Laura Ingalls Daydream

"We bought the house," she said, "in 1948. Before the children were born." I was listening to her precisely because she was the type of person who would say "before the children were born." Her children were "the children". She was born in Manhattan in 1922. This Manhattan life she spoke of was something I would never know being from the Midwest. Certainly I had visited Manhattan, certainly I had friends living in Brooklyn, working fancy jobs in the city.  But all I could guess about her life in the city, and the time in which it was lived, was based on Jack Kerouac books I'd read: shiny lunch counters with heavy bottomed mugs of black coffee; bowls of split pea soup eaten on rainy days; men's raincoats hung on coat racks by a steamy window. Times Square in black and white; bohemians in loft apartments with mattresses on the floor. I can insert myself in there but I will never really know.

 

This is something I dreamed of as a youth. Going to New York. A thing you say to your friends when you're 15 and you're so sure that's what you will do. You will go to New York to become a writer, playwright, actor, painter, sculptor, a filmmaker like John Cassavetes.

 

I didn't go, though. That thing I held on to, that thing I daydreamed about, sitting in Midwestern coffee houses on rainy April days, or algebra class while I looked out the window at a dandelion filled courtyard and the sun fell on my school desk. This thing was my little jewel, a treasure because I was so sure that even though there was no money to send me to a school out East and I had no trust fund or inheritance or pile of money to go and live in the reality of New York, I was so sure that somehow it would work out. That I'd just pack a suitcase one day and go. Preferably on a train or at least a bus.

 

Years later, I am a little sad at the realization that I let that dream go. In that time, I've come to realize that I am not a fast-paced go getter, not a Business & Marketing major. Now I look out the sliver of window in my dry office at my dry office job and daydream about moving to the country and living on a small amount of land and growing my own wheat and grinding my own flour. Selling eggs in town laid by my own chickens like my grandmother did, having a few goats and making my own cheese. I pine for this now like I pined for it's inverse, New York, before.

 

Is it any different, being dreamy and being stuck in high school than being dreamy and being stuck at work? I'm still at a desk. I still find moments when no one is looking for me or talking to me or emailing me with something they need right now. This is just a daydream I'm writing down while at work. A calico dress and sunbonnet daydream. A Laura Ingalls Wilder daydream. Except now I also think about how exactly do I get there.