Dream Group

For Paul’s Dream Group, I dreamt about my father. In the dream, I am about seven years old, bicycling in front of the building where I grew up on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx. My father is standing nearby watching, and, in the background, I hear Andy Williams crooning “Moon River.” It's a beautiful dream, and I loved having it and loved sharing it with the group. My father was as simple and unpretentious as they come, and for him to have Andy Williams singing that lovely hit song as background music to his life—well, if I wrote that script in my waking life, my father would have walked away in embarrassment. He couldn’t take the unabashed glory, the unabashed delight that he and I shared in that musical moment which was my dream. I certainly never saw him that way. Maybe it was in his character to be modest or avoid attention, or maybe it was the impact on him of losing his entire family during the Holocaust. But for Paul’s dream group, I dreamt my father this way.

Paul got us believing that the dreams we dreamt the night before the group met, we dreamt for the group. For Paul, I dreamt my father proud, confident, in love with his life. By the time I had that dream, Paul had already worked his magic on my dreams. Paul’s excitement for our dreams inched its way into our dream life and has stayed in mine ever since. I think that Paul, this unpretentious, unabashedly delighted, dreamy, and musical man worked his magic into that dream, my dream about my father.

It was earlier, during my first year at the William Alanson White Institute, that Paul found his place in my dreams. He brought a basket of strawberries to each class and he let us know that even though he was a big shot at the Institute, he still struggled, just like us. He didn’t

wear a suit and tie like the others, and he cursed. He spoke Yiddish, like my parents, but was also seriously cool. He personally knew Leonard Cohen, Philip Roth, and Norman Mailer. And he lived in the Berkshires and hiked with hi