Last Night I Dreamed of a Dead Woman from Long Ago

Six nights ago I dreamed about a long-dead friend and have felt obsessed about it ever since. Just finished looking at old pictures of her I found in dusty high school yearbooks. She graduated in June of 1976 a year ahead of me. Her name was Jo Anne.

We didn’t hang out much at all in high school. We became friends years later after she tracked me down to Richmond, Virginia, where I lived and attended grad school. She wasn’t my girlfriend. We were never lovers. More like I was her confidante – we were buddies and pen pals there for a while. Before she died.

We were both rural kids bussed from the far corners of Prince Edward County into the town of Farmville, Virginia, where we attended high school. She was a wild beauty who once shouted out in the one class we ever shared “If it feels good, do it!” Followed by a big, goofy laugh. The rest of us giggled and either nodded our heads in agreement or shook it like "She's crazy." I did all three. Jo Anne was tall and slender with long, black hair. She carried herself with an air of crazy confidence, reminding me sometimes of that character Pippy Longstocking. Art was among her favorite subjects, and she was known to be quite imaginative with both pen and brush. Back then I was way too shy to do anything but laugh with her and admire her daredevilry.

Ten or twelve years later, after I had already graduated from high school then college, been married and divorced, moved to the city, and was buried into my first intense year of graduate school, Jo Anne looked me up and found me. She got my contact info from my parents back on the farm in Prince Edward. She knocked on my apartment door where I lived down in The Fan, I opened it, and she came on in and sat down.

I had to hold my breath and pretend nothing was the matter. She had warned me, but it was still a shock. She was all broken up from a terrible automobile accident. Or maybe it was a motorcycle wreck? I just don’t remember now. But she had a severe limp, was kind of hunched over, and had lost an eye and part of her face. Her voice was husky and whispery as the accident had damaged her neck and throat. She was still beautiful in a ghostly way, and it was clear she was struggling with it all even as she tried to dismiss it all as “just what happened, life goes on” kind of thing.

It was tough being with her at first. I felt uncomfortable, not as mature as I am now. Hell, I’d still feel uncomfortable. Jo Anne had a great sense of humor, though, and a certain deep wisdom. We became pen pals. I believe I still have some of her letters buried down in basement boxes. I remember her big, loopy scrawl mixed precise lettering. She wrote with a sort of restrained chaos, as if ever moment counted and I wasn’t present enough to feel it. Our conversations touched upon many topics, from spirituality to healing to growing up in the country to just plain having fun to the shared pain of broken hearts and love lost.

One day the letters stopped. Was it 1985? Or 86? I began to miss her and wondered why. Then the pressures of grad school focused my attention elsewhere. One day I read in the paper she’d died suddenly. Still don’t know why. She was gone. Just. Like. That.

Jo Anne must’ve been in her late-20’s as I was in my mid-20s. She had a huge spirit, and some of it had been crushed. I suspected she had the hots for me. She clearly was attracted to me and sought me out. I unable to go there with her. Not only was I was still recovering from the pain of a divorce, but I couldn’t handle the desecration of her outer beauty back then. We did share some intimate letters, as her inner beauty captivated my spirit.

Jo Anne was a dynamic young woman, bursting with energy, and I could already see her batteries emptying out. I just didn’t expect her to die.

Many years later, in the early morning darkness of Thursday, September 10, 2009, I dreamed of my long-dead friend. In my dream Jo Anne Ferguson was alive and radiant in a new, fully healed body. She just danced and spun with delight – spinning through the air, her feet never really touching the ground – and the air was smoky and smoky in a good, homey kinda way – a clean, white dress with shoulder straps, v-necked, and waistband with a skirt that hung loose above the knees – her white dress whipped around her body as she spun in gray smoke. We never spoke, I never heard her voice, but she knew I was there watching her. She was too full of joy and unexpected life. And every moment counted.

In real life and in this dream she had a mane of tangled black curls. As she spun suspended in smoky air her wild mane of hair whipped in slow motion behind her head. In real life she wore big glasses. In this dream her eyes sparkled free of such things. Her eyes lit up with deep, black sparkles. In the dream she wore that plain, white dress, something she didn’t wear in real life as she was a blue jeans hippy kinda gal.

My dreamed morphed into two other events that seemed significant at the time, but this first piece compelled me the most. The urge to write of it was overwhelming. So I emailed about it to my friend Scott, who had recently started a new men’s group course I've unofficially nicknamed the "Bone Soup Men's Group." In the ending ritual the Wednesday night before the dream Scott lit a fire with sparks struck from a flint and cremated a bird that had died earlier that day. The little bird had flown into a window of his home and broke his neck. Just like human beings barrel up the highway and crash into other cars and maim and kill each other. Just a bird flying into windows. Or a reminder to be more aware and appreciative of the present moment – our lives and those of others may hinge upon it – who knows when the next massive asteroid or comet will smash into our planet?

Still got those letters somewhere in a box with other old stuff, archaic remnants from the Age of Paper. I have not thought about her in many years. She’s been dead a couple of decades. And here Jo Anne is again, spinning in my dream. What is that all about? Why these images? What does it mean? From the standpoint of conventional dream interpretation, what aspect of me does she represent? From an alternative standpoint, why is she reaching out to me from the Afterlife after so many years and what is she trying to tell me as she shared her joy of discovering herself as a free spirit in a perfect body? If the Afterlife is indeed free of temporal limitations, perhaps as a beam of light traveling across the galaxy a beam of her soul experience upon her death finally reached me in some moment of spontaneous resurrection. And, of course, the influence cremating the bird must've had upon my dream.

Shit, I am crying. It is hard for me to cry. Especially for myself. Tears run down my face and my voice breaks. I fold my arms against my chest to stop the crying. I open back up. But I’ve already moved on. So perhaps this is the gift. The freedom to cry.

Remember where ya been. Watch where ya going. In between be here now.

And Jo Anne, thank you for the gifts: the dream, the tears, the lessons. I have a hunch resting in peace forever is not your thing. I have a feeling you're partying it up in the Afterlife, celebrating the pure joys of the soul.

Still, for the rest of us back in the mundane here-now: remember where you've been, watch where you go, and be here now.


William Dudley Bass
Seattle, WA
September 16, 2009

© by William Dudley Bass

My Wife Changes Her Name

I married Kristina this past July 11, 2009. She is the great love of my life, and we have been together over 7 years. Kristina is a vibrant and dynamic woman, bold, sexy, intelligent, professional, passionate. She lives full-out as a Post-Modern Age human being. She used her father’s family name, “Katayama,” as her own. And after our wedding she insisted on changing her name. Or, more accurately, adding my surname to hers.

“What?” I asked incredulously. “That’s old-fashioned culturally-ingrained male domination of females. I don’t own you. I’ve fought against this kind of bigotry my whole life.”

I had more to say, too. “I LIKE the Japanese sound of ‘Katayama.’ Mine is an “Olde English” name. I like the global feel of Bass and Katayama being together as a couple. It supports Euro-Asian-American planetary integration! My name is short and monosyllabic. Yours is long and lovely with four syllables emphasizing the same vowel. And don’t you dare hyphenate! That’s a monstrosity!” Blah blah blah.

My first wife had taken my surname when we were both in our early 20’s. We felt we were supposed to. I was ambivalent but didn’t like hyphenations. This was back in the early 1980s. Margaret took my name grudgingly, too. It didn’t help matters that she didn’t like the rest of her name either. She was a troubled person back then and in the 3rd summer of marriage left me for another man. It was a crushing blow followed by a devastating divorce. She went back to her maiden name of “Manuel.”

A few years later I met Gwen Hughes while in grad school and eventually we married. It was now the late 1980s. We would stay together for almost another decade and a half. We had one daughter of our own and adopted another. Surnames for all of us were a constant topic of conversation. Gwen and I were fierce believers in gender equality, at least before the law and within our society. We were adamant marriage was a stand for two adults choosing each other from a stand of love and commitment. Not politicalized family arrangements for power, wealth, status, and privilege. Not male ownership of the female, or the reverse either.

Gwen toyed with the spelling of her first name “Gwendolyn” and various nicknames. We debated using her middle name of “Valentine” as her surname, dropping the “Hughes.” We most definitely did not want the clunky-chunky hybridization of “Hughes-Bass.” How would we “tell the world” we were now a couple and one family? Ultimately we agreed to keep our respective surnames. I would not take her surname. That implied female domination over the male. Quite frankly most people were conditioned to assume upon meeting “Mr. & Ms. Hughes” that “Hughes” was actually my surname and that Gwen had simply done the traditional thing and took it, too.

A few times we’ve met a small number of couples who did the really alternative act of jettisoning their surnames and creating new surnames. To them it represented freedom from all sorts of cultural conditioning. They came together with intention to create a new surname that represented uniquely them. One couple's surname was made up from their favorite science fiction book. Another couple named themselves after endangered snowy owls. The problem with such a rare display of creative courage was that every body else automatically assumed whenever they heard of these couples having the same last name that it was the husband’s family name. These people constantly had to explain over and over that no, they made up a new name with everyone else going “That’s weird.”

There is just no way to get rid of the surname conundrum unless you do as some cultures do and that is for each person to have only one name. Even if one took their mother’s surname that name was really the mother’s father’s surname. All surnames in a patriarchal culture are thus at some point the man’s name. The reverse for matriarchal cultures. Some Spanish-language cultures blend both surnames.

So when Gwen and I had two children each child got four names. There was a first name and a middle name with two unhyphenated family names. We joked that each child had the freedom to mix and choose their names as they got older. And with each daughter having “Hughes Bass” as their last two names it was clear “Bass” would be the family name. No weird hyphenation. We had heard of people with pre-existing hyphenated names marrying each other to wrestle with such horrors as “Sally and Jack Smith-Jones-Cunninghamthwaite-Marquez.”

Actually my oldest daughter’s name got accidentally hyphenated on her birth certificate. Someone made an automatic assumption that “Hughes” and “Bass,” being the last names of her parents, must thus be hyphenated into one last name for the child. It caused a bureaucratic nightmare with social security, filing for taxes, schools, and applying for a passport. I finally went to court and paid $150.00 to have the damn hyphen legally removed. That was one expensive dash!

We adopted our second child, one of Gwen's neices to help resolve a family dilemma. That was even more expensive. Our adopted daughter came into the world with merely a first name spelled a certain way and a last name. In the legal machinations of the court we kept those names but added my sister's name as that child's middle name as her first name was of yet another of Gwen's seven sisters. We did it to unify both halves of the family. And we gave her my last name "Bass" for the surname. So like her older sister she ended up with four names.

Eventually Gwen and I grew apart, chose to divorce, and went on in different directions but stayed friends and co-parents. Our names stayed the same as if nothing had ever happened. Our children still had their two family names with mine as their official surname.

So when Kristina married me she took my last name, “Bass.” It’s an Old English name meaning “short of statue, red-haired, and hot tempered.” I confess at various times I’ve exhibited all three traits. There were plenty of tall Basses and blonde Basses and cool-headed ones, but I got the original three. “Katayama” is Japanese for “shoulder” or “face of the mountain.” At first she added it on to her original surname as “Katayama Bass.” After awhile she simplified her full four-word name to “Kristina Bass.”

Why did she do this? Not for any submission to classical patriarchal tyranny. My wife felt it very important to her that everyone in our family shared the same surname. She desired the energetic container I held for the family. And we were a post-double divorce blended family with different last names. She wasn't going to change her name and leave her daughter behind. Kristina wanted unity and she wanted harmony with that unity. We both surrendered to a cultural and social norm, and we did so with a deliberate intention.

Kristina herself came from a broken household. And as an adult she married “too fast” a charming man who eventually for reasons of his own left her for another woman. And he left Kristina pregnant. Kristina never officially took her first husband’s name, but unofficially she did and many people knew her by that last name, “Barker.” So did I at first. After he left her she expunged it.

Ah, the drama of human relationships. Soap operas swollen with real pain. And we often try to hide it from embarrassment and shame. We all do.

I helped deliver their daughter in a homebirth just as I had helped deliver my first daughter with Gwen. For her child’s surname Kristina refused to use “Barker” at all and legally had “Katayama” established as her daughter’s family name. Now, over seven years later and remarriage, my stepdaughter was the only one with a different last name in our household. Kristina got her ex-husband’s permission to change it, especially as he was back and had been back in his bio-child’s life for some time. Off to court the three of them with, two ex-spouses and their offspring to take my last name.

I felt weird. In fact I resisted this maneuver at first. It made me very uncomfortable. I was not legally adopting my stepdaughter. That was not possible anyway with her bio-dad more involved over the years. I did not want to be seen as stealing another’s child. And, to be honest, I had shouldered the bulk of the work in raising her with her mother.

Per ruling of the court at the behest of both parents, my stepdaughter kept her mother’s maiden name of “Katayama” and had “Barker” added to it to include her father and ended with “Bass.” Wow. Three family names. But only one last name. Mine. Yes, a five-word supername is a mouthful for a little girl, even for an adult, but it meant much to all the rest of us. A certain healing for all involved, a letting go, a being with what is, taking action to move forward to a new place of integration and harmony. I felt honored.

I feel honored my new wife and stepdaughter took my family name as their new last names. I feel a certain bashful awkwardness, too, as it goes against my egalitarian stand of men and women (and women and women and men and men, for that matter) being free to choose their own surname. In the early days of my conscious evolution, however, that meant to me the freedom to keep their name and not change it based upon cultural conditioning and social pressures. Now it is simply the freedom to choose. The freedom to take any name one wants, to make one up, to mix and match, or the freedom to keep the name one has or add another to it.

Such freedom, however, comes with a certain responsibility. There first had to be agreement between at least four components of broken families. There was the financial cost of taking time off work, going downtown to the courthouse, and paying the court costs and legal fees to have the names changed. In our Wedding Ceremony, Kristina and I declared our vows not only to one another as wife and husband but also to all our children and stepchildren. The vow to all three daughters was for many the most moving part of the whole wedding. These are vows we committed to honoring every day, even when we mess up. And we do.

Someday we will die and our names will go up on some memorial. Maybe. And eventually everyone who knows us will also die. At some point the memories of stories about us will fade and then the stories will stop. Even the bones shall return to dust or be burnt and scattered as ash. All that remains shall be our names.

The Three Bass Sisters

(Wedding photo by Carol Ernst, July 11, 2009)

William Dudley Bass
September 15, 2009

© by William Dudley Bass

Yellow Jackets Swarming Ants

A cloud of yellow jackets gathered and swiftly attacked, killed, and ate dozens of ants. The massacre was over in minutes. Life and death right there in my front yard. The ebb and flow of nature that I unwittingly contributed to.

The other day while clearing old wood from my yard I disturbed several colonies of what were probably red carpenter ants or possibly thatching ants. I was out at the River House, my dream home on the Upper Wenatchee River outside of the village of Plain near Leavenworth, Washington. Clearing brush was an on-going process, and I was cleaning up more debris as I regretfully had to sell the house.

There were piles of punky old timber rounds, “punky” meaning wood too rotten to burn. My lawnmower was acting up even with a new spark plug. I feared all my abusing it as a bush hog out there in the shaggy weeds and wild grass had all but killed it. As it sat there simmering in silent revolt I piled up brush, sticks, and punky rounds in a burn pile. I figured with the burn ban in effect it would be around mid-November before I could safely set it afire. Meanwhile, dozens of yellow jackets buzzed low over grass and weeds. They completely ignored me and appeared focused on hunting edible bugs.

It was the last day of August 2009. Temperatures have risen from the upper 50s into the low 80s. Wasn’t too bad. Drank plenty of water and Gatorade. Seems like every time I turn over and broke up rotten segments of logs hordes of big red and black ants charged out in all directions. At first I jumped back, as the ants resembled in appearance thatching ants. There was a huge colony of such ants over on the edge of a neighboring property where they’ve build a large mound. They eat lots of pests so are considered good for gardens, but build big mounds, bite hard, and spray a burning acid where they bite. But there were no mounds, just nests in the wood, so maybe they were red carpenter ants instead. I wasn’t about to stick my bare hand in and find out, so I quickly tossed the broken wood across the yard to knock the critters lose before chunking it into the burn pile.

Even though carpenter ants are big and fierce looking, they don’t bite and burn like thatching ants. But they can be more destructive by tunneling through wood as they build their nests. Apparently they don’t eat wood, contrary to popular misconceptions, just tunnel through it. Such tunneling in turns seriously weakens any wooden structures. Eventually if left untreated the wood disintegrates and structures may collapse.

Ah, more of the damn things. Seems like every time I move an old timber round or section of abandoned firewood I stir up these big red and black ants. The sheer mass of them swarming is just amazing. Sheer biological mass. Animal mass. Insect mass. Upon a mass of plants and plant material. Biomass. Life on the planet. Right here right now. Swarming, moving, or growing quietly in the soil and blowing in the breeze. Life.

I threw another ant infested chunk of old log into the burn pile. Looked like hundreds of pissed off ants from several disturbed hives were swarming over and around the burn pile. I gazed at the wind blowing the tall ponderosas for a few minutes, admiring their graceful yet robust trunks. I felt sad at what appeared to be the spread of pine beetle infestations, especially the regional explosion of natural western and mountain pine beetle populations. They eventually overwhelm and kill trees. Glanced back to look at my small burn pile, and did a double take.

Yellow jackets were swarming over the burn pile and dive bombing ants. They hunted, pounced upon, and killed ants. The yellow jackets were eating them. Voraciously and as quickly as they could. It was a mad race against the clock, for the ants were running as fast as they could scurry. They weren’t even fighting back. Just trying to hide and survive. They slid between cracks in the wood or disappeared under debris. Here it was right here under my eyes as I stood spellbound: life and death, kill or be killed, eat or be eaten, and fast.

And then it was over as quickly as it had begun. The ants had vanished. I imagined most of them survived because there were far more of them than there were of the wasps. The yellow jackets returned to their silent cruising low over the yard.

How did the yellow jackets know of the ants and their situation? What did the yellow jackets do to communicate so quickly and efficiently with other wasps? And how did ants from different colonies all mixed together like that react or respond to one another while under attack? I felt a mix of remorse and wonder. And went back to my work. Life goes on for the living.

William Dudley Bass
September 15, 2009

© by William Dudley Bass