Dreams

We sat under the great oak tree that warm summer evening, bare feet in the cool, scented grass, our backs against the firm, gnarly trunk of the oak tree. The crickets sang about us, a cat slunk by, and we could hear old Uncle Billy’s boisterous laughter from the back porch. It was summer, we were twelve years old, and we were happy.

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” Toby asked suddenly.

“Oh, lots of things,” I said.

“Like what?”

“Tell me what you want to be first,” I said. Toby was my very best friend, but my dreams were very private.

“Ladies first.” As if he always made a habit of letting the lady go first! Boys were so exasperating sometimes. They made you go first when you didn’t want to, and when you wanted to, they went first.

“No,” I said, “you’re the oldest, so you can go first.”

“All right. I want to be a doctor, and find a cure for something and become very famous. And I’ll build really good hospitals everywhere, and poor people won’t have to pay to come to them. That’s what I want to do. Your turn.”

I pulled a piece of grass and folded it into tiny lengths. “Well,” I began a little hesitantly, “well, I want to become a famous painter, and paint beautiful pictures that people will remember as long as they live, and that people will talk about after I am dead. And I want to travel all over the world and paint pictures of everything I see.”

We were silent, watching the fireflies come out. Around the block, mothers opened screen doors and began to call their children in. Toby’s mother called his name, and almost at the same time my mother called me. Slowly we stood up, reluctant to leave the magic of a summer night.

Toby crossed the street to his lawn, then he ran back. “I forgot one thing,” he said. “I want to marry you when I grow up.”

I didn’t say it out loud, but I had the same thought.

******

Twelve years later, I went back to visit my family. As the men smoked on the front porch, and my mother knitted, I went to the old oak tree. I leaned against the solid old trunk and thought about the summer evenings of my childhood.

I put my hand on my stomach and whispered to the baby that was growing in there, “Someday you will play under this tree. Someday you will tell your dreams to your best friend.”

I felt Toby’s arms around my waist. “Remember when we told each other our dreams that night when we were about twelve?” he asked. “It seems so long ago.”

I nodded. What big dreams we’d had then! Toby was a doctor now, but he worked at a big hospital with twenty other doctors, and he hadn’t found his cure, yet.

And me – I had a degree in literature, I had taught for several years while I waited for Toby to finish medical school, and now here I was, expecting our first child. The only things I painted where the walls in our new house.

Only one of our dreams had really come true, but that doesn’t matter to me.

No one ever said you couldn’t dream big.