Hasta Luego...

A quick note before we dive in: I hope all of you currently affected by snow, ICE, power outages or other menacing phenomena are safe and well! Reading the news from afar it seems like quite a lot is going on at the moment. 

Anyway. So Hasta Luego is a phrase they use all the time in Spain to say goodbye. It means roughly "see you later." (Literally: "until then/later.") But the Spanish will use it for goodbyes even when it's unlikely you will ever see them again. It just sounds nicer: like they're already looking forward to the next time they'll get to share your delightful company, even if they are a taxi driver who just took you to the airport.

As it happens, my wife and I are on the cusp of needing to say a whole lot of "Hasta Luegos" to people we really care about. But we're not exactly sure when Luego will be. It could be a long time from now.

Facing hard goodbyes is wrenching, and we hate it. But we're mature adults, so we know exactly how to handle it:

We're just pretending it's not actually happening.

Anyone got any better ideas? How do you all cope when you become fond of people, and then end up living very very far away from them?  My wife and I have been doing various versions of this for our entire 35 years together, so you'd think we'd be better at it by now.

Dream On...

 

Lately I've been (sort of) keeping a dream journal. I wake up a few times a night anyway, so if I can remember anything, I'll scribble a few short sentences down, in the dark, in a small notebook. 

"Meatball earrings."

"Lunch with Fisk, so happy!"

"Feeding the vultures. Andrea..." (our vegan friend) "denied eating the hamburger, but she did."

"No Cokes allowed in workplace! Paintball war."

"Light blue cat. Didn't like me at first. Patience." 

In the morning, I may spend an extra five or ten minutes in bed, trying to decipher the cryptic wandering phrases, often written one right on top of the other. Some mornings it's amazing: I start writing what I remember, and more details start coming back, and other dreams make a shy appearance at first and then reveal themselves more fully as I scribble dream-nonsense for pages and pages. Other mornings: nothing.

If I go over my notebooks periodically, it's exciting to see how easily I can freshen those dream memories right up. Many of them remain fairly vivid even many months later. I can still picture those big meatball earrings I was wearing last summer! Even if I can't remember if I've brushed my teeth this morning without checking to see if the bristles of my toothbrush are wet.

But why take precious morning time to do such a silly thing, which honestly is sometimes just frustrating? The fragments are so damn elusive, and so often just when they start to feel graspable... they slip completely away. 

Are there some secret psychological benefits to be had from keeping a dream diary, and getting more acquainted with the insanity that takes place in your brain every night?