A Cavalcade of Lesser Horrors

Vigil Candles

180 Vigil Candles I had a dream before dawn this morning. One of those camerasubjective things where the dream wandered, boomed, pushed, and panned around and through the vigil lights on Saint Joseph’s side of the altar in an old Catholic church. Some of the candles were newly lit; others were old, weakly flaming, on the verge of flickering out; others were at various stages in between. Still others had yet to be lit at all. Every so often a coin would clank into a brass collection box outside the camera frame and echo in the empty church. Then some hand, holding a twisted, waxed-paper wick, would reach into the shot, borrow flame from one of the candles, and light a new one. Even asleep, the allegory was obvious. The candles were people . The flames were lives. I’m not sure whose hand it was, but the dream wandered through time—something I’ve been doing more and more myself lately. All my dearly and not so dearly departed were there—some long extinguished, others more recently, interspersed with living, young and old, and with generations yet to come. And I don’t think it was an accident that this was Saint Joseph’s side of the altar. The man married into chaos. He was an in-law, immersed in the story up to here. But let’s face it, he was not real family, and somewhere down deep, we all count ourselves in-laws, not real family, to the rest of humanity. V IGIL CA NDLES 181 It was a substantial dream, and it stayed long enough for me to fix it in my memory after I woke up. I’ve been working away at it all day today, picking and poking, putting it aside and letting it fester, then coming back to it, thinking about people I’ve known and people yet to come. It seems to want to run parallel to a certain way I’ve come to see the world as I walk through it. I live in Minneapolis. The city was here one hundred and twenty years before I showed up, and it’s full of old tenements and warehouses and bridges and schools, lakes and parks, defunct corner grocery stores, and house, duplex, and small-apartment neighborhoods. It feels beautifully haunted to me. I walk through it and sense other generations looking out from the city’s windows . I feel other times. There’s a stone-arch railroad bridge dating back to the late 1800s—a walking and biking path across the Mississippi now. The bridge curves across the flow of the river just below Saint Anthony Falls. Halfway across, out in the middle, there’s a spot where I sit and sense all the passengers, trains, and years. I got my first view of the city from a railroad-car window right about where I like to sit now. A couple miles to the south, on the west bank of the river in a neighborhood off Franklin Avenue, is an old duplex where I overstayed my welcome with friends one summer, freeloading, waiting for the army to send me to Vietnam and my world to implode. A few miles west is a bus bench on a Bloomington Avenue corner that will forever be special to me. I have venues like this all over the city—old, but still callow places. I look up at certain windows and know the rooms on the other side of the glass. I see the chandeliers with flame-shaped bulbs still hanging over the place where the dining room table goes years after I last walked out. I remember people who no longer live there and things that happened there—winter-evening card games, holiday parties, loves and friendships abandoned. 182 V IGIL CANDLES So much unfinished business—so much dust in this or that corner of the city, in this or that corner of time. So many snapshots stored in a shoebox way at the back of the bedroom closet shelf. Am I being too loyal to old friends and lovers? To my old self? To events that don’t mean anything to anyone anymore? We each have an irretrievable past, right over there on the other side of everything that has happened since. We each had a hand in letting large and small things go, and we can’t ever again...