Pushing 60: Tree

Last night I dreamed of an old boyfriend of my sister’s. He was Irish and pronounced 3 as ‘tree’. In the dream I was looking at a greetings card which made it clear he had always loved my mother. There were kisses all over it and declarations of a powerful passion. I remembered this man as I woke up and puzzled as to why he had entered my dreams along with a serious young boy fondling a show girl.
There was a journey on a train with fluffy blue seats like water bottle covers. The journey involved lost suitcases and mislaid tickets.
It was a train to a Samuel Beckett rally taking place in a faraway stadium. Arriving on the last train with a missing ticket to ‘the greatest show on earth’ I rushed about trying to find someone to listen to my plight but don’t think I ever found anyone.
I woke and wondered about how dreams change as we age.
I think of day dreams and how nobody wishes each other good day dreaming but they should.
Or rather they could …
Recently I have been advised to remove ‘should’ from my vocal vulgarly or rather my vocabulary.
It is a change worth making at any age but certainly as one pushes 60. Fuck all that punishment embedded in vocabulary.
I think of my mother staring out to sea. ‘I am happy with my thoughts’ she says but still I give her a book to read …
In the middle of decoding dreams my friend rang. I read out the meaning of goodbye by Manuel Scorza, from yesterday’s sugar, and he said my translation was nearly right but as it is clearly a farewell to someone then ‘you’ must come into it.
‘Goodbye means never looking at you again’.
‘And dying with other sorrows‘ he suggested instead of ‘pains’.
He remarked on my Spanish accent saying I had always sounded sweeter and sexier in Spanish. I laughed and imagined living here forever and dying in Spanish. I watched someone dying in another language once, his third.
At times he would cry out in his mother tongue, Hungarian, and at others in his second language, German. He cried out for what sounded like a kiss but was in fact a cushion.
I consider death as usual. I never knew till yesterday that Manuel Scorza had died in a plane crash in 1983. The plane crashed into mountain tops on descending into Barajas killing nearly all on board. He was 55. I think of another fatal crash. Camus died in a car accident in 1960 with the ticket, for the train he was supposed to have taken, in his pocket. He was 46.