned to embrace my contradictions.) So if you have something to say about this or any future posts I reluctantly invite you to follow this link to Facebook and leave your comments there (and "like" the page while you're at it!). Hopefully a dialog will ensue.