Never Married, Without Children, And Alone

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I'm not really sure why I was driving in the area of Van Horne, Texas. The dream I was having had me there. I was driving what seemed to be a large car like a Lincoln or a Cadillac with an old man as passenger. Suddenly the highway I was traveling upon became a one-lane road, and then it was like a driveway that had concrete on the two ruts, and then weeds were growing in the path when we came to a house that didn't have any windows, and the old man turned into a black dog when we got out of the car to try and figure out where we were.

Over in the tumbleweed-like Texas underbrush next to the road to nowhere, an old black man stood up from behind this creosote bush. Nothing happened. He just stood there for a moment, and then disappeared as if he had sat back down. He seemed as startled to see me there as I was to see him.

Suddenly, I had a two-liter plastic bottle of some orange drink, and I didn't know where it came from. The black dog was jumping up on my back and pushing at my arms with it's paws. I somehow understood from that he wanted me to pour some of the orange drink on the ground so he could lap it up. He was thirsty. That's when I woke up and realized it was me who thirsty in real time. I was in my own bed in my own house, and I was ever so happy to be there. I went to the bathroom and got some water to drink.

After I drank a glass of water, and checked the time on my computer, I realized that it was only about two-thirty in the morning. I'd had about four hours of sleep before I woke up thirsty. I lay on my bed awake for a while. One of the reasons I probably thought I was in Van Horne, Texas is that I had too many covers over me. It was cool when I went to bed and the covers felt comfortable at the time. The weather seems to have gotten warmer since I went to bed, and I had gotten hot like I was in Texas in my youth.

As I lay there, I started thinking about an old friend I'll call Joe. He's been more of an acquaintance than a close friend. We have known each other since childhood, but never socialized together. He is a teetotaler and a church-goer. I'm a psychonaut and a loner from his perspective. He seems embarrassed to sit and have breakfast at the same booth as me. He's a joiner and belongs to several men's clubs. Not me. My siblings do.

He and his sister and mother and father lived a couple of doors down the street from our family. His mother and my mother were both school teachers and friends. They visited continuously from the time my family moved to this small town. I took my mother to her funeral when she died. They both died in their early nineties.

Joe was always strange to me. He was snooty and dismissive for reasons I didn't understand. He had a bad temper and got mad at the damnedest things. It was difficult to be friends with him as kids. Not just with me. He took after his mother, and when his father died of old age, Joe took his name (which was his actual first name) and moved from a garage apartment out back into the big house to care for his mother.

Joe was pretty much of a nerd and science club guy in high school who was into math and photography. We both played in the band. He read sheet music. I didn't. He's never been married. Probably because of his homely looks and his snappish personality. He wasn't easy to be around because he judged people. That's not to say that I was either, it's just that I seemed to like people in general better than he did, and I was willing to make concessions to get along.

Joe went to N.C. State college and got a degree in mechanical engineering. He intended to be a career man in the Air Force, His eyesight kept him from being a pilot, and when they passed him over for promotion he had to resign. That was a terrible event for him. It was when he had to leave the Air Force, that he came under the influence of a woman spiritualist who talked him into returning to college to get his MBA.

Becoming a businessman appeared to be about as far away from everything he had ever believed in about himself. It might have been why he fell in with this older seance-type woman whose philosophy he adopted heart and soul.

I have myself been influenced by the occult world, particularly after my divorce from my first wife, but I never cared much for the spiritualist angle. It was more of the New Age attitude I sought to employ. After we both ended up back here where we were kids together, we tried to be friends. We had similar interests in the occult, but our outlook on life was very different from each other's.

He told me about some of his efforts to get up with a woman to marry late like his father and mother had. He met one woman from New Jersey who lived near the ocean. I think she was a nurse. From what he told me the interest was one-sided, but he became obsessed with her, and probably took her friendliness to mean more to him than what was actually so.

He must have went too far with her at some point in his efforts to woo her, and she called the cops on him. Joe is a fairly determined person when he sets his mind to a goal. When he finally came to his senses and realized she felt like she needed the cops to protect her from him, he was so ashamed that nobody could talk to him for a while. I sort of doubt that he ever even kissed the woman.

His mother's death was another big blow to him. She was a lot younger than his father when they married. He was a mailman and she was an old maid school teacher. From my few encounters with Joe's father, he was probably lucky to get a wife at all. He never talked much, and while he wasn't unfriendly to us kids he stayed by himself in his hobby shop a lot.

Joe got his homely look from both of them. His father was a skinny little man that his mother seemed to dominate. Joe's sister was not all that attractive either, but she was a lot friendlier and ended up marrying a career Air Force guy Joe introduced her to. They had three male children. Surprisingly, from the few times I met them, they were some fairly normal looking children, and friendly like their mother.

Joe told me the other day that his sister's husband had gotten real sick over the last few years. He went to the VA Hospital for help, and when his doctor transferred to the VA in South Carolina which is where the husband came from, they moved down there to continue his treatment.

His sister and her family moving to South Carolina left Joe to live alone in his parent's house. Joe is a couple of years older than me, and has no immediate family left here to take care of him as he gets older. That's kind of worrisome, but I'm no better off than he is in that regard. Well, at least I have siblings who live nearby. He's got nobody but some distant relatives that he never got along with too well because he is picky and has a quick temper.

I think I'm writing and thinking about Joe because of the dreams I've been having lately about the possibility of me dying alone as well. Since I've been meditating again the dreamtime is not that scary, as it has been in the past, but I do dream of being lost frequently. My thought world is decomposing back into the random elements I initially composed them of. I don't think that's unusual for a person of my age. I personally figure I'll drive off to the VA Hospital to keep an appointment one day, and forget how to get back, get lost, and eventually die of exhaustion.

Presently, I don't think my personality will survive my dotage in order to experience death. It's not much of a personality anyway. I'm watching it die each night in my dream world. When I do pass away there won't be much left of what some people might have thought that I am is. Why would it not end this way. I've been a trickster all my life. '-)

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