When Dawn is gone and I have the bed to myself I spread out like a starfish and fall into a deep sleep. Last night I dreamt I saw a younger version of myself; the two of us were introduced like I was meeting a little boy, it just happened to be me. I knew the little boy was me and I think he knew it too, but I only had the perspective of my older self. The dream felt rich with meaning (my therapist would be so proud!) but all I could remember was the way the young boy looked: like the picture of a little boy on the cover of an Allman Brothers album, his hair a bit long with a sweater, running across a field of dandelions. Kind of like a picture of me I remember from the ‘70s.

I tried watching a Russian sci-fi film from 1972 called Solaris, but turned it off with 40 minutes remaining. Almost three hours with subtitles and no music, just dialogue. Maybe that explains the trippy dream.

And the sound of a far-off explosion in the middle of the night had me thinking about a disaster kit in our house, and why we don’t have one, and how I’d stock it and where I’d put it, and what it would be like to actually use it, to have to live on canned food and bottled water for so long.

Then replaying scenes from my trip to Portland, my old musician friend Loren who I’ve known since the fifth grade. A picture he showed me of a student of his who died in the ice storm from touching a downed power line. Remembering that kid’s face, trying not to think about it. Loren and me driving around town with his son Arthur: all three of us only children. Each of us alike in our own demanding, self-centered ways. Probably fun to watch from afar.

Going out to an art show with Loren on a Saturday night and taking in the Portland hipster scene. Some contemporary art space in North Portland, a series of interconnected rooms with exhibits and people standing around trying to make sense of it. A small cocktail bar, some people with kids. All the guys with beards and hoodies, the same cuffed pants and hipster shoes. Tattoos, knitted caps. Their keys clipped to the outsides of their pants. The seriousness of art, and being seen.

Loren and I play out the same string of events each time I visit: we shop for records, clothes, incense, cologne, then always end up at a vegan restaurant. At the record store they have an old one he made in an earlier band, Id Battery, and I tell the story of the time we were in London and he sold a dozen CDs of his to the Rough Trade shop and got like a hundred pounds, much of it in coin, which we put into a wool sock and took to the pubs, and what a feeling that was for him to be known as an artist, in a cool record shop like that, to then use that money to go drinking with his old buddy Bill.

We talk about being young like that and what our lives were like but Loren says he doesn’t want to go back to that, he just wants what he has now to be better. And we try to work through that. I guess that’s what good friends are for.

In the early morning I drive Charlotte to the airport hotel where she’s doing a weekend dance competition and we take turns playing songs on the radio. There’s one from Kendrick Lamar she wants to hear since she listened to that before the last dance competition last month. It’s so early on a Saturday I guess you could say it’s still Friday night. And there’s no one on the road.

When it’s my turn on the stereo I let the iPod play whatever comes up: there’s 60 GB of songs on it from the 2000s, my digital library through 2010, played top to bottom in alphabetical order by song title. After two years of this we’ve just started the M songs. “Made of Stone” by the Stone Roses, then “Made-up Dreams” by Built to Spill.

She listens with care and we don’t speak, then we talk about each song and what we heard. I know in some small way she’ll remember that. And I feel less a sense of finality in my own life, that I’ve shared something with her. That life can be rich with meaning, whether you remember it or not.

Categories: identity, Memoir, parenting, writing

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, pacific northwest, parenting