Elsie

    I love it when I fly. Sometimes in a dream, I just spread my wings and lift off my feet. Sometimes I’m at the edge of a precipice afraid of falling to my death when I suddenly remember I can fly. Sometimes I awake in bed and drift across the room out the window into the waiting night. However it happens, it always starts with an awareness. I just know that now I can fly. Many of these opportunities are heralded by a ringing that fills my head and vibrates through my body. Other times, an angry roaring grows louder and louder. That’s how I was introduced the first time. I was sixteen, taking an afternoon nap when a jet engine blasted in my ears. My eyes snapped open and I stared at the ceiling. I tried to jump out of bed but I was paralyzed. I glanced around the room terrified I was having a seizure. The roaring began to vibrate, then pulse. It modulated into higher and higher vibrations until it began to sing a beautiful sound, the music of the spheres. Then my body floated off the bed.
   I’m sure it’s hereditary because my grandmother could fly. When I started my first year at college in Santa Barbara, my mother and I stayed a night with my deaf grandmother in the house her father had built in 1889. My mother and I slept in the main bedroom, she in the bed and me at its foot on a cot. There were two doors to the room: the entrance and the bathroom door furnished with a hook for privacy as the bathroom was shared by a second bedroom. In the middle of the night in the pitch black I was awakened by a hand on my face. I lifted it off and felt the loose skin and prominent veins of an elderly person. I called to my mother to turn on the lights because grandmother was standing above me. Just before the light flashed on, the hand slipped from mine. The room was empty, the entrance door shut and the hook latched over the bathroom door. I was terrified. When I related the incident to my grandmother the next morning, she read my lips, scoffed and patted my hand. “Don’t worry dear. That was my mother’s room. She died there. Maybe she came back to say hello. Or perhaps it was I. I was astral projecting last night.” My grandmother's name was Elsie. She taught me how to play chess before I could walk.
   Elsie married a shit, a jealous Swede who despised the world. When Elsie lost her sight and she could no longer read lips, the world closed to her. One night the Swede woke up to the stench of gas. He ran to the kitchen in a panic thinking a pilot light had blown out, a burner was on, the oven was on. He found every pilot light off and every burner on. Elsie was there. She rocked in a rocking chair with a book of matches in her hand. She was smiling serenely as she readied herself for one last flight. My mother and I visited Elsie in the home before she died. She knew who I was when my mother told her but only for a moment. The Swede sold the family house and moved into a swank assisted living condo. When Elsie died, I raged against the world.
    I cherish her memory but memory is fleeting. I cherish this gift of flight but this gift is fleeting. There are times in my life when it has abandoned me and there is nothing I can do but wait for it to return. I have not flown for years.
Copyright 2014
Richard Talbot Hill 

 All my life I’ve flown in my dreams. It’s a wonderful experience and it appears in one of two ways. I either realize I am dreaming and realize I can manipulate my dream into flight or I am in a very dangerous situation in a dream and suddenly realize I can escape by flying.
   It’s been years since I have flown, years since such wonderful and liberating experiences began to taper off and disappear. Looking at it with the perspective of time, I wondered what else transpired in that time, what started those years ago that coincided or maybe even caused the disappearance of my wings.
   I can tell you that, chronologically things began to darken in my life and in the world when we invaded and destroyed Iraq. All the horrors of my early experienced with American empire manifested in the war in Vietnam bubbled to the surface and I realized that we had not put that monstrous part of ourselves to rest. As Americans and Muslims died in Iraq and Afghanistan in the thousands then tens of thousands then hundreds of thousands, we turned a blind eye from the carnage to the crap table of the American economy. When that exploded, we all hung on for dear life while the perpetrators were rewarded.
   That’s when I decided to research. That’s when I decided to write. As I struggled to pay the rent, I struggled to find out how we got to where we were or more precisely where we weren’t. We were no longer in control of our lives, our income, our country. Granted, none of us are ever in complete control of anything but now, all but a tiny fraction of us were not in control of anything at all.
   My research opened a sordid book of what the greatest country in the world has been up to this last century or so and the more pages of that book I turned, the more I began to realize that it was not what we as a country or we as Americans had done to the world, but those of us who controlled our country and used our country and us had done to the world in our name without our permission, oftimes without even our knowledge.
   Those of us who controlled our country and control it to this day are the men and women who control the corporations, the corporations who, with the vast treasure they have reaped by smothering the world in a monopolistic octopus that strangles every part of it control our government, our police, our military our media, our history, our thinking.
   Now when I realize I’m dreaming, it doesn’t even occur to me to fly. When I face danger, I cannot escape. Now none of us can even think of flying. None of us can even think of spreading our wings. None of us can even dream because that insidious octopus that has strangled the world in our names has come back to roost to strangle us.