You can sort of go home again

My older brother, John Peckham, called last night to say Sunday he will be moving from a rehab facility where’s he’s been doing PT back to his ranch outside Tolar. He will need the big, clumsy electric wheelchair that is taking up way too much space in my closet, and I am delighted to give it to him. Christian determined make and model last night, and I called Colin who is smart about these things so he could look online about new battery, etc. As a bonus, Christian found all the original paperwork in a pocket on the back of the chair, but he reported when not turned on, the chair is dead weight. Moving it will be a problem, and we are still working on that.

But it was much on my mind when I went to bed last night, and so, of course, I dreamed about it. We (not sure who we was) were at John’s, waiting for word to come get the chair in a truck, but John said first he wanted to go to the Dunes. A word of explanation: when we were growing up our family had a time-share on a rustic (operative word) cottage in the Indiana Dunes State Park. Dad and a colleague had owned it years before in their bachelor days. At some point, the State of Indiana exercised eminent domain and took over the cottage, but every year Dad got a rental contract for the season. He said each year he held his breath until that contract came.

The cottage really was rustic. On a high dune, three flights of stairs above the beach, it had a commanding view of the length of Lake Michigan to the front (I loved to watch storms roll down that lake and to this day I trace my love of a good storm, sans tornadoes, to the Dunes) and a dense forest to the back. It also had no running water (a cistern pump) and no electricity. There was an outhouse down the hill in the woods, and at night you went to bed early because Dad was paranoid about burning the mantle in the Aladdin lamps. It was too dark to read. And you didn’t just drive up to the cottage—you had to pack in your clothes and groceries, either a mile down the beach (too hot) or through the woods (our preferred route).

So in my dream we were talking about going back to the Dunes. John and I and my ex-husband went in the late sixties and had not been back since. When I went to Chicago with my children six years ago or so, they scheduled a morning trip to the Dunes followed by lunch at a North Side restaurant. I had to explain that the time schedule did not work, but their intentions were the best: they knew how big a place the Dunes hold in my heart.

But suddenly, in my dream, it dawned on me that I couldn’t go back to the Dunes. There is no way to maneuver a walker either through the woods or down the beach and up all those stairs. That made such a huge impression on me that I sat bolt upright in bed.

My rational mind has known for a long time that neither John nor I are very mobile. We haven’t had a contest, but in a walker race, I think I would win. Besides there is no there at the Dunes for us anymore. Sometime around 1969, the state stopped renting cottages to long-term leaseholders, rented them to weekenders for a while, and then tore them all down. So I guess in some deep way that aha! moment I had was sort of a Thomas Wolfe You Can’t Go Home Again bit of reality, a recognition that John and I are older and different, and we can’t ever recapture the past. We can remember, but we can’t relive.

Over the years John and I have sometimes been close, sometimes almost estranged in recent years. There’s an elephant in the room with us—politics. But we have much more that binds us together—our Chicago background, our families past and present, osteopathic medicine, Texas (we both like dogs—he can have the cattle). We had grand, huge family celebrations, until both our families grew too large to do that. Since his health has taken a turn, I think, without ever talking about it, we are closer. We talk on the phone often, and I have taken all four grown children to see him. From his hospital bed, a wink or a look with a smile tells me he’s glad I am there, and we are still brother and sister. He is, after all, the one who used to protect me from all kinds of evil, like bad boys who teased me when I was little and very shy. And he is the one who said, “You need to get away from home” and took me to Missouri to graduate school. He had a hand in shaping my life, and I have always known he was there for me.

I think he will like this story. But now about that blasted wheelchair ….