Dream

You’re all invited over for some lemon blueberry cheesecake.  

In about five years.  

The lemon tree in our greenhouse has 36 blossoms this year.  

That’s 35 more than it had last year.  

Plus, all eleven of my blueberry plants are still alive, and one even had three little blossoms on it.  

Granted, the first lemon I got from my tree was about the size of a puny plum, and even if they make it to maturity, three blueberries aren’t going to go that far – they probably wouldn't even make it to the house. Nevertheless, a man’s gotta dream.  

I started writing this column on Sunday and after I got into it about 100 words, I lost the thread of what I was trying to say, so I watched three episodes of “Young Sheldon” with my wife and went to bed. At 3:37 a.m. my eyes popped open, because I remembered what I'd been planning to write. Our coffee cup collection includes one we bought at the Carl Sandburg house in North Carolina. I picked that particular cup because it had the quote, “Nothing happens unless first a dream.”  

I believe in dreams. Not the “giant chipmunk is teaching me geometry” sort of dreams. No, I mean the dreams where you look at a corner of the yard that needs a little something or you think of a place you'd like to end up and you sketch out a plan in your head to get there. 

I live in a world of dreams and, I confess, I always have. When I learned to weld at age 11 or 12, one of my very first projects was welding an abandoned gear on a chunk of shaft and then going on a rampage through our grove smashing trees, pretending I was Thor.  

That dream never really panned out, and that's probably just as well. 

It took me a little while to figure out that the dream is just the first step. Figuring out how to make your dreams come true is just as important, and most important of all is being willing to do the actual work. 

A memory that can make me blush is recalling a small school room in the hills above Jacmel, Haiti, where I gave a passionate speech on this topic to a group of adult learners who'd asked me to speak. I went on at some length, only to discover afterward that it was a beginning English class and no one in the room had understood a word I said. 

Now I give fewer speeches on that topic, except to myself.  

My wife and I have been inventing our life together for half a century. When our children were little, they had horses to ride and kittens to cuddle. They saw the Atlantic, the Pacific, the Caribbean and a lot in between, and none of those adventures were accidental. There may not have been much money, but there was enough, and I guess showing your children the concept of “enough” is part of the dream as well. They all turned out to be good human beings doing work that matters, so as far as our children, all our dreams came true. 

So many dreams over the years. Dreams for me, my family, my career, my church, my community. So many embarrassing failures. But there have been enough successes that I can look around and think things turned out pretty well. 

Whether the blueberries ever produce doesn't matter all that much. They're just a very small part of a much larger dream.  

The fact that there's still a dream...that matters a lot. 

Copyright 2024 Brent Olson