Humainologie creative dialogue writing festival Wednesday December 23

“The very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life.” - Zadie Smith

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” - Joan Didion

Writing good stories can be endlessly rewarding. Consider it a life skill. As with any other skill, it improves with practice. Only you can discover what rewards it would bring to you if you set out on the journey.

I thought I couldn’t write short stories. That was five years ago. Then I thought what the heck, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. I opened the door and took a step and kept going. I have a long way to go, but now I think I can’t stop.

My contribution to the short story writing festival is appended below. At 4,500 words, it is over half the maximum length for a short story (7,000 words) according to a standard definition.

Send the written version of your short story to me and I’ll send it out to the dialogue network. At our creative dialogue writing festival next Wednesday December 23, you can read your story aloud if it’s flash fiction (under 1,000 words) or read an excerpt from your story if it’s longer. Aim for a reading-aloud time of not more than seven minutes.

Calgary may be the first city in the world to have a short story writing festival at Christmas. This is historic. All you need to do is open the door and take that first step and then keep going.

Each day is a gift. Each day is a chance to write a new story. And it is always the difficulties in the story that make it interesting.

Arthur

Dream Letter

Part I September 28, 1918, Philadelphia

The reality of life and the illusion of dreams are interwoven.

That night, after the big parade, Robinson O’Connor had a strange dream – if it really was a dream at all.

They had gone to the parade that day, arranging to meet Robby’s cousin Patrick and his family there. Robby’s father had said he hoped the war would end soon and that everyone should go to the parade to support the war effort, and so they did. Robby’s mother had died before he was three years old. His father did what he could to replace what Robby had lost. At the parade, John Philip Sousa led a marching band, and the beat and lift of the drums and the brass band took Robby high up on a trajectory of exhilaration. He had never seen so many people together in Philadelphia at one time.

He and his cousin Patrick had become so excited at the parade, that they were on a merry-go-round of laughter afterwards, running about at Patrick’s house, and Robby was out of breath when his father called to him that they had to go home.

That night, back at home, weariness at last crept over him. He slept.

He was alone in a room and it was dark. The window was open, and he felt cold and wanted to get up and close the window, but he couldn’t get up from his chair. His legs were very long and thin – so long that he would be very tall if he could only - but he could not - stand up. Then he heard someone walking toward his room and his door opened and a woman – he did not recognize her – said that a letter had come for him. She reached toward him, her hand holding the letter. He wanted to ask her to close the window because he was cold. And then he woke up.

It couldn’t have been just a dream. He had seen and felt those long legs and they were his legs. It was the letter, too, and he wondered what was in the letter. Then, years later, he would forget that there had been a letter but would remember other parts of the dream.

He had called out to his father after waking up and his father had come to the room and sat on the bed beside him, pulling Robby up to sit on the edge of the bed, and had put his arm around him and told him it was just a dream. But Robby had experienced dreams, and this was real. He was sure of it.

A week later they received news that brought an end to Robby’s childhood. His cousin Patrick had died. Since the parade, his father had been talking to Robby about something happening in Philadelphia that he had heard about from a friend who worked at the city’s largest hospital. He would bring a newspaper home from work and look for the news about it, and sometimes show an article to Robby, shaking his head. Most of the news was about the war, but the newspapers did mention the illness. It was in other cities too. Patrick had died because of an epidemic, Robby’s father explained. People were calling it the “Spanish flu.”

In November, the war to end all wars came to an end.

At Christmas, Patrick’s parents had always invited Robby and his father for Christmas eve dinner. They would stay the night and Robby and Patrick would open presents together under the Christmas tree on Christmas morning. Now Patrick was gone, and his parents had told Robby’s father they were still in mourning and just didn’t have it in them to celebrate Christmas that year. Nor did Robby.

Part II More than twenty years later

By Christmas of 1939, no one was calling it “the war to end all wars” anymore. One evening Robby brought his next-door neighbors a loaf of bread he’d made, and Adrian invited him in. Adrian’s wife, Evelyn, was reading to her children, and when she had read the lines

Long has paled that sunny sky:

Echoes fade and memories die:

Autumn frosts have slain July.

she paused and shook her head and looked at Robby and her husband. “There’s going to be another war,” she said. Robby knew the poem. He was startled to hear war mentioned in response to Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass. Something was about to happen.

On December 7, 1941, the same neighbor, Evelyn Barnes, knocked urgently on his door. It was already evening. When he opened the door to her, he saw she was upset. “The Japanese have attacked us,” she said. Her husband had heard a radio report about an hour earlier. The Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor.

When Robby signed up for military service in 1942, it seemed like the perfect time and the perfect timing for his own life, as if a wind had carried him aloft. Everyone around him felt it, especially the young men. Now everyone knew what they should do, and it was to be a part of this thing that simply had to be done. There was no more hesitation or uncertainty in life.

He trained with the Army Air Forces Training Command in Galveston, Texas. From the Galveston Army Airfield, the train took him to Newport News in Virginia. From there, he would leave on the ship for his post. They had not been told where that would be. “Loose lips sink ships.” They would be told somewhere on the way.

In the two weeks before he was scheduled to board ship, he had dinner at the canteen on the base in the evenings and then had a drink with other men in uniform. They always met at a nearby bar, where there were young women from the town. There was an undercurrent of camaraderie that Robby felt in those evenings.

One night he saw Marie for the first time.

He hadn’t noticed her right away. She had come to the table where a group of them were sitting and looked at him and said that he looked like a newcomer.

“Yes, that’s right,” he said, and they began to talk. Marie was her name, Marie Dominique.

It was several days later, when they met for a glass of wine, just the two of them, that he noticed how beautiful she really was. It was a cheerful, lively beauty, in her wide blue eyes and her lips which seemed always about to break into a smile, and her abundant waves of blonde hair and the rhythm of her walk or even in how, as she turned toward him, she would tilt back or forward, as if she were almost unconsciously creating new dance moves.

He was leaving in three days. They exchanged addresses. Crossing the Atlantic, he would sometimes be on deck and look back toward the west and imagine her as he had last seen her. “Wait for me,” he had called to her.

It was May 1944. The Liberty Ships had been assembled quickly, often in less than two weeks. Robby slept in a three-tier bunk. They had two meals and a snack each day and passed the time with reading or sleeping or playing cards or sitting on deck. At least once every day he would close his eyes and recall her standing on the dock, touching her hand to her lips and then extending it toward him.

Occasionally they saw whales. On a day with fine weather, they had a submarine scare. They dropped depth charges and went on, with the dozens of other ships in their convoy.

He changed ships in Oran and again before passing through the Suez Canal. They were on board a British ship by then, and there were women on the ship, British navy women, and an orchestra and dancing in the evenings. They passed through the Suez Canal, and arrived in Bombay, where three of Marie’s letters were delivered to him.

In India for several weeks, they knew they would soon move from there to China. As they learned later, it would be to Kunming, then to a nearby airfield, at Chengkung. That would be the base for their reconnaissance flights.

His thoughts returned to her often in the evenings. Her letters arrived twice a month, first in India and later amid the drone and knock and staccato of life in Chengkung. At Christmas in 1944, she had written that she’d put up a Christmas tree and imagined what it would be like when children of her own – “our own,” she had written - would unwrap their presents under a bigger tree, and she hoped it would not be long.

For several weeks in June 1945, Robby received no letter from her at all. Before falling asleep one night, he recalled a dream from his childhood. A woman’s hand had reached toward him holding a letter. He remembered wondering what was in that letter.

The next day was overcast. A letter from Marie arrived. It was dated May 10. She had met someone. They were engaged. She had missed Robby so much and maybe that had made her vulnerable…. Robby put the letter away. After that, there were no more letters from her.

In September 1945, he came home to something missing. At Christmas it was still missing. It would not come back to him, she would not. Before going overseas, he had accepted a job offer in a furniture company his grandfather had founded. In the year after his return from China, he tried to fill the empty space inside him with his work. It helped, yet the void was still there. He could only fill half of his life, not the part that Marie’s departure had left empty. He brought his attention so completely to his work that only at night, when he was very tired, would he think about Marie.

He was well liked at work, and he had an ability to improvise solutions to any difficulty. He had already been promoted to branch manager when he met Kathy at a Christmas party in December 1946. She was intelligent, with boyish good looks. Her dark hair and her deep-set eyes easily attracted attention from anyone, and Robby was no exception. Six months later they married.

In the months since the war had ended, Robby had learned more about the violence that the Allies had inflicted on the enemy. The firebombing of cities in Germany and Japan had been followed by two atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Some time in late 1945, Robby’s identity had begun to distance itself from the violence he had been part of.

One night – he was half asleep - he had a dream – or perhaps he imagined very vividly - that he was helping someone who had fallen in a street of a city being firebombed. The heat of the city’s air was so intense that the pavement of the street had melted, and Robby was trying to help the person to their feet and get them to safety. Afterwards, when he thought about that dream, it seemed more true to himself as he really was than what he had done as a member of the armed forces during the war. The dream was his reality now.

Kathy and Robby had two sons. Kevin was born in April 1948 and Eliot in May of 1950. Many years later, when he recalled the times their family had before Kathy passed away, it was always of the good times and the good things they had done together – of Kevin and Eliot unwrapping the presents “from Santa’s elves” under the Christmas tree, of taking them to the park, of their school days when the children would tell them about it at dinner after Kathy had brought them home, of Kathy’s home cooking, of taking the boys to the Philadelphia Warriors games in the winter and the Philadelphia Phillies games in the spring and summer.

Something would bring back a memory, and the happiness and gratitude would well up in him and he would have to stop whatever he was doing. Once, just once, when Kevin and Eliot were unwrapping the boxes from Santa’s elves, Robby’s memory had flashed back to something from a letter, “I have put up a Christmas tree and every time I look at it, I think I see our own children unwrapping presents under it.”

Nothing was missing then. Even his work in the furniture business had seemed more than a career, more like a calling. After dinner, Kathy and Robby had taken turns reading stories to the children. The Alice stories became a family favorite, and it was Robby who was reading on Christmas eve that year when Kevin was twelve and Eliot was ten.

.

A boat beneath a sunny sky,

Lingering onward dreamily

In an evening of July —

Children three that nestle near,

Eager eye and willing ear,

Pleased a simple tale to hear —

Long has paled that sunny sky:

Echoes fade and memories die:

Autumn frosts have slain July.

…

Robby paused. Kevin looked at his father.

“What’s wrong, Dad?”

Robby looked at his son and smiled and continued.

Still she haunts me, phantomwise,

Alice moving under skies

Never seen by waking eyes.

Children yet, the tale to hear,

Eager eye and willing ear,

Lovingly shall nestle near.

In a Wonderland they lie,

Dreaming as the days go by,

Dreaming as the summers die:

Ever drifting down the stream —

Lingering in the golden gleam —

Life, what is it but a dream?

In June of 1960, the family moved to Baltimore, where the head office of the furniture company was located. Robby had become CEO. He inspired those around him.

In September 1962, Kathy began to experience abdominal discomfort and mild swelling. It persisted. A few days later, after her medical evaluation, they received the news. It was ovarian cancer. Her prognosis was guarded at best. Despite her treatment, Kathy died four years later, on September 17, 1966.

Again, he rescued himself from grief by attention to his work. Now he had two fine sons, young men really, and he hardly felt the void as he had experienced it previously. Occasionally he thought of Marie. She would be happily married no doubt, with a family of her own. He thought of looking for her, just to see how her life had been. It would be good to see her. What if she were a widow? Or childless? Yes, perhaps he really should try to find her, just to ask how she was doing. But time passed and he never did.

Part III December 2005, Baltimore

“Oh, I have no complaints,” he said to Rebecca. “Sure, being old is a pain in the ass if you think about it but Kathy and I had a good life. I miss her, but the boys are doing well.” He laughed. “They’re still boys. That’s funny. When Eliot came in yesterday, a lady asked him if he were a resident here!”

Robby had chosen the Evergreen Retirement Home because he liked the people he’d met there. Eliot knew several of the staff members and had recommended it. Rebecca, who had been a personal assistant to Robby for years before he moved into the retirement community, provided a continuity that eased the transition.

On the third day of his residence there, he had taken a seat in the atrium, in one of the circles of comfortable chairs that encouraged residents to conversation. He’d opened a book that he had brought with him and begun reading.

“You look like a newcomer,” a voice said.

Robby looked up from his book and was surprised to see an unusually short elderly man sitting opposite him. The man had not been there just minutes before when Robby had taken a seat. Despite the man’s advanced age, he seemed spritely. He was uncertain whether the man was a dwarf. He was sitting on the edge of a chair much too large for him and still his feet did not quite reach the floor. If an old man’s eyes could be said to twinkle, that would be how Robby would describe them. For a moment he did not know how to respond.

“I’m Norse,” the man smiled. “Norse Hansom.” Then he added, “It’s Norwegian.”

“Robinson O’Connor,” Robby said at last. “Yes, I’ve been here just three days now.”

“Welcome to the Evergreen,” the man said.

“And you?” Robby asked, “Have you been here long?”

“Yes, quite a while,” the man said.

“Well,” Robby said, putting aside his book, “tell me about yourself. What sort of work did you do?”

“Professionally I was a neurologist,” Norse said.

“So it’s Dr. Hansom, I would guess.”

“Yes, but just Norse here at the Evergreen.”

“I’ve never heard that name before. Did you practice here in Baltimore?”

“I was at Johns Hopkins for a few years, then when I retired to work on my book, I did rounds occasionally at Baltimore City Hospital.”

“You authored a book?” Robby asked.

“Yes. You might enjoy reading it. The Neuroscience of Illusion. It’s for the general reader, so you don’t need to be a neuroscientist to enjoy it. Most of the chapters are about neurological conditions that affect how the world is perceived. For example, a patient with the alien hand syndrome thinks their own hand does not belong to them. But the essential theme of the book is more basic. It’s our peripheral nervous system and its connections in our brains that give us the illusion of reality in our everyday life. A good example is our visual pathways that receive light of different wavelengths, which we experience as different colors. The colors are a product of our central nervous system.”

Robby thought that he should pinch himself. “Where can I find a copy of your book?” he asked.

“I still have a few copies left. I’ll give you one.”

“That would be wonderful,” Robby said. “How much is it?”

“Oh, good heavens, it’s a gift. It needs to be updated anyway. I’m working on a new edition.”

The next day, a Saturday, he didn’t see Norse at all, either in the dining room or in the atrium. He was absent again on Sunday and the following day as well. The retirement home always placed a flower and a note on a table to commemorate residents who passed away, but there was nothing there. Robby asked at the front desk. The person on duty said she did not know of a resident by that name.

Perplexed and disappointed, Robby returned to the circle of chairs and sat down. Winter was colder than usual in Baltimore that year. Already the staff were putting up the Christmas tree. As he watched them, a memory came back to him, a memory of a letter, in such detail that it surprised him. “I have put up a Christmas tree,” Marie had written, “and every time I look at it I think I see our own children unwrapping presents under it. Well, our tree would be bigger. Oh Robby I hope it won’t be long. Do you think it might be next Christmas? I love you so much!”

Where was that letter? He had no idea. It had long ago been lost, as everything was lost now. Memory was so unreliable, except when it wasn’t. Even what had happened a week ago was lost forever.

Another week passed, and still there was no sign of Norse. Robby spoke often with other residents and with the staff, usually in the dining room or the atrium, or occasionally in the library, where the Baltimore Sun and the New York Times and the Washington Post were available every morning, and they could talk about the news. Yet he missed the opportunity to talk with Norse. He had looked for The Neuroscience of Illusion in the library, both on the shelf of books authored by residents of The Evergreen, and on the shelf of math and science books, but did not find it.

“Mr. O’Connor someone left a Christmas gift for you.” Rebecca handed him a box, beautifully wrapped and ribboned, and with a note attached. It was from Norse. “Robinson, It was a pleasure to meet you, and I hope our paths will cross again some day. Here is a copy of my book as promised.” Robby unwrapped the box and opened it to find a copy of The Neuroscience of Illusion in brand new condition. The author was Wunorse Hansom, M.D., Ph.D. It had been published in 1995. Robby looked at the table of contents and was astonished at the number of chapters, most of them devoted to neurologic syndromes that radically changed the way the affected person experienced the world. He turned to page 271 and read the first paragraph of a chapter on lucid dreaming.

A lucid dream is one in which the subject is aware that they are experiencing a dream. In some cases, the dreamer is able to control parts of the dream. Studies of lucid dreaming have recently focussed on its implications for waking consciousness, specifically its potential for improving mood and cognition.

He read opening paragraphs of other chapters, more than twenty of them, and as he read, he began to feel lighter, as if the book were indeed lifting his spirits and changing his awareness of the world.

After dinner that evening, Robby walked carefully with his walker back to his room. Even now, he gave the impression of a man who had once been very tall. His legs were as long as they had been so many years ago.

Room 100. As he shuffled carefully into the room each day, it would pass through his mind that he might actually have to keep going not just to room 100 but to a hundred years of age. “Well, you live with it and you do the best you can,” he would say when people asked him how he was doing.

That night, the boom of the drums and the roar of the crowd on that day so long ago came back to him. His father suddenly lifted him high up, seated him on shoulders as high as a horse. The blare of the trombones started, and a little girl who was on her father’s shoulders turned toward him and said, “Look, Robby, it’s John Philip Sousa!” She had wide blue eyes, and she was laughing with delight. The wind moved her blonde hair and Robby felt it fresh against his own face and he looked out over the heads of the crowd to the parade and back to the little girl, and he woke up.

“Marie,” he said to himself. “Marie Dominique,” he repeated the name as if to remind himself.

There was Christmas music playing in the dining room that morning. He had finished a pancake and a bowl of grapefruit and was about to pick up his coffee when he heard Rebecca’s voice.

‘Mr. O’Connor, there’s a letter for you,” she said. “It looks like it got lost in the mail.”

Rebecca placed it carefully on the table to his right and then pulled up a chair to sit beside him.

The post mark was difficult to read. Rebecca carefully opened it and handed it to Robby. The date of the letter was October 20, 1966. It had been addressed to their previous home in Philadelphia.

“Dear Robby,” it began. “It has been such a long time.”

The handwriting had been instantly recognizable. Robby looked at the signature. It was from Marie. The last line of the letter read, “Hoping to hear from you soon.” As he read the letter, his mind slipped away from everything that was around him at that moment – Rebecca, the coffee growing cold on the table beside the empty plate that still had some syrup from the pancake - into the state of a waking dream. He recalled Marie’s vitality and her laughter. The address she had printed carefully in the very center of the letter was in Chicago. He had never been to Chicago. Marie’s husband had left her. She wondered if it would be possible to talk with Robby, perhaps even to see him again.

When Robby moved his chair back from the breakfast table and pushed himself up to stand, he decided he would go to sit in the atrium where he could see the Christmas tree. Rebecca had placed the letter in the black bag attached to his walker, just inside the front cover of The Neuroscience of Illusion, in a way that it protruded above the edge of the bag and could easily be seen and picked up. As he moved slowly from the dining room, across the hall, into the atrium, he glanced down at it again. The letter was there. It was real.

The ceiling of the atrium was very high, and the room was very bright, and the Christmas tree was very tall. He found a place to sit down where he could look at the Christmas tree and the front doors, sliding doors. His gaze again went to the letter.

Still she haunts me, phantomwise…

At that moment, Robinson heard the sliding doors open. He looked up from the letter. A young woman was entering through the front door. She glanced at the Christmas tree and then at him.

She had wide blue eyes and blonde hair and seemed about to break into laughter, and even as she looked around the atrium, there was a liveliness in the way she moved her shoulders, as if she were beginning to dance. She did not seem to recognize him at all. She turned and walked – almost waltzed - toward the front desk. She was talking to the woman on duty at the desk. Robinson wanted to call out to her, to say her name aloud, to see if she would turn toward him, recognize him. He remained silent. Memory is unreliable. Even the senses are unreliable. You mistake someone for someone else. This moment passes, then another, and we think we’re in touch with something real, and it’s all an illusion.

The young woman had gone to the hallway and turned toward the right, away from his room. She was looking for someone else.

Tomorrow would be Christmas day. Eliot would come to visit him before noon. Perhaps Eliot’s daughter and her husband would also visit, and bring their two children, but that would be later, perhaps in the early evening.

He picked up The Neuroscience of Illusion and put the letter from Marie back in the black bag. He opened the book. For the first time, he noticed the epigraph on one of the opening pages:

“Life, what is it but a dream?”

- Lewis Carroll

When Rebecca returned to the atrium, another hour had passed. “Mr. O’Connor, can I get you anything?”

Robby did not answer. He was sleeping.