When Kangaroos Held up the Sidewalk

When Kangaroos Held up the sidewalk

“Daddy, where will we go if we drive into the clouds,” asked the little girl? Her father replied, “Up to the carnival in the sky.”

I miss it. I miss the dream that dominated my sleep for twenty years. Every time, the dream would become part of me, and taking it with me the next day, I would wrap it around me like a blanket, hesitant to let go. That the dream was a mystery didn’t scare me. I knew the dream was part of my life; I just needed to learn which part.

I used to think kangaroos held up the sidewalk. Sidewalks have a knack of being uneven and kangaroos hop. In my childlike mind there was a connection and it seemed logical to me that kangaroos held up the sidewalk. My brother and I used to think we could dig a tunnel from Charlotte, North Carolina to Toledo, Ohio. My grandma could then just walk over whenever she wanted to see us. She always said she would be happy to walk over whenever we were finished with the tunnel. She fed our dreams.

With that is it any wonder that, for years, I had a dream about driving into the sky with my parents, swearing every time that is was in fact a memory from my life? A recurring dream that nagged at me and comforted me from time to time for twenty years. It would be hard to shake the dream whenever I had it. Thinking and wondering when this dream actually happened had, in fact, become a part of my life. Wondering why I had this fragment from my childhood floating around my head, not settling anywhere, wandering inside seemingly aimlessly about waiting for the perfect moment to come to rest. I knew it had to be part of something that had really happened to me, but darned if I could find the rest of the memory, the rest of the story, so that I wouldn’t have to grasp at air looking for the hook, something that would put it to rest once and for all. If this fragment could find its niche in my head, I knew the dream would stop.

The dream was always the same. I was a little girl driving with my parents in our 1975 blue Chevy. The car had been my grandfather’s. He sold it to my mother so she would have something to drive. It was one of those huge boats with a back seat that stretched for days. I had no problem stretching out to take a nap in the car.

In the dream I am sitting by myself in the back seat, I don’t know where my brother is but that’s not important. It is a gray day; fog seems to be rolling by the car hiding everything in sight. We are driving in a metropolitan area, with many large buildings that loom up towards the sky. The fog hides the tops of the tallest buildings in the city, while the moisture leeches on to anything of substance. The heaviness of the day has had an effect on my parents. They are bickering back and forth, biting and snapping little barbs at each other; nobody winning. In the backseat I can’t hear what my parents are saying, but I don’t mind. I had learned these little arguments don’t mean anything.

My father makes a right turn and before me is the strangest sight I have ever seen. Straight ahead on either side of the road are two billboards. On the left hand side of the road, a pinkish rose colored sign with an oblong shape and white writing stands proudly, calling to drivers to see what it has to say. It is a unique billboard, both in color and shape. On the other side of the road, a standard white billboard with writing as black as the water in Lake Michigan on a dark, cloudy day, speaks to drivers in its own way. I always remember the billboards from my dream because they are what is real. The billboards have their own message for me, what they say to other people is unimportant. They are the answer to my questions. “Find me and you find your answers,” they tell me. What grabs my attention in the dream is the road. It disappears...into the sky...gone...with no end in sight. The road ahead travels due north, straight to the sky. I had never seen anything like it before in my short life. “Daddy, where will we go if we drive into the clouds?” I asked.

He replied, “Up to the carnival in the sky.”

That’s it, that’s the dream. Twenty years in the making and still no closer to understanding it than I was when I had the dream for the first time. The only thing I do know is that the dream represents an event in my life, an actual memory, a slice of my life. I had never told anyone about the dream. I knew it really happened, I knew I had asked my dad about driving into the sky. I didn’t want anyone trying to tell me otherwise. I kept it to myself, my one big secret; my own mystery.

A year or two before college graduation, I found myself heading to Minnesota to visit an old friend during spring break. As I drove I started remembering my years living in Minneapolis as a child. I remembered the fun I had walking on the lakes in the winter with my parents, building snowmen and snow forts with my brother, waiting for the school bus to take me to school, the crush I had on Sparky Butler – his real name was Patrick - swimming in the same lake in the summer, and all the other things I did as a child. It’s the first time I had gone back to a place I had once lived. My family and I had moved quite a few times in my life, and I had never put down permanent roots anywhere. Thinking about the places I planned to go while in town; Lunds, the supermarket where my family used to shop; Kenwood Elementary, the school where I developed my first crush, got into my first fight, and the first school I remember leaving; my house, where I used to dream of becoming a famous ballerina, and where I was scared to go into the attic because of the monsters; and the Calhoun Lake, where I swam in the summer and walked the dog or skated in the winter, I really started to get excited about my trip.

As I drove along the highway, I watched the countryside roll past. Fields that were once lush with the growth of new crops now stood dormant, nourishing themselves for the coming spring, and the new planting season. Trees and bushes held onto the snow as if it were a sweater to keep their bare branches warm against the cold wintry air. The wind blew gently causing errant blades of grass that had missed the last cutting, to sway gently back and forth. The sky was a dank, drab, dirty, dingy, gray color that caused everything in sight to take on the same grayish hue.
The color of the sky brought memories of Michigan to me. I remembered the winters in Michigan were always very gloomy and depressing. There had always been plenty of snow but the sun hibernated in the winter just like the Great Bear. “It’s crazy how memories flow in and out of one’s head,” I thought to myself. I hadn’t thought this much about my childhood in years. It’s amazing the things you remember; the sights, sounds, smells...it’s all coming back. Memories that hadn’t been surfaced in years all of a sudden started popping into my head left and right.

“Dammit! Where is that hotel?” I had been driving around downtown Minneapolis for the longest time looking for the Marriott, the hotel where Bonnie, my friend, worked. “I have been down this same street five times now, you think I would learn,” I fumed to myself. Looking out the window while driving, I noticed how much things had changed in the years since I had lived there. Downtown Minneapolis was not the same downtown from my childhood. I hardly recognized the city.
Thinking I had finally found the correct street, I made a right turn. “Oh my god!” I gasped. There, right in front of me are two billboards. On the left hand side of the road, a pinkish rose colored sign with an oblong shape and white writing stands proudly, calling to drivers to see what it has to say. It is a unique billboard, both in color and shape. On the other side of the road, a standard white billboard, with writing as black as the water in Lake Michigan on a dark, cloudy day, speaks to drivers in its own way. On that day the billboards spoke to me.

I had the answer to my dream. I was staring at a drawbridge. The bridge had been up that day I was in the car with my parents and the fog was so low it covered the top of the road making it seem like the road went to the sky. One missing detail, making a real memory seem somewhat far-fetched. I haven’t had the dream since I had found the answer. My memory found its home and is resting comfortably, probably tired after all those years floating around waiting for me to understand. I miss my dream. It was a part of me. My little mystery. Something that belonged only to me. I found the answer to my mystery shortly before I graduated from college. It seemed that putting my childhood in order was a fitting end to that part of my life.