Dreams as Ideas

There are dreams and there are dreams. I’m not talking about the moving pictures in your sleep, here. I’m talking about flights of fancy while sitting alone drinking coffee or other moments of contemplative quiet.

I think one of the big drawbacks of realizing one is no longer a young buck or a spring chick comes from the dear friends surrounding us. They don’t mean to do this, but when you find every gathering devolves into a discussion of doctor visits, odd symptoms, diagnoses, how many and what medications you have allowed doctors to put you on, it drains the youthful spirit right out of you.

I don’t add to those conversations because I avoid doctors and as a result am not on any prescribed medications. I haven’t had a Flu shot since 1977 (of any kind) and I haven’t had the Flu since 1958, when I was a little girl. While I’ve never been able to ignore the ravages of poison ivy, I never wasted time complaining about cramps or bemoaning menopause. I was just too busy to give them focus.

Yes, my friends all believe me to be extremely foolish, and they are allowed to do so. I tell them my ambition is to be perfectly healthy until I suddenly drop dead from some accident or something I didn’t know I had. At least in my mind, I will have lived a healthy life, not spending it fearing illness or death. I remind them that the death rate in the United States is still 100% no matter how much you worry or what you do. Then I silently watch how often each of them gets sick and I see that I do not. That’s why I don’t care if they find me foolish. I’m not the one battling any prescription side effects, am I?

I wasted all those words to get to this point. That is exactly the kind of environment that sucks the dreams right out of us, and having no dreams is what ages and kills us, in my opinion.

So, this morning I took a Google Trip. I do these things. I think of an old, old friend, a place, a performer and I wonder “Whatever ever happened to him/her? or “Why don’t I know more about that geography or history?”

Today, I googled the Sakonnet River in Rhode Island. I wondered why Narragansett Bay is called a bay and the water on the other side of Aquidneck Island is called a river. I learned that no explanation was given other than “It isn’t a river; it is a saltwater straight.”

Well, I thought, that is not unlike the lower portion of the Rappahannock River, where I now live. It is also salty, tidal, and two to three and a half miles wide at this point.

Then, I wondered if Sakonnet River was navigable. You see, I lived directly on the Bay side of the island and watched Naval ships and tankers coming and going in the shipping lanes between Newport and Jamestown every day. But I wasn’t given that kind of access to the Sakonnet, and I was curious. So, I checked out the NOAA charts for the depths, inlets, etcetera of the Sakonnet – and I got an idea.

Wouldn’t it be great to spend a summer sailing or canoeing up, down, and all around the Sakonnet and learning its shores and put-ins from Sachuest Point up to the headwaters!? Could I even do that at 71? I’d need to work on my musculature and endurance, to be sure. Oh yeah, and shouldn’t I take someone with me? But who? I can’t answer that right now.

Then, I remembered another dream I’d had to paddle down the Rappahannock from the fall line at Fredericksburg to Urbanna! I wouldn’t want to paddle UP river, because even though you barely notice the river’s current versus the tidal push near the mouth, the further upriver you go, the more you realize it’s an actual river, flowing down to the Chesapeake Bay.

How long would that take me? I think it’s about a 50-mile ride. How many miles could I travel in a day? How about if I do the Rappahannock one summer and the Sakonnet the next?

Oh, wait…. I live on Perkins Creek and canoe around it only about 3 times during the year. It’s been a few years since I paddled out of it to the Rappahannock and made the short trip into Urbanna Creek and back. That little trip takes a couple of hours, depending on how far into Urbanna Creek you go, how choppy the water is, how hard, and in what direction the wind is blowing. Maybe I should start there to build endurance and establish better habits toward such a goal.

At this age, how much of this is doable? Well, if my goal is to have a vital life beyond age 120, it is absolutely doable, but not without serious life changes. And if I never achieve these goals? So what? I will have been working toward SOMETHING and gaining unexpected knowledge and benefits along the way.

I said this was a DREAM, and I’m likely to come up with others that might supersede this one. So don’t hold me to it. It is MY dream, after all. And it’s good to remember that I can HAVE dreams, that I can still set goals, and that I don’t have to accept all the barriers of advancing years that most people do.

I’m not dead yet, and I can still make choices.

So can you!