To read an excerpt from the book, please click on the following link:

ashaveilbook.blogspot.com

An excerpt from The Pleasure Palace, my romantic comedy, can be found here:



Sunday, April 17, 2016

Alive in Dreams

Transcendent dream last night. I dreamed that I carried Thistle out to the back deck; she was just a toddler. The forest , dark as ink, looked like a jagged wall. I looked to the left and a procession of people, in an angled but straight line, walked towards Thistle and me. They were in a long stretch of dim light, yellow-white with a border of soft, smudged amethyst. They drew close and stopped at the deck railing. I sensed they could not cross it.
I looked at the line of people and saw that all of them were relatives who have passed away. My grandfather, Gordon McMillan, stood at the head of the line. Behind him, my sister, my grandmother, my mother, my Aunt Anna and Uncle Mike, my great-grandmother Maria, and some men I sensed were uncles.
"They want to look at Thistle," said Grandpa McMillan,so I held her up a little higher. My relatives started talking: "What a beautiful child; she's a redhead; we love her; we love you." So many voices; I had a dream-thought: these are firefly voices. After a time, they turned and walked back through the soft light, which faded, along with them, into forest shadows. Thistle told me the next morning that the "ghost lady" she keeps dreaming about has gone away now.
I think that they came to remind me of important truths, but above all, that love survives everything, even the sadness and separation of death.

It reminded me somehow of the final scene in The Elephant Man film. I have perpetually felt like an outcast in my life, or a misfit. I certainly do not have the terrible deformities of this man.  I admire his unbelievable strength to endure an unimaginably horrible, poignantly sad life--among other things, his father forced him to sell gloves and other dry goods door to door, and no one would buy from him.  How beautifully fortunate he was to be surrounded by kindness and have such a good place to live. The woman in this clip represents his mother, one of the few people who truly loved him in his life and died far too young to protect her child.

I wish I could publish this as the actual You Tube video here, but it will not let me. Please follow the link to watch it:

Elephant Man: Last Scene
















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