~~ DAYDREAMING ~~
I see her sitting in her wheelchair, just outside her door at the nursing home where I visited my Mom. A diminutive, grey haired woman looking intently at the paperback in her two hands. Every day I’d see her there. Reading, I thought. A kindred spirit. Another book worm. Maybe one day that would be me, I smiled to myself.
Then I noticed something. Her book was upside down. A twinge of sadness accompanied that realization. The book it seems was just a prop. Or perhaps an echo of a lifetime of enjoying stories.
That picture in my head is at least 15 years old and still as vivid as if it were last week. Today the vision of her comes when I am daydreaming. I love to daydream and do it more and more as I age. I wonder now, if that dear old soul I see in my mind’s eye was not so much staring vacantly at that wrong side up book, as she was daydreaming Aha. Still a kindred spirit!
I’ve always daydreamed. Always with a sense of doing something I should snap out of. A sense of wasting time. The first conversation I recall concerning this propensity goes back to third grade. My parents, returning from a meeting with my teacher, shared what I did well and where I needed to improve. As all parents do. As I did many times over. But the only assessment I remember - and remember vividly, was that if JoMae could only stop staring out the window, dreaming, she would do so much better in school. Perhaps that is why I’ve never seen this as a positive habit.
Now that I’m alone after a long and happy marriage, I catch myself daydreaming a lot. Sometimes remembering. Often imagining. I’ve been noticing lately how similar it is to writing. While I love to write, I’ve never before connected the two hobbies. Now I have decided to embrace those daydreams. Try to capture them. Recognize this practice as something positive. Write down those small scenarios that carry me away and see what happens. And if someone should observe me staring into space, don’t worry. I’m not vacant or lost or mixed up. I’m writing!
My little old lady from so long ago, no longer living, I am sure, still lives on among the pictures in my head. Only now I think of her as gathering stories. She may not have been able to write them down, but I suspect they were vivid to her mind’s eye and entertained her hours on end. I’ll try to write mine down for both of us.
JoMae
6/22/17
As a couple ages, thoughts of death begin to enter the mind. One of us would likely be left behind some day. Although in decent health, we sometimes spoke of it. Quite often, actually. Yet in my heart of hearts I couldn’t go there. I could only see the impossibility of going on alone. I couldn’t imagine how I could survive—or want to—the loss of John.
