Forgive But Never Forget

My mother was a wonderful woman. I know that most people can and do say that about their mothers, and I suppose they are right, but I mean it about my mom.

She did have her faults though, and one of them was that she never forgot. That can be a good thing as long as the thing she was remembering happened to be a good deed. God help you if she thought that you had screwed her over. There would be no explanation or apology or distance of time that would allow her to forget the slight. EVER!

I inherited some of her finer traits which makes me a lovable, trustworthy, hard working, dedicated and enjoyable person to be around. You would have to travel quite far to find a nicer human being than I am, and believe me when I say that I am under estimating myself. No, really! Unfortunately, I also inherited her memory. I will never forget it if someone treated me badly, if they ignored me when I should not have been ignored or if they said something twenty years ago that was less than nice. I sometimes forgive, but I will never forget!

This morning I fell back to sleep when Louise left for work. I usually get up, but I needed that extra rest for some reason. While I was sleeping, I dreamt that I was sitting on a set of bleachers with my daughter when she was ten or eleven years old and she was crying. On the set of bleacher on the other side of home plate were her classmates, listening to and laughing with one of her friends. He is still a friend of hers and he is a friend of mine. However, in the dream he was saying unpleasant things about her.

I got down off of the bleachers and walked over to home plate. I called her friend over to talk with me and when he arrived, I just looked at him for a long time.

I kept eye contact and said “I don’t know what is going on, or why you are saying those awful things, but I want you to stop. If you don’t stop, I will not be your friend now or in the future. I will never speak to you or of you again. You will be dead to me. Worse, you will never have existed and you will never exist again. Do you understand? Do you understand!”

He looked up at me and simply said “Yes.” He walked over to the bleachers, climbed up to his seat and started talking about my daughter again. I couldn’t believe that he didn’t care if he were my friend or not. I looked at him and as I concentrated, the other people disappeared from the bleachers, and my daughter’s friend faded into nothingness. Dead.

I woke up angry and more than that, disappointed. I am having difficulty remembering that it was a dream, not the real world. However, if a person could behave like that in the dream world, is it too much to believe he couldn’t do the same in the real world?

Time will tell I suppose, but I do not look forward to the next time we meet. We may never meet of course; after all, he did fade into nothingness.