Wish Fulfillment; Post Script

And I have a post script for last night's post;

Please don't think I was trying to brag. This blog is where I come to process both the bad and good things. My obesessively analytical mind overflows and I use blogger to get it out of me.

But even after I blogged I still had a strange dream.

In my dreams, for twenty-odd years now, maybe longer, I fly. I fly like a bird, which involves flapping my arms like a bird flaps his wings. So even though I don't have feathers, I ride the air. I glide and soar. To get altitude, I have to take off from a running start and flap. Sometimes I don't make it and land on my chin in a pile of cartoon-dust. But when I catch the right updraft it's very rewarding. I wheel, I soar, I ride. I think I fly in my dreams because I'm so often bound by circumstances here in reality. My mind longs for freedom and in my dreams (even though my analytical mind imposes physics on me) I get to be free.

Well last night, I flew. But this time, I used my flight to take care of some unfinished business. In reality, when I left to go to Bible School, I thought I had the support of my first "father-figure". This was back before I even knew what to call the function that he met in me. He is the pastor of the first church I attended, where I went fanatic for a good ten years before I left to the ministry. After I got to Missouri, this man practically dropped me. You see, I went to Missouri with My Friend The Doctor. Only back then, he wasn't -The Doctor. We started on the same footing, but he made it work for him and became -The Doctor. Me, I staggered and bailed, and restarted, and dropped out. I came away with a Master's and he came away with a wife and a doctorate (one of those staggerations was when I met My Mentor). But when we were out of the First Father-Figure's sight, we seemed to be out of his mind. He never followed up on us. He never called. He never wrote. Thank God for My Mentor, because he's twelve times the man that The First Father-Figure was.

So last night in my dreams, after gaining the sky, I used that freedom to visit The First Father-Figure. I hovered over his house. I spied on him. There was no scandal to uncover, I just had (have) unfinished business. I had never told him goodbye.

In my dream, I didn't tell him goodbye either, but I did what I do. I avoided him. I avoided him the way UFOs avoid farmers in Iowa. He saw me. I zoomed and flapped through his bedroom windowscreen, I swooped under his car door right under the nose of his righthand man, and I let him see that I was free without stopping to talk. However, he put restrictions on my release. He called after me, saying that I had borrowed some keys from him when I had left back in 1992, and if I brought them back, he would dismiss me with no consequences (yes, it was that kind of church. You didn't just 'leave' this congregation. You either took the Right Hand of Fellowship, or you were labeled a backslider. Such baggage I carry, right?)

So off I went flapping from the New Jersey church to the New York town that I grew up in to go get this key. All that flapping started to tire me out. When I reached my old neighborhood, I could barely stay above the treetops. I started attracting attention from the people on the ground. In my dream, like in my life, they were innercity youth transplanted to suburbia. When they saw me flying, they were amazed at first, but then they wanted their piece of the miracle. They would jump up to grab me. The more they tried, the more frustrated and angry they grew. The more I tried to avoid them, the more tired I got. It seemed eventually that I would be caught and never get to deliver that key or finally free myself from The First Father-Figure.

So ... I woke up. And I do mean I consciously pushed myself up from the bed on my arms and exhaled with relief. I effected another escape. But like all my escapes, it left an unfulfilled goal behind. In my dream, and in my real life, I am not free from The F F-F.

In two weeks, a wish is going to be fulfilled. But in my head I'm still battling demons and sins and hauntings of a turbulent and dysfunctional past.

So when I gush about My Hero, and express my joy, my amazement, my gratitude, my wonder, my awe -- please don't hate. I do it because I need to.

I need to actively ruminate on the good things in my life because I could too easily drown in all the bad.

And I just refuse to drown.