WATER

 

“Fear and anxiety seem to be the overall most common emotions reported in dreams.”

—Ernest Hartmann, M.D., Dreams and Nightmares.

 

DREAM: A Man Attacks Me at My Car. (April 5, 1994. Four years and seven months after my memory returned.)

My car is parked under a street lamp. I see a man coming at me. He looks like he is going to grab me. I try to get into my car, but it has a cover over it, and I can’t get the key in the lock fast enough. I wake up terrified.  

 

When I had this dream, I had no idea what it meant. But after I made the artwork, six days later, its meaning became clear. The car in my dreams is a metaphor for me as I travel through life. When I put the cover over the car, in the art work, it becomes a bed, and the dream scene a bedroom. The street lamp, a metaphor for my unconscious, brings to light a memory from long ago.

 

WATER

One of the techniques my kidnappers used to force me to comply, was to hold me under water. I write about this in my book. At that time, I did not know how to swim. 

 

 After my return home from my abduction, I learned to swim at the YMCA. In the 1950’s my father built a beautiful kidney shaped swimming pool, which I used every day to build my stamina.  I swam under water for several lengths with my eyes open, and different strokes were familiar to me. Thus, during college, I took a lifeguard class and obtained a license. 

  

Swimming pool my father designed and built

One of the things I learned was how to save an individual who was panicked and flailing around. As you approach the distressed swimmer you reached out with your right arm, grabbed their left arm, pulled them toward you and whipped them around backwards. You could then wrap your right arm around their neck, with their arms out of the way, and drag them back to shore.

My license enabled me to be hired during the summer at a local privately owned lake in Denver. I was one of two lifeguards. The other was a muscular young man who did all of the rescuing. Luckily, I never had to test my nascent skills. Sitting on the lifeguard stand with a whistle in hand, I watched children play and enjoyed getting a gorgeous tan, which led sixty-six years later to me getting squamous-cell skin cancer on my face.  

The owner of the lake was a tall, skinny, uptight white man in his seventies. He was angry all of the time. I was allowed to work at the entrance toll booth once he trusted me with money. One of his early instructions was for me to ask telephone callers where they lived before giving out any information about cost and directions. If they lived in a certain area, I was to tell them not to come. 

One day a car-load of happy and excited teenage Negros (as black people were called in those days) arrived at the toll booth. Not wanting to turn them away, but not knowing what to say, I hesitated. The owner saw the arrivals and quickly ran over and gruffly informed them they were not welcome.

“Why are they not allowed to enter?” I asked.

“Patrons won’t come if we allow Negros,” he said.

“I would.”

He shrugged.

This is one of the most painful memories of my life. I stood in the middle of the road and watched those young people, out for a nice day, drive away. I can still see their stunned faces looking at me out of the back window of their car. Tears still well up in my eyes when I think of them.

At this time I knew nothing about segregation. How could Christians, who said they believed in the teachings of Jesus, act this way? I complained to my father and said I wanted to quit.

“You need the job,” he said. Luckily, a family vacation allowed me to resign a couple of weeks later.

The Ku Klux Klan had a huge presence in Colorado at that time. The Spike Lee 2018 movie “BlacKkKlansman,” (SIC), starring John David Washington (Denzel's son), makes this point clear. Based on Ron Stallworth’s book,the movie tells what happened when he was hired in 1978 as the first Black police officer in Colorado Springs.

John David, as Ron, tricks the Klan into sending him propaganda material, and then talks a fellow white agent into impersonating him at meetings. The police were eventually able to bring down this Klan in an exciting ending to the movie.

 

California poppies cover the hillsides in spring – my favorite time of the year.  

Onward and upward.