One of my favorite dreams was the one where my dad showed up.

Not as a bear this time, terrifying the family.  I’d try to get everyone inside the house, our house (mom’s house), but I was the youngest and my brothers and sisters wouldn’t listen to me.  They kept going outside and leaving the door open, or letting the dog out, and as soon as I’d get everyone back in one door, they’d go out the back door, not seeing the bear, not knowing it was there.  These dreams haunted me until I was in college and figured out who the bear was.

But one of my favorite dreams is the one where dad himself came to visit me.  He had his cane, his odd gait, and Marian, his old girlfriend, was with him.  He came to visit me in the apartment I used to live in in Olympia.  He walked up to me and gave me a hug.

And what’s so unusual about that, you might ask?

Well, the sense I had from him was that there was pure love flowing from him to me.  Pure fatherly love and pride.  No animosity, no testing, no teasing, no meanness, just pure love.  And it was unique to him, this love.  I mean, he still looked a bit like a bear, after all.  Maybe after all those years of working with bears at the Zoo he’d become one of them.  But that would imply that they changed him.  Instead, I think he’d been drawn to work there because bears were so much like him.

But in this dream, although there was a hint of bear, only the faint aroma, perhaps, (it’s not a smell you ever forget), but the point was that he loved me and showed it.

And that was absolutely remarkable.

I hold this image of him, or try to, as though it were an actual memory of him and not just a dream.  I hold it because it heals my heart toward him.  I hold it because it was the love he had for me that he could never express, not until the day he died, when he told me, on the phone, thank you for being who you are.