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Dream and Implications
Sometimes they say
“I knew something was wrong
when she was standing at the foot of my bed
and said to me,
‘I’ll be fine. I love you’”
And then I woke up
and knew it was a dream.
Such tales show up in more places
than the gossip rags at supermarket check stands.
I hardly ever wake up remembering a dream exactly.
Often I have no sense of having dreamed at all,
maybe because my septuagenarian kidneys
demand my conscious attention too often at night,
but last month I did awake remembering
a flash scene that persists.
Somewhere, sometime, I turned from conversation
with someone faceless and looked up and over
about 45 degrees where four men were talking,
and one in the group turned to look at me:
it was my father.
So why?
Was it because I still value his memory?
Was it because, when I was a kid in Nome,
as a pilot for his mission,
he flew food and other supplies where needed?
Flew doctors and dentists in the Stinson Voyager
to the outlying villages?
Brought the pregnant, the sick and injured
in to the hospital in Nome?
As chaplain for the Civil Air Patrol,
flew search and rescue missions
when a plane was overdue
or a dog team went missing on the Bering Sea ice?
Or was it because, when I was in grad school,
he was so proud to introduce me to other pastors –
adding that I was working on my PhD in English –
even though some responded
“Well don’t come to my church!
You’ll criticize my grammar!”
Or was the dream triggered by my pondering
my parents’ role in the lives of the Native people,
given the realities of colonialism
and the heritages of segregation
that have lessened somewhat in recent decades
as critiques of the past have increased?
Given the forced acculturation in boarding schools of the past,
the lawsuits against major denominations over sexual abuse in the past –
some suits dismissed because of the statute limitations –
in adulthood, I don’t know details of many specific cases,
but I can recall the childhood instances
of conversations between mom and dad
that included anger expressed toward certain other clergy,
anger that, as an adult, I now know
surged over a faith being used to keep a woman submissive,
silent and alone through a pregnancy or after an abortion.
I know there was explicit concern when,
after Dad’s Sunday sermon,
a more doctrinaire colleague announced,
“Come to the Wednesday night service,
and I’ll tell you what today’s scripture really means!”
Or when the grand old man of the mission
loosed a tirade of hell-and-damnation at his village church
because a woman wore a red coat to Sunday service.
Was my father conservative? Yes.
We were a family in the subculture of
No drinking, no smoking, no dancing,
no sex before marriage, and no movies.
No movies? The theater in Nome back then
showed movies that, in modern terms, would be rated R.
The week Bambi started showing,
churches in Nome erupted.
Bambi was a good kids film,
but the precedent of going to that theater was bad.
People would say, “But the preachers’ kids went to the movies!”
Eventually, Moody Bible Institute’s science film series
was shown on Sunday nights at our church,
emphasizing the wisdom of science
that showed the wonders of creation.
Still questions come to me in daylight.
Why dream about my father
turning away from a conversation
to look at me?
I never had a serious conversation
about theology with him,
or colonialism, or cultural contamination,
or segregation or oppression.
Were Dad and Mom’s missionary lives worth while?
Were they overt racists?
Did they do as much harm as good all those years –
preaching Jesus,
taking orphans to the children’s home,
ferrying food, medicine and supplies where needed,
building churches and parsonages,
flying Native or White who needed to and from Nome hospital,
helping Native artisans market their beaded sealskin slippers,
their walrus ivory carvings?
What does father’s look mean?
I recall mother keeping me out of the parsonage bathroom
while she washed and dressed a classmate’s body
before the funeral,
and warning me away from the living room
until she finished sewing up the weeping wife’s scalp,
while Dad and the police
searched for the drunken husband in the blizzard
before he staggered out past the sea wall
to freeze to death in a snow drift,
or stumble into a crack in the sea ice
and drown in the Bering Sea.
About ‘Dream and Implications’
The poem was composed to address the stated purpose of the workshops entitled “Connecting Dreams to Words Through Poetry,” and was composed the Friday before the second Saturday Zoom session. As mentioned within the poem, criticism of Western cultures domination of Indigenous cultures has increased during my lifetime. Exposure of extermination, forced acculturation and elimination of languages and Native cultural practices show the cruelty of domination.
Anecdotes in the poem give both my naive childhood perceptions of implicit consequences of colonialism and the tensions within the conservative religious subculture I knew and my adult realizations of my parents’ efforts to improve peoples’ lives through their faith-based activities. They worked to counter some of the negative aspects of life in the villages of Northwestern Alaska that their mission and several other missions served. One especially difficult and pervasive problem affecting Alaskans of all ethnicities was and is alcoholism, as the last anecdote in the poem portrays. Not even certain clergy avoided the snare of the bottle.
The poem declares respect for the father’s memory yet questions the role of missionary service in the grand scheme of colonialism. So, to, I, who served in the U. S. Army 1968-1972, desired to do my duty, be a good soldier in a controversial war, and yet knew the “we are winning this war” rhetoric of leadership ultimately was not supported by on-the-ground experience. The Vietnamese hardliners in the North would accept losses of any amount to outlast the foreigners: “Hy sinh vi nuoc” / Sacrifice for the country.
The Nixon “Peace with honor” rhetoric and the fall of Saigon left me with a tangle of tensions – grief for the allies abandoned, gratitude for the friendships of Vietnamese settled in the USA and who helped me resolve some tension as they rebuilt lives after leaving all behind, and a continuing unease whenever someone now says, “Thank you for your service.” Often, I say nothing in response because that or “Welcome home” trigger recall of the mantra of so many during my time in Viet Nam with boots on the ground: “Don’ mean nuthin.”
Only with the recent rise to power of the tribe determined to ignore the Constitution that millions of veterans have vowed to defend have I hung on my wall the framed ribbons and medals that show I did my sworn duty when the times demanded, though others did not. Through conflicted feelings, including the feeling of being thrown away in a futile conflict, I can still connect with my own humanity in an imperfect world. I can still respect my parents’ work, and I can dare to respect my own.
