I had a dream

I HAD A DREAM

Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, skype name halpep, “peacemaking” at pepinsky.blogspot.com

April 2, 2013

                I’m thinking the dream might have been around the time my wife Jill and I started commuting, maybe 15 years ago.  I was showing my parents the original law school building where I had taken all my required classes.  I was surprised to find that the building was gutted.  We entered through a door at the north end of the building.  To my surprise, the building had been gutted, presumably for restoration.  I looked to my left, which led off to some unfamiliar place (though afterwards I recalled that my classes had been in a classroom at the south end).  To my right was what remained of my first-year classroom, which was vaulted and looked like a church sanctuary nearing completion.  It felt so familiar, there with my parents, and yet so different from my waking memory of the building.

                Late afternoon last Friday was calm and sunny.  I took my normal walk to meet friends for happy hour 3 blocks up the hill in the old downtown.  I normally walk there along the streets, but this time, feeling jaunty and relaxed, I veered off the streets through a public parking lot straight to the church my parents had sent me to in 1951, walking up the hill from our apartment on Selby Blvd. in my clip-on bow tie and suspenders over shorts beginning in late summer, to learn about the Bible in Sunday school.  My parents, a Yankee Russian Jew and a Southern WASP, never joined any congregation, and slept in Sunday mornings.

                For the very first time in the 1-1/2 yrs. Jill and I have lived in my childhood home, I decided to walk through the double doors that provided me direct passage through the building to the restaurant.  I walked in, and there on my left (I walked in from the back of the church) was the sanctuary I had dreamed of.  I went up and down the aisles.  I introduced myself to the young janitor, Edward, from Ghana.  I walked out, across High St. on the crosswalk to the post office, and turned the half block up to meet Jill and our newfound Ohio friends.  Love and peace, hal