If you flip back a few pages, can recall that my father died this past summer. Last night, I had a very interesting dream about his death.
I was back in Denver, my hometown, and it was time for me and my brothers to gather and sort through my father’s belongings. I biked over to my dad’s house while my brothers drove, we were all going to meet at his place.
In biking there I got a little lost. In the dream, his house was part of a development built onto a hillside. I was biking through the development looking for his house. It was like I had never been there before and yet I also knew I had; it was simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar. I biked around aimlessly, trying to gather my sense of the development. I entered a house, and it turned out to be the wrong one. It was home to a family of three, a father and his two children. They seemed to be from Iran, or some place similar. If they were angry at me for being in their place, they hid it from me.
I continued to ride without a sense of direction, trying to gather my bearings , and continued to look for his house. Somewhat by accident, I found it. I was the first there, beating both my brothers. My dad’s widow was in the house, as well as a number of workers there to help clear his home. I looked for a place to store my bike.
My brothers arrived shortly after I did. The workers had started taking the house apart. They were using pry bars to take down the molding around the baseboards of some of the different rooms. It was clear their goal was to strip the house down. I asked my brothers if we should finish clearing my dad’s pictures and art works off the wall. We all agreed we should. I walked around the house, looking for pictures that interested me.
In walking through the house, I saw my father-in-law. He was taking photographs of my father’s bed. His pictures seemed interesting. I went to get my camera, to follow suit. It seemed appropriate that I’d take pictures of my dad’s house after his death. I got my camera, but found I was out of film.
Brian Arnold 