Some Men Dream Things That Never Were

Earlier in the week I had a vision. That's not unusual for me because I'm a dreamer by nature, though a casual dreamer. Over the course of my life like many people I've fallen into the habit of discounting my own dreams. I rarely listen to them. I don't hear the hope of inspiration in the dream, and I don't hear my true path calling to me. Inwardly I dismiss it as a flight of fancy. I enjoy the trip for a moment of time and let the wind take it out of my grasp like so many dandelion seeds floating on the breeze, not realizing what I had in my hands was my own destiny and my true voice.

It's so easy to let yourself be discouraged, to slip back resignedly into your old unexpectant life with no ambitions and no dreams, just the steady, slow discouraging drumbeat of watching the clock and gathering yourself to go to work. My boss called me into his office again last night. He accused me of not reporting to work last Tuesday. He's so eager to throw me under the bus he hallucinates false evidence and misreads time reports and falsely recalls warnings that were never issued. It's become an active vendetta, a campaign of misinformation and hate. Somehow I became a target, which is terribly odd to me, because I work hard at not becoming one, maintaining the golden mean of doing my job and doing nothing to attract attention or animosity. But something about me has gotten under his skin. The numbers don't justify his vengeance. I'm neither at the top of the pack or the bottom. Maybe I remind him of someone who stole his girlfriend in eighth grade; I have utterly no idea and don't want to know. Shift bid is executed in three weeks and I just want to survive until then.

See, I did it again. I started out talking about a dream and digressed into a mundane and painful digression. You see how easy it is to lose the thread of a dream and diffuse its energy? We do it every day.

Our dreams tell us something vital about who we are and where we want to go. Often the specifics are not important. It's the energy of the dream, the urgency, the way we see ourselves living and interacting and using our talents in the dream scenario. That's the vital thing. In our dreams we are vibrant and active people. We're doing things. We're energized and alive and competing for the prize. We're strong, active, decisive. And that is what we are meant to be.

So, I want to encourage you. Don't discount your dreams. Reflect on them for a moment or two, and try to discover what they are telling you about yourself and your true hopes.

In my dream, the one that came to me and won't quite leave me alone, I bought a restaurant and bar, the place where Marie and I met. It's called the Tillicum and it used to be a warm and welcoming place with good food and good music. Over the years with bad management and absentee ownership it's become a shell of itself. A couple of weeks ago Marie and I went there on a Friday night and it was nearly empty. The shrill Irish woman who ran the place into the ground ran us out with her rude behavior. Then just this Saturday our friend Jay sent us a text and told us the place was closed. The Tilly empty and disbanded on a Saturday night, the place where Portland legend Norman Sylvester used to sing the blues and encourage the crowd to "put your hands in the air like you just don't care."

I've run restaurants and have a gift for liking people and creating community. I've run promotions and special events. I created a women's golf benefit dinner attended by a hundred people and a children's clinic attended by 300. I created them out of thin air, off a scrap of paper and a couple of lists composed at my kitchen table. I know I could save the Tilly. I know I could learn what I don't know, assemble a staff, build fierce loyalties and synergies and joys of belonging and comfort and welcome. I know I could be an agent of social change, a principled businessman and give life and joy to that neighborhood restaurant and lounge, make it a special place again. I know I could do this. I know I could find out how. I could raise the money and dream a dream big enough to start the music again in a place that is now gathering dust, a place some clown will probably turn in to another strip mall or another strip club, neither of which Beaverton needs. There are far too many of those already.

So this morning I called the real estate agent who's listing the property. He quickly sized me off as "not a serious offer", assured the property was sold but the business was still listed, but it was the wrong square footage for a restaurant. "Nobody wants a restaurant with that square footage anymore. What are you going to do with it?"

I've always thought the Tillicum was the perfect size. There was room at the bar and a place to dance and a place to eat and two pool tables in back. People came and got along and had a good time. They had great music and great food.

Of course there are all kinds of practical reasons not to get involved in this. There's certainly no guarantee of success and there's a high probability of failure. The failure rate for restaurants and bars is extremely high, particularly for owners who don't know what they are doing. People are far too ready to put other people in that category. Just because I haven't done something before doesn't mean I can't do it. The fundamentals of success in any business aren't complicated; it's just a matter of executing them over and over. Cleanliness, service, courtesy, communication, problem solving, attention to detail: I understand those things. I've practiced them all my life.

The other problem is money. Financing this particular dream would be a challenge. It would take money, someone to believe in the project and the business plan, some willing to see the vision and take the risk. Just because that hasn't happened doesn't mean it can't.

I just got a call from work. I got my last choice for shift bid. I'm working for this same manager again. I had deliberately made his shifts my last six choices, but by the time I picked that was all that were left. It's telling that his shifts were all that were left. Apparently I'm not the only one trying to avoid him. The universe calls us to our destiny in a great variety of ways, even when we refuse to listen.

It could be that this particular dream is worth discarding, for a great many reasons, but one thing is clear: I want to do something more with my life. I want a bigger canvas, a larger hope, a way to earn a living that engages more of my energies and talents, where I have more say in where my life is taking me and what I produce and contribute to the world around me.

In three and a half hours, though, I'll put on the headset and have my senses assaulted afresh by insensitivity and discourtesy, horrible venting hostility over trivia and problems that could be solved without a trace of the animosity and brutal unkindness people chose to lead with. I would have be perfectly willing to help them in whatever way they'd ask if they'd simply ask, but somehow life has given them the message they'll get better results with sarcasm, profanity, and condescension. So I endure it because I have to pay the rent. I know I'm foolish to think I'd find less of it elsewhere, but the hope endures. At least if it was my place, I'd have the option of asking them to leave, if it came to that. It's comforting to think of a setting where I had that kind of autonomy and influence, though in most cases I'd handle it in another way. I just like the thought of having the option, knowing I currently work in an environment where I have very few of them.