Tag Archives: Tim

DREAM with Tim and a Bottle of Rum

Dreams, , ,

Last night I dreamt I was with Tim. We were looking over a rack of used clothes (he used to work at Savers before he got hired as a teacher and during the summers). I think we were laughing at the clothes. Tim said he needed a drink, and he started drinking some rum from a bottle that looked more like an amber beer bottle. I told him I wanted a little, so I started to take a swig from the bottle but only drank a very small bit. Tim seemed a bit angry about something. Maybe because drinking isn’t as much fun when you’re dead.

And Stan, I’m sorry, I forgot to say hi to him for you.

Those were the days when we used to go out drinking with Tim.

Dreams the past few days

Dreams, , ,

Darn, I wish I could remember this dream better. I know I remembered it when I woke up and thought, “that’s pretty funny, I’ll have to write it down” and then went on to forget the funny part about it. All I can recall is that it had Mitt Romney in it. Why do I have this guy in my dreams? (Here’s the other dream I had with Mittens…caution…opens to the previous old version of this blog) It’s absolutely ridiculous. It’s not like I’m a supporter…hardly! Have I had Pres. Obama in dreams? I don’t think so. Oh wait…I did. But why Romney? No explanation at all.

In the dream he was an instructor, maybe even an art professor. Well, that makes sense. Although I’m sure Mittens lacks any creative talents (robotic mannequins aren’t known for genuine creativity), I’m sure he’d be up there in the compassion zone along with most of the art professors I’ve known. That’s sarcasm. Yeah. Good Times, as Leon would say.

Maybe it will come to me later.

Now on to the next dream. It is very hard to explain, and I tried my best to tell Stan about it after I had it on Monday. I was going to some function where Tim would be there. It was a combination of a hospital and a funeral home, a church and a restaurant. I was not with Stan. I was traveling in a cab along with some young women. We were bringing chairs with us. When we got where we were going, we were told that we wouldn’t need the chairs because they had enough. We were all standing around a long table that was a cross between a restaurant table and an operating table. Tim was across the table from me and I waved at him. He waved back and said hi. He looked the way he did in the mid-90s with longer hair. I didn’t get a chance to talk to him because there were so many other people taking up his time.

I miss Tim so much.

Illogical DREAM

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I wish I could’ve written this down when I woke up in the middle of the night because I could remember it easier, unfortunately, it was much better to stay in bed than to get up at that time.

I dreamt Stan and I were at my parent’s house. Both my mom and dad were there. Stan and I were getting ready to go somewhere, and I thought I should call Tim to let him know we were ready if he wanted to come with us. I was going to call him on his cellphone because I knew he was still at work and I wouldn’t be able to reach him at home, but then realized I didn’t have his cellphone number stored on our cellphone.

OK, HOLD ON. WTF. This is wrong on so many levels.
Continue reading Illogical DREAM →

The Carborundum

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carborundum
carborundum
A couple years ago, Bill was helping my mom clean out the basement. I am fortunate to know a chemist, as I would have no idea what to do with all the stuff my dad had collected and stored away for all these years. I told Bill to keep a lookout for a piece of carborundum that my dad had. Carborundum is a man-made “mineral” that has industrial uses but also is collected by those of us who appreciate its aesthetic qualities. My dad had given me a very small piece of carborundum a long time ago…about the size of a thumbnail. In true father form, he never gave me the large piece which was a couple inches or so across, although it’s not as if he kept it out on display, or brought it out to enjoy once in a while. Just like with the carnival glass–stored away in the basement, hidden from view, while his daughter could be enjoying it, he was keeping it just because. Just because it was his, and he and generosity were strangers, except when it came to strangers–strangers in the name of the Catholic Church Charities–then he was generous.
Continue reading The Carborundum →

Dead Friends DREAM

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Weird dream–Tim was standing on a tall utility stool, like the height of a barstool, but utility grade metal, like the kind that were abundant in the art building @ CSU. He was fixing something on a wall or ceiling. He says “I saw your friend Brian.” I then started asking him questions like “how did you know it was him?” or “how do you know Brian?” or “where did you see him?”
Continue reading Dead Friends DREAM →

An Atheist Walks Into a Church…

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Tim would appreciate the irony in this: that the first ever Catholic Funeral Christian Burial Mass I ever attended was not that of a relative, but of one of my closest friends. I mean, what the? And it was so dreadful. Not a word about Tim himself, what a great brother, uncle, son and friend he was, and how he worked with mentally-disabled children, but it was all self-serving about the priest and his little fable and moralizing in code that was so obviously anti-gay. I was offended, frankly. Here I go again, me being disappointed in humanity again because I had much more faith (ha, ironic word usage there too) in what they would do and say at the funeral. (But here’s the problem, Ann, we’re not talking HUMANITY, we’re talking CHRISTIANITY–therein lies the problem) It had nothing to do with Tim, and everything to do with preprescribed Catholic ritual. As Tim would say many times, to us anyway, “I hate the Catholic Church so much.”

There was obviously aspects of Tim’s life that were unbeknownst to other parts of his life. He kept his sexual preferences secret from his family (although they must know now because the Madison obituary did mention his husband–the obituary in his family’s part of the state was altered to a more Republican-friendly version), and around us he always talked about how much he couldn’t stand the church. So it was a surprise for me to find out after his passing that he was studying to be some sort of Secular Franciscan…something…I don’t know the terminology. Even if he had a hard time making a clean break from the religious way in which his family brought him up, (unlike me, in fact, I didn’t have to break because I was already broken seemingly from the start), I still can’t imagine him having wanted such a traditional, impersonal sort of funeral. But then again, it is very foreign to me, the whole Catholic funeral thing.

I can now fill up one hand with the number of funerals I have attended in my life. My earliest memory was of my grandfather–mother’s side. I remember the color white, and I remember my mom lifting me up to see him him in his casket. I was only about 2 and a half. I’ll have to ask my mom, but I think the union he was in was able to give him a good funeral. I don’t remember churchiness. I might be mistaken, but something sticks in my mind about that. He was the only grandparent whose funeral I attended. My dad’s mom’s funeral was in Massachusetts and my mom and I stayed in Colorado while my dad took care of that. My mom to this day still speaks not well of her MIL. I don’t think my dad’s dad’s funeral was large, and my parents thought I’d best not attend anyway. I was a teen then, going through my own difficult times. And my mom’s mom’s funeral was held in Wisconsin when I was living in Colorado, so I’d have to miss work at a job I just started, so I couldn’t afford to go.

I attended a funeral for my friend Ron from high school when I was in my 20s. It was in a Unitarian Church and very humanistic. They played some music that he had composed. The funeral for my major art professor from grad school wasn’t held at a church, but at a funeral home, which is much more sensible than in a church. Stan’s Dad’s funeral was in a Methodist church, but it had a very humanistic aspect too. I remember people talking about Gordon during this service. But this one, I had no idea it would be so hand’s off and impersonal. I am just shocked. I cried not just for the loss of Tim, but with anger at how removed from Tim’s life the whole service was, and how anti-gay coded the sermon or talk or whatever they call that, was. I tried looking at the architectural elements, trying to figure out whether altar embellishments were gold leaf or just paint, stared at chandeliers trying to figure out how to render them in Bryce, anything to get my mind off of how I felt towards the Catholic institution.

I am so glad at least he will be cremated. When I read “Burial Mass” in the obituary, I thought they were really going against his wishes. If they only knew, like we do and his other friends we talked to, Dave and Julie, knew, Tim would want his ashes sprinkled where the dogs he grew up with were buried on the family farm.

DREAM with Tim…Symbolic for Something?

Dreams

I was in a building that seemed familiar. It was sort of like the cross between my two art studios when I was in grad school…the Inhumanities Building and the Education Building. I don’t know if Stan was with me, but there were other people there. I was on the 4th floor (the floor where Tim spent much of his time when he was in the hospital), and there were elevators near windows, which was not like any of the above-mentioned buildings. I’m looking around and anticipating seeing rooms that are classrooms, but instead they are hospital rooms. Tim was in a wheel chair, and he was going down to the first floor with some other people. I look out a window by an elevator, and I see Tim. He’s laughing and knocking on the window. Somehow he is trapped outside the building and he can’t get back in, or back on the elevator. We (me and the other people standing around in the hall) are trying to figure out how to get him back inside where it is warm. He didn’t seem too angry about it…he seemed to think it was funny.

Not a Good Way to Start the Year…and a DREAM

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We got a call this morning that our friend Tim passed away last night. This was no surprise, as we were expecting it after his brain hemorrhage a couple weeks ago, precipitated by his infection a couple weeks before that.

I had a weird dream with him in it last night. But after that dream, I had an even weirder, more disturbing dream. But it needs some background and explanation. So now before the dreams, here is the real life background info, that I should’ve written down last year, but I wasn’t exactly in a writing mood:

On New Year’s Eve/Day 2009/2010, I was awoken in the middle of the night by the sound of someone screaming “help! help!” outside. I couldn’t move, but I heard someone running up or down the steps next door, probably a younger and more awake neighbor looking to see what was going on. I think Stan slept through it. Soon after, I hear sirens, so I finally get up to look outside. The old guy who lived alone across the street had a fleet of 3 vehicles: van, SUV, pickup sort of vehicles…one of those WTF sort of things (this is in the city…on a corner lot…not in the country). A pickup with a camper shell had somehow caught fire under the hood, and by the time I got dressed and looked outside, I saw flashing lights and smoke emanating from the truck. The old guy wearing shorts stumbled outside to view the damage, then back inside, never to take care of the problem. The truck sat on his lawn for the next few months, never hauled away or repaired under his watch.

A couple months later in March on a Saturday night, Stan and I were watching a movie and I heard sirens. They stopped in front of the old guy’s house. Paramedics went inside and emerged a while later carrying the old guy on a stretcher. We figured he won’t be coming back. We were right. Several weeks later he died.

For many, many years prior to this incident, I would have creepy dreams about the old guy…that he was watching me and could see me inside my house. This was impossible…he never opened his drapes to look out his window…and we have a jungle in front of our front window, so it would be hard to see through all our houseplants even if he did. Once I dreamt I could see him on the top floor, and he was sitting up in a hospital bed. I don’t know if this was before he was taken away on a stretcher or not. But all these dreams took place from the safety of my own home, watching. I never actually went over there in any of the dreams.

For the next few months, a daughter of his and her family would come over and clean up little by little, hauling big bins of trash outside, and then eventually renting a large dumpster. But first they got rid of the 3 cars, including the one that had caught fire. Some young guys came over and in an afternoon disassembled the entire thing for parts and hauled it off. By the time the dumpster rental had expired, they were still coming over every weekend or so to clean up some more and to throw away more stuff.

I knew that he didn’t have a good relationship with his family…one daughter, the youngest, basically left and never returned, except to pick up a piece of furniture, and then her car wouldn’t start as she was trying to leave…something that would happen to me. There were two older daughters, and I don’t know which one was attending to taking care of the situation. By the time we came back from our vacation in August, we didn’t see them come over to clean much anymore. The house hasn’t been sold…nothing has happened with it. From the outside, it looks the same as it’s always looked…clutter in the front porch, old refrigerator on the back porch, closed drapes on all the windows. Who knows what’s going on inside.

Last night or early this morning, before we got the news Tim had passed, I had a dream that I saw Tim. He was sitting in a chair in a hospital, sort of slouched, but he was awake. His skin was rather grey and his lips looked blue, but he was alive. I asked him if we could see him and talk to him, but he said now would not be a good time because he looked awful. I said that didn’t matter to us…I was just glad to see that he wasn’t comatose anymore.

I woke up from that dream, and went back to sleep. I had another dream. It started out very realistically. I was sitting in the living room, and look out the window and notice that there is a light on in the windows across the street. I assume it is the daughter and her family come to clean up some more. But it’s New Year’s Eve in the middle of the night…why spend the night doing that? I saw motion inside…there were lots of people there. Were they having a party? I don’t know why, but I went over there. There were three women, probably his daughters, and they were all sleeping downstairs in the living room, like a slumber party. One had pulled out a sleeper couch, and the other two were sleeping on a very long old fashioned sofa. The room had wallpaper and in the corner of the wall was a large blood stain with splatters. It was scaring me, and I asked them what that was from. One of the women starts to tell me something, but it doesn’t make any sense, so I figure she does not want me to know what it is, or it is a sensitive subject or something. I keep staring at the blood stain. And I wake up.

I’m not surprised I had a dream about Tim the night he died. People say that happens when someone dies you are close to. They come visit you. I’m thinking he must have been on the other side at the time I had the dream. I hope he doesn’t forget about the house in Kenosha where we’ll all meet when we’re all gone.

As far as the dream about the old man’s house across the street? I don’t know. But I’m sure it’s connected somehow. I thought when he died someone in my family would be next, like it was an omen. I guess Tim was as close as one could get to a brother for someone who has no siblings. We were born in the same hospital.