Rudi's been dead now three and a half years, but last night he visited me in a dream, that big old happy self doing his same old tricks. Felt really good.
Rudi would have been seventeen on April Fool's Day.
I've dreamed recently of my father and my friend Keith, both deceased, and in the dreams they were very much alive, very much going about fairly mundane tasks. Those dreams felt good too. Waking has had its own sorrows, sure, but the dreams felt good.
I can't recall in which poem just now, but Carolyn Kizer wrote words that I find comforting and haunting, puzzling and promising:
I dream of the dead,
Kind, brilliant, and comforting.
The lost return to us
When we are lost.
