I've never told anybody this but I exist in two distinct worlds, the world of actual memories and the sleep world of my dreams, which like life includes moments of beauty and moments of terror. I'm quite serious. My dreams are largely repeats and my dream world is one with which I am quite familiar, even though I retain no conscious memory of many of the details. Usually I come to this realization when I am dreaming. Which may account for how fond I am of Blondie's song "Dreaming". If not my favorite song it is clearly my favorite music video.
In the final verse, the narrator finds herself getting lost in her dreams seemingly everywhere she goes.: “Imagine something of your very own/Something you can have and hold/I’d build a road of gold just to have some dreaming.”
In that way, she imbues the refrain of “Dreaming is free” with potency and pathos well beyond the seeming simplicity of the phrase. Blondie’s songs tend to be so much fun that’s it’s easy to overlook their depth and the craft behind them. Don’t make that mistake with “Dreaming,” or you might miss the hurting yet ultimately hopeful heart beating inside that pristine pop shell.
I doubt that much of my sleep dreaming is to compensate for something that is missing from my life, but it probably reflects elements of trauma that I have experienced and then chosen to consciously minimize.
When I met you in the restaurant
You could tell I was no débutante
You asked me what's my pleasure
A movie or a measure
I'll have a cup of tea
And tell you of my dreaming.
Last night I dreamed that I was a newly arrived recruit at a futuristic version of Alameda Naval Air Station although it could have been Treasure Island. I was getting an extensive tour of the facility in some futuristic car. This was one of those rare occasions when the dream was entirely new. Upon waking with a pretty clear but rapidly fading memory of the dream, I for some reason was reminded of my last year at RAF Chicksands and this unfinished page so I decided to work on it a bit this morning.
1973 was my last Christmas at Chicksands, although technically I was not actually on the base for Christmas but rather back home in Ohio. In fact I was able to take Christmas leave both years and then rotated back to the world before the third Christmas. But dwelling on this has caused me to have a minor panic attack about my somewhat hazy memories of my last year at the base, which ran from September 1973 to September 1974. The last part of that time (summer 1974) I already covered extensively in my Life Lessons section. But the roughly eight months before that were chock full of amazing stuff although I have rarely thought about it because it occurred between the most complicated period of my life and the most intense period. So I will try (49 years later) to resurrect some experiences, hopefully uncovering some long buried but not entirely forgotten memories.
It essentially starts with my late August 1973 release from the Air Force Hospital at RAF Lakenhealth. I had been there most of the summer after my June motorcycle accident. I was back at Chicksands working in the Recreation Center and still going up to Lakenhealth twice a week for physical therapy on my knee. These were interesting rides in a blue Air Force station wagon, a full size left hand drive Chevy with a British driver. Typically there were one or two other outpatients. I remember that Dave Lucia from Minnesota was often along trying to rehab his arm. They really didn't know what to do with me and I was on a light duty restriction so the manual labor in the commissary was no longer appropriate. The Rec Center beckoned.
I was literally passing out ping pong balls which was a standing joke about anyone temporarily assigned there. It was a bit like manning the desk at a YMCA although I also rode along on center sponsored bus tours, serving as a poorly informed tour guide as we drove to sites like Stonehenge. And I discovered a flare for engraving plaques for trophies which the Rec Center awarded for activities they sponsored. Best of all I did not have to wear a uniform. Well maybe second best of all, because best of all was that the Rec Center was inhabited by a lot of 17 year-old dependent girls. They had spent their lives adapting to their father's latest assignment and were American, surprisingly mature, self-assured, and refreshingly normal. No lack of self-esteem in the bunch. Until that assignment well over a year after I arrived on baseI had no idea such girls existed on the base.
At the start I was still living in Rose Cottage (an off-base duplex in Hitchin) but my both housemates (Dave and Carol) had been replaced by Sam who worked in the base commissary. And I still had my old barracks room in "E" dorm, my old roommate Jeff Needles lived off base but as a staff sergeant still kept a single room in the barracks. I still had my key to this room and when sent home from the hospital some weekends I stayed in this room, being unable to drive my car. The closets were full of my uniforms and misc. junk that I had not taken with me when I first moved off the base.
Roughly at the end of November 1973 I moved out of Rose Cottage and was assigned a room on the second floor of "B" dorm, the windows of which faced the hill leading up to the chow hall. Then one night in early December I noticed a light on in my "E" dorm room at the top of the hill, meaning that some new personnel had just arrived on base and been assigned this room. Realizing that my stuff was in danger of becoming trash I immediately went up to my old room. I introduced myself to the two new airmen (Dennis Stiffler and Kerry Laughlin) who were about to break the locks on the closets, produced my key, and we transferred the contents to my Volkswagen. I became good friends with both of them. Housesitting for Dennis after he married a dependent girl and visiting Kerry and his wife (a former WAF) in Bossier City after our discharges.
I was very lucky to have noticed the room light that evening because shortly after returning from Christmas leave Captain Johnson transferred me out of the rec center and across the street to the squadron orderly room. Suddenly I needed my uniforms, a haircut, and some semblance of military bearing. Having understandably missed out on my promotion to sergeant I was still an and under the supervision of a huge black staff sergeant (name long forgotten), SSgt Jeff Berlin, and a staff sergeant named Pierce (who everyone called Hawkeye - this being the time of long-running MASH television series). Mostly I sat in a tiny room just inside the building entrance and handed out barrack's room keys to newly arriving personnel, collected the room keys of out-processing personnel, let locked out airmen into their rooms, and replaced lost keys. All the time maintaining a wall of room assignment charts.
I must have done something else but about all I remember is sitting in that room each day. One day we were all were mobilized for a surprise Security Police sweep of each barracks with their dope sniffing dogs. We were stationed in back of the barracks waiting for someone to throw their stash out the window. It never happened so we were not placed in the dilemma of whether to keep what was thrown out or turn it in. Curiously the only weed found belonged to airmen already busted by the British Police thereby saving the Air Force from having to pull anyone's security clearance. As I recall they started with the building least likely to contain smokers so that everyone else would be tipped off and move their stuff.
At some point that fall Sam had almost burned me alive when went out to the pay phone and left the stove burning under a pan of grease. I had an attic room two floors up from the kitchen and eventually the greasy smoke worked its way under my door and alerted me that something was wrong. I was still not moving that well but was able to work my way down the smoky stairs to the kitchen where I amazingly in retrospect did all the right things in the right order to put out the fire. Covering the blazing pan with a flat top griddle and then throwing buckets of water at the burning ceiling. I had the fire out before Sam returned but the greasy smoke had coated the entire first floor ceiling. I did not immediately kill Sam, even when he denied starting the fire. But I soon convinced him that he was about a inch away from death and he went out and bought paint and painting supplies, washed the ceiling, patched what had been damaged by the fire itself, and painted the downstairs.
I was not yet physically capable of lending much assistance and I was pretty sure that his last coat of paint would soon peel as his prep work on the ceiling left something to be desired. But at the time I believed that I would soon to be sent to heavy equipment operator school. The lease was in my name (or at least I was the only one of the original three who was still there) so once Sam had completed his work I visited the landlord and made arrangements to terminate the lease. This was not total surprise to him as Dave I had visited him between the accident and my surgery. In fact I was using his solicitor to pursue the driver who had hit me. But for this visit I was by myself and armed only with some good whiskey. I didn't break the lease, I just gave him a couple months notice that I would move out when the lease ended in January. I probably mentioned the fire since Sam had cleaned it up.
I guess that Sam continued to live there or at least I don't recall his moving out. I do remember a striking British girl that he brought around several times. I probably split my time between the house and the barracks what with the trips to the hospital and my temporary job on the base.
This was my Rec Center period which lasted roughly until I returned from a Christmas leave in Cleveland. There were a few notable things during this period. For a guy about to be transferred I had accumulated an amazing amount of stuff. A 1965 VW Beatle, a 1958 Mercedes 190SL, and my wrecked but under repair BSA Lightning. Plus a huge record collection and the typical overseas GI array of expensive stereo equipment.
Just prior to my accident I had gone through a driver's training program at RAF Alconbury and been issued a Government Vehicle Driver's License. I was the only person that I knew with one of these as we were all operations types who had no occasion to operate anything but our own cars. My new supervisor at the Rec Center knew nothing about this and one day he sent me to the motor pool to get a truck that he had reserved to haul some building supplies for a fair they were setting up. He had also reserved a driver. I walked to the motor pool and showed them my new license; they just gave me a truck. I drove it onto the area where the fair exhibits were being constructed and when I got out my supervisor was quite impressed - I guess because it broke the rule that operations people did not operate vehicles.