Happy as the Grass was Green

When I wake up in the morning, it is hard for me to remember my dreams from the night before. But, occasionally a dream will drift into my daytime hours. Even a waking dream can give clues to who I am and what’s on my mind. The other day I found myself thinking about two jobs that I had during my college years.

The summer of 1972, I took a job working at the Brockway Glass Company in Washington, PA. The company hired college students to make boxes and watch for flawed glass coming out of the hot furnaces on the conveyor belt. Often I worked the midnight to eight shift watching the glass. To combat any boredom, I had written snatches of poetry in tiny print on my hands. Whenever I got a spare moment, I would try to memorize a line or two. Occasionally a piece of glass would tumble to the floor. Remembering Dylan Thomas’s “Fern Hill” carries me back to that period of innocence —

“Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs, about the lilting house and happy as the grass was green.”

The next summer I lived in Gloucester, Massachusetts and did summer stock theater with a group of theater lovers. At Folly’s Cove in the outdoors, we learned new ways to shape and create theater. On weekends we put on a “Vaudeville Show” at a restaurant called The Chanticleer. My world up until that summer had been quite narrow, but there in Gloucester I would mingle with feminists who loved Plath and Sexton, gay producers, and a talented director named Vincent. That summer saw the first crack in my in my innocence.

Dreams reveal who we are. They bring together the conscious and unconscious part of our mind. Today I am still a work in progress. I am older now, but I am still the same person.

The last lines of Dylan’s poem are:

“Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
 Time held me green and dying
 Though I sang in my chains like the sea.”