The Sunday List of Dreams Read Online Free PDF Page A

been gnawing on that leash a
really
long time.”
    Frannie sits silently through the telling of this story. She has heard it only twice. Once when two of Connie’s daughters were home just last year, as Connie was beginning her retirement plans. Connie’s youngest two daughters—Sabrina, 27, the suburban Chicago mom, and the baby, Macy, 25, a “way too young” married mom herself who refused to work, lived in Indianapolis with her graduate student husband, and who had made a hobby out of criticizing her mother—had come to visit for the weekend. The impromptu gathering did not include their older sister Jessica, who never even returned a phone call asking if there was any way she might make it home for two days. Connie and Frannie had huddled in Connie’s bedroom, listening to Sabrina and Macy’s voices rumble through the tiny house, and that night, while her daughters caught up, Connie shared the story of the list. And again six months ago, during a long quiet weekend when the Irish husband was out of town and Connie and Frannie had a slumber party.
    The telling of its creation sounded powerful and beyond poignant but it was that night, nine months pregnant and rocking alone, wondering how the course of her life had veered so far to one side, afraid, angry and wanting to stop the forward movement of time, to push it in a new direction, that Connie Nixon claimed the right to create her list. She rocked and wrote and as she did so she placed her life—all the hard parts, the giving, the wanting, the sacrifice, mistakes, unspoken words, inappropriate reactions, lost chances, expected behaviors—every single thing that she regretted, into a deep cave that was temporarily inaccessible from her position on the chair.
    And she rocked and the only thing she took with her on her rocking chair voyage was a brown leather notebook, a pen, and every dream she could capture. Connie wrote until her ankles, already the size of large, ripe tomatoes, swelled another inch. She wrote until her back tingled and her baby shifted so that her weight was directly on top of Connie’s already minimized bladder. Sometimes, during her two-hour dream ride, she closed her eyes and imagined that she was doing exactly what she wrote about. Some things simple, some complicated, some hilarious, some selfish, some just an exercise in physical, joyful abandonment.
             
    Sleeping in without an alarm clock.
    Never cooking dinner at the exact same time every single day ever again.
    Having the entire bed to myself.
    Moving into a real house with a backyard.
    Having the perfect baby.
             
    Sometimes one idea covered an entire page and included wild drawings, scraps of food, drops of wine, milk or tea. Sometimes a page just contained one word—
“sleep”
or
“exercise”
—and sometimes it detailed in precise form how something would happen—
“Sleep in very late. Walk through the house without stepping on anything and notice immediately that a maid has been in to clean the entire place— TOP to BOTTOM .”
    Connie Nixon kept the book for a long time in a drawer that no one else bothered to open. Sometimes, when her one baby had turned into two, and then two became three, and when she realized that the burdens of married life, because of her husband’s rotating police work schedule and his addiction to fishing, would keep the division of family labor tilted towards her side of the ledger, she would simply open the drawer and touch the brown book, as a lover would touch the arm of a partner in passing, and then keep going.
    And there were always Sundays.
    The only day of the week, at first, when she reserved a small space of time, sometimes only fifteen minutes, when she could fall into her own dreams, see what they looked like when they turned into words and imagine the reality of what she would do someday when they danced to life. And the list changed as her life and needs and own direction