Heart of a Dreamer

Today while my dad was describing his adaptation to living without access to a car he went on about how when I'm home this week he's going to want to replace the ancient exercise bike that sits in our basement, moaning for euthanasia due to our lack of desire to use it or even acknowledge it. He asked me if I remember the store he purchased it from, Consumer's Distributing.

Consumer's Distributing was like many stores in developing suburban town centres - lacking in pizazz, so much so that even their store names were shockingly literal. Consumer's Distributing was just that, a distribution outlet for a hodgepodge of manufacturers' overstock of consumer goods, that could not be profitably sold from a major reseller. An artifact of North American over-consumption: corporations squeezing a few more cents into their top line at the expense of the lower-middle class' increasing desire to live materialistically and beyond their fiscal means. But that's what I think about C.D. now, after my fancy undergraduate degree and having worked both ends of 2 of the world's largest supply chains. Before I learned how to turn my back on happiness C.D. was a field of dreams.

When you grow up in the hood the strangest phenomenon occurs: While otherwise forced to face so many other harsh realities of existence, you learn to make dreams out of the everyday. When I was a kid, C.D. was my wishlist to Santa Claus. I would pull out my crayon's and a fulls-cap sheet of paper and say "Dear Santa, once again I've been a good boy and so if I can have some of these gifts I would want them in this order..." Then, because for some reason my dad used to tell me that Santa can't read my mind and he needs pictures to understand 'what kinda of toys you boys want,' we would take the yearly catalog that C.D. would "give out" and my dad would tell me that Santa will buy us our favourite things from this book. A safe bet for my dad; he would buy us either our "Top 3" or maybe even up to 6 items from this book, depending on how expensive they were (he left himself that flexibility), while giving me and my brother over a hundred pages of dreams to choose from. It also meant that he could be absolutely assured that no matter what dreams may come he would be getting the cheapest possible prices on them with no reseller markup. The dreams evolved from hot wheels, to batmobiles, to a Sega Genesis console, until eventually we couldn't find our dreams in that catalog, they had become too large for its pages.

Sometimes I feel as though that's why my dad kept the bike around for so many years after it ceased to be functional - and I mean it is bad, like I'm sure somebody else could put it to good use, but we actually just put a really large nail into the seat adjuster to balance the seat neck, and for a stationary bike to have found a way to throw me off of it twice and cut my foot open 3 times is quite impeccable. But I think my dad remembers the looks on his two boys' faces when they knew that now they were getting what was owed to them by the world, after another year of impressive grades, moral stature, commitment to kindness and above all, filial piety. If you're good to the world, each man and woman deserves a chance to cut out whatever dreams they found in their book and paste it on their wish list. The commitment your loved ones make to you is to be there for you when it's time to ante up, and remind you that all of your dreaming was worthwhile. Maybe my brother and I will get the new bike for my dad, but spare him the task of addressing Santa.

When I was younger and my dreams were smaller they were all tangible. As I get older, and on nights like tonight, my dreams extend further and further from the glossy paper with prices written all over it, and I start to realize that the best dreams are intangible. In fact those very dreams were gifts, gifts my father gave to me to teach me the value of dreaming. For a long time since, I had forgotten the value of dreaming because of the pain of not being able to touch the intangible. But these days are different. Earlier today, driving up the DVP with the windows on low and Paganini on high, looking at the new marvel of human construction cascaded by the perennial natural constructions of spring, I feel as though things can only develop upwards from here. And as my car veered east on the 401 and the mauve sunset could only catch my rearview mirror, I touched one of life's analogies, proving that the intangible can be felt: I'm moving away from sunsets, it brings me no joy to describe the end of things when there is a world of new beginnings. I have the heart of a dreamer, and whether dreadful or blissful, dreams for me are a blessing, I am thankful to know how to dream again. Seven hundred and fifty dreams later, I ought to be thankful for being taught how to dream all over again. Yes, I counted.