Last night my wife and I were in Japan, sitting on a tatami-mat floor, singing “Folsom Prison Blues” with Johnny Cash, who also played an acoustic guitar he kept in a cardboard box.
I didn’t know the lyrics so I tried to fake it.
Someone asked why Johnny Cash was in Japan, someone else said it had to do with his wife.
This was better than the dream I had a couple nights earlier, a long dream in which nothing happened, I was just dead.
I think that dream was inspired by spending an evening in our cellar looking through a pile of paper trash I had dumped out of a full garbage can.
Everything was in there, from Christmas wrapping paper to letters from long-dead relatives and printouts of emails from the 1990s.
I was looking for money someone had received for Christmas and then couldn’t find after we’d cleaned up.
I never found the money, so we’ll find it somewhere else, or not, but at least we know we didn’t throw it away in our housecleaning frenzy.
I found other stuff, though.
I found a eulogy my then-eight-year-old daughter had written for the funeral of a family friend – we looked everywhere for that eulogy and gave up years ago on ever finding it. And there it was – together with a picture of our friend.
Our friend was beautiful and brilliant and loved her children fiercely.
I found love notes and cards I had written my daughters when they were little and I was still doing calligraphy.
It was a little overwhelming, sorting through all this stuff I had forgotten (I did calligraphy?). Most of it went back into the garbage can.
I saved only a few things, like an ancient note from my wife warning me that our cat (now long-dead, although he lived to be 20) was pissing on everything so that’s why the St. Nicholas shoes were by everyone’s beds instead of at the front door. (Cats have always been pissing in our house! I thought it was just a brand-new crisis! That took the edge off it somehow.)
So much happened. So much forgotten.
So I dreamed I was dead.
It was a similar feeling, sorting through a binload of lost memories.
That ghostly feeling.