The Pecan Park Eagle

Dreams are funny creatures. Like plays about the emotions and spiritual forces of our inner lives, characters and themes and plots appear as symbols of our greatest hopes and worst fears, sometimes cascading from positive to negative and back again before we even know it. – And then we suddenly wake up – and it all begins to fade away from consciousness like the images on old camera film that have suddenly been removed improperly from the Kodak of our brain. When that occurs, and for some people, it occurs every time, we still know that something happened. We jut can’t remember what it is.

The difference between exposed film and forgotten dreams is great. The images on exposed film are truly lost forever. The images of a forgotten dream are just complexly buried in our unconscious minds and, if they are strong enough in theme, they will return in some form as recurring dreams.

I have a recurring dream that is an excellent example. Those of you who know about my passion for baseball history and my undying hero-worship of Babe Ruth from early childhood will not be surprised. This dream embraces both my greatest hope and worst fear – and it never really gets resolved. Now I fear that, unless I can somehow, someday find that elusive time machine that I keep looking for, that it never will resolve its cycle of recurrence.

Here’s that hope-to-fear dream – and this one is always pretty much the same: In my dream, I’ve managed to go back in time to the Bronx, New York on September 30, 1927. It is late afternoon and the Yankees are entertaining the Washington Senators in the next-to-last game of the season at Yankee Stadium. The pennant has been clinched for quite a while and only a small crowd of 8.000 fans has shown up to lose themselves among the 67,000 seats of the game’s great cathedral. I always wonder why there was no more interest in the possibility of Ruth’s 60th homer on that day, but there wasn’t, at least, not the kind of interest that translates into ticket sales. In the dream, all I care about is getting there as I race down the street that parallels the right field line from two blocks away, just trying to get inside the ballpark in time.

In time for what?

In time to see Babe Ruth break a 2-2 tie in the bottom of the 8th with a record-setting 60th home run to right field off lefty Tom Zachary of the Senators. The two-run shot gives the Yankees a 4-2 victory, their 109th win of the season, but even more importantly to history, it allows Babe Ruth to break the tie with himself for the most home runs in a single baseball season. And, as you probably know, the number “60” will remain the gold standard for home runs in a single year until 1961, when Yankee Roger Maris hits 61* with the help of a season that is now eight games longer than the one they played in 1927.

In my dream, I am running to reach the ballpark in time to buy a ticket for the right field stands so that I can compete for the home run that I know is coming that way. The ball will be caught and kept by 14-year old Herb Siegel – unless I am able to reach the same area in time to beat him to it.

In the excitement of the moment, I seem to have lost track of the unwritten rule about time travel, even in a dream: You don’t go back to alter a single thing. My problem with that rule has always been that our ability to time travel is in itself already a significant alteration of time and space reality. Maybe that explains why it either never happens, or else, never gets reported.

And maybe it’s simply my abjectly obsessive greed that does me in on this dream. In the dream, for example, I suddenly cannot run.

As I try to run, the sidewalk starts to feel like a rubberized trampoline and my legs feel as heavy as lead. Each step I take is slowed by the heavy falling of  shaky shoes coming slowly down upon a jello-like surface and, as I fight on, suddenly I hear the loud unmistakably Ruthian crack of the bat. My head swivels to the right from my trudgery in time to see a mighty blast by Ruth clearing the stadium confines in right field. That’s not the way it happened in reality, but it’s the way it always ends in my recurring dream. Siegel doesn’t get the ball, but neither do I. It’s fade to black time for the dream, from there until the next sleeping moment I make this trip from greatest hope to biggest fear in one fell and fatally disappointing swoop.

Now, what brought all of this dream-stuff to mind this morning was the new dream I had last night. This one’s not about baseball, except by proximity location near old Ebbets Field, and it’s not even about my real home town of Houston. It’s again set forth in New York, in a very special place known as Brooklyn, New York, but, even though I know that dreams are mostly symbolic of matters that are going on in our real lives,  I cannot for the life of me figure out what this dream has to do with me or the City of Houston.

Perhaps, you can help.

Here’s the dream. Please post your comments below on what you think it may mean: