Three Pages and Namesake Babies

Amazon sent me an email that I was about to lose a $5.00 credit toward buying a book if I didn’t use it soon. I wouldn’t throw a five dollar bill away and I buy a lot of books, so I went to their listings and bought The Artist's Way. It’s a book that’s been around for twenty-five years and I’ve been meaning to read it for the past ten. Its synopsis says author “Julia Cameron takes readers on an amazing twelve-week journey to discover the inextricable link between their spiritual and creative selves.” Below is my first attempt at following her ‘three pages’ rule. It involves getting up every morning and writing three pages off the top of your head. No excuses, nothing is off limits. Just write with no forethought.

Already I’m breaking the rules of writing the three pages because they're supposed to be written in longhand. But writing in longhand doesn’t work well with my dyslexia because I know I’d get caught up in stumbling over spelling and transposed syllables and that would break the stream of consciousness the exercise is supposed to free up. There’s no one here to tattle on me---so my house, my rules.

I woke up with a weird but pleasant dream still hanging around inside my head. I dreamed I put a squash in a baby bed and was petting as it ‘slept’ peacefully and the baby bed was in the middle of a bunch of women doing yoga in a sunny meadow. Then the dream had me in a pickup truck with my husband and a stranger and we were running the country roads looking for roadside grave markers near the lake where my family’s cottage is located. I woke up wondering why on earth I’d be treating a squash like it was a live baby and if this were a blog post I’m writing I’d google ‘squash’ in the dream dictionary to find out what it signifies. Oh, what the heck, my house my rules and I’m looking anyway.

Just as I suspected there was no listing for ‘squash’ but the dream dictionary did have a listing for seeing vegetables in our dreams. It supposedly can signify “a need for spiritual nourishment…” Is it creepy or serendipitous that I just bought The Artist’s Way and the book claims to nourish spiritual growth? While I was looking in the dream dictionary I wondered if the squash had something to do with the diet I always start with a new year. I know I need to eat more vegetables and the yoga class is easy to figure out how that fit in the dream since I recently wrote a blog about a woman in tight yoga pants. It also just occurred to me that the last thing I read on Facebook before going to bed was an announcement that the newest member of our family was just born and named after my father.  

I have mixed feelings about naming children after others in the family. It’s an honor to be sure. One of my nephew’s granddaughters is named after her great-grandmother. A pretty name but won’t people who knew my brother’s first wife tend to look for character traits in the baby that belonged to her grandmother as she grows up or look for similarities in the newest baby to his namesake? What if these two babies grow up to be awful human beings, disgracing their namesakes? I doubt that will happen...but still with so many outside influences parents have to deal with in this day and age you never know. They say kids grow into their names and I suppose that’s true. Well, except for ‘Mabel’. My neighbor’s ten year old girl is a Mabel and I still can’t get used to addressing a child with a frumpy old lady’s name. My dad was nearly a saint in my eyes and in the eyes of the new baby’s grandmother’s, so will he get special attention? A special kind of love? The brand new baby in the family is obviously the squash in my dream but am I sad because I probably won’t be around to see him grow up? Is the stranger in the truck this baby all grown up and I'm introducing him to his namesake and other ancestors? Is this why I dreamed of roadside grave markers?

Well, don’t I know how to bring myself down. On a brighter note, I got a long, hand-written letter in the mail from a person on my Christmas card list. He and his sister and my brother and I spent a lot of time together growing up because our parents were good friends. We even had summer cottages on the same lake. He wrote about seeing Black Board Jungle, the movie, together in 1955 and how he knew the song, Rock Around the Clock was going to be the start of something big. He wrote the letter  before Christmas and said he wasn’t looking forward to the holiday “because of all the people who are now in heaven.” I wrote him a letter back saying that I’m a firm believer in the notion that as long as we remember and still talk about the people we’ve help bury, then they are still with us. I got that from my dad who defined heaven and hell this way: if after we die we are remembered with love then we’re in heaven but if we’re quickly forgotten or scorned then we’re in hell. “It’s the living,” he said, “who are the final judges on where we reside.” Wow, I think I just figured out why people name babies after relatives who’ve passed on. The little Melanie’s and Pete’s of the world are helping to keep their great-grandparents in heaven. ©