Leave No Trace (old version)

Nature, and Paul Zindel's "The Pigman."

I had an interesting dream the other day—one of those dreams that leaves you unsettled for an hour or two. My grandpa was getting ready to get into a car. The last car that he owned: an early 2000s maroon thing, long in the front and low to the ground. He told me that he was going to drive to church, that it was only fifteen minutes away and he could go by himself. I don’t remember what the circumstances surrounding this were. What church was he going to? His is right down the block from his house. Why was he going there? I vaguely remember that earlier in the dream my grandma, who’s dead, was writing a letter to a rectory, so maybe he was going to the church to drop it off. It’s strange, how in that hazy dream-induced receptiveness, you will accept anything as true. I don’t think it even occurred to me that I hadn’t seen my grandma in a while. I suspect this is because she wasn’t the focal point of this story.

The events that transpired next seemed to happen in slow motion. First, he got in the car—a struggle in and of itself usually, since his ninety-seven year old, arthritic body is usually in a lot of pain, but in the dream this process was just slow, not painful. As he started the engine, it dawned on me that he hadn’t driven a car in years, that there was no way that he could drive for fifteen minutes when his legs were stiff and he could barely see. I started to walk over towards him to tell him to stop, but I was standing about a half a block away and my legs took on that weighted, dreamlike quality where they feel like they’re moving but don’t actually take you anywhere. The whole scene was hazy. Sometime in between my first and second step the car started moving. The windows were down, and I heard him cry out euphorically, “Woohoo! Finally!” His mouth was smiling wide, his eyes looked out proudly at the road. He was the happiest I’d seen him in years.

Then something happened. As soon as the car picked up speed, it exploded. Just burst, not into flames, but into dust. Ash. I couldn’t see my grandpa anymore. He and the whole car were just gone, leaving a shady black silhouette in their wake. The dream ended as I was running over to the faded car, not actually moving, but running anyway, heart lurched out several yards in front of me with an achy feeling in the back of my throat. “He died doing what he loved,” I remember thinking, as I was being hurled back into reality.