Book of Dreams

I would climb up the creaking old stairs into a place only safe to visit in Day. The light came into the lone window and cracks between boards above and at times below me. I was much smaller then and more prey to fears of Spiders, Bats, and Ghosts than I am now.

The room was large and Ancient, not as large or as grand as the House below but always older as if it held time firmly, greedily. There were crates and cases, and furniture deemed worth keeping, but not for display. There were dress manikins, curved and bare, that somehow seemed shaped for a woman, not seen in this day. I was embarrassed by them , me the intruder.

I had long ago found the sword, and canes and large Baseball Posters and claimed them as prizes to be kept in my room below. The other items would call to me for inspection, the window that gave town a new look as yards , roofs and Steeples became clearer as whole objects rather than the partial view that we were always granted from below.

Today, the cloying scent of Wisteria that climbed the trees almost overpowered the dusty oldness of the place. The Steamer's Trunk wrapped in leather and always shut tight against the elements, such that were, in this dim place, sat on a large Wooden table, where I had moved it many years ago, with the help of Father. Was it many or just a few?

Amid the old histories, garments, and treasures collected in several lifetimes of the ancestral Family was the Book of Pictures. Like a Time Machine, I could open it anywhere and be transported through time and space.

Time ruled, more than Space or Place now, in the Book. My hands grasped it more firmly these days. I no longer struggled to keep its unwieldiness under control. The Time held sway over me as well, I knew.

A young man handsome and jaunty posed beside a new roadster with laughing women , surely none my Grandmother. Here again on a Baseball Diamond in a cityscape that could never be our small Southern Town. That same jaunty man beside a biplane in a muddy Field, this time surrounded by other men jockeying to be photographed, arms around each other, in uniforms from French to American to British. The men for some reason seemed happier to be together than they did with the women that would come in go through the Photographs.

With another turn of the pages, more soldiers, in Grey Uniforms.......but with pale haunted eyes, not smiling as my Grandfather did in his War. Perhaps the always too Bushy Beards and long thick Mustachios didn't show the Smiles and Grins. Somehow, I doubt that was right. It didn't seem to be a Smiling Race, just formal and posed, filling the Pages, out of a duty to be recorded for posterity.

Places and things that only History books and the Town Library could have prepared me for popped up randomly. Steam ships, Paris, Indian Fakirs, along with Fierce looking Indians of another sort. New York, Charleston, Savannah peppered with black folk in the background, who had became something different to me recently with Minister King shot and the Schools changed.

My Father as a Boy, looks like me. Here standing with hunting rifle and herds of dogs standing beside the now, more Sturdy and not Jaunty Man. Here my Grandmother as a Young Woman makes an entrance. She carrying a Baby, and the once jaunty man looking Proud.

Prouder than he did in the War or the Baseball Diamond......maybe this is when he Grew up...