Fever Dreams and Redemption

Seven hundred and twenty three.  That's how many pages I've had to read to finally--finally!--start enjoying The Goldfinch.  Until early this morning, the sun still tucked into bed, I had few kind words for its main character, Theo.  This self-absorbed, drug-addled, life-happening-to-me character had been trying my patience these past few weeks, despite my pity for his earlier circumstances.

But there, on page 723, was redemption, framed in the bioluminescent vision of his mother, who met him in a dream.

And, just as suddenly, I was taken aback by the parallels between this newly-respectable Theo and my own mother, who, herself, woke yesterday with the sticky residue of a dream that did not leave her.  Energized by dream-become-vision-quest, both Theo and my mother were propelled into these new days by something that the rest of us could not name.

I wonder sometimes, as my mom writes this last chapter of hers, if I am reading too much into it, looking for symbols and meaning where there is, in fact, only circumstance.  Like the clunkiness of a poorly written plot, I force and retrofit significance instead of letting it unfold like the first buds of spring.  It is understandable, of course, that I do this, that I try to add heft and depth to each of our meetings.  But that doesn't make the compulsion natural.

Better, I suspect, for me to let my mom set the pace.  To take my cues from her, as she pulls me in, rubbing my back like she did when I was a child.  Better to let her speak enthusiastically about the important work that kept her up all night, work that I cannot possibly understand or even find traces of, instead of me trying to explain it away.

While I may hold a pen to a piece of paper, it is my mom who holds her own pen, is her own author, steadily writing late into each night, more certain of the plot line than I will ever know.