Memory Pieces: Stories From My Past
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The Visitation (1964)
He asked me if I knew Oscar. I told him no. He said Oscar was my uncle and that he had just entered the room.
I thought about it, aware of the room we were in, small and crowded with tattered books and old newspapers. The furniture on which we sat had seen its day. Bishop Nickerson sat behind his desk, a large wooden one. There was so much on his desk, but the only thing that stood out to me was a large book and a tin of smoking tobacco.
“You sure?” Bishop Nickerson asked.
Nodding my head I told him, “Yes sir. To the best of my knowledge.”
“Well he just entered the room and he’s telling me he’s your uncle.”
I moved around a bit in the lumpy old chair I was sitting in, feeling my hands move across the cracked leather, and I glanced at the door that had been closed, then to the corner behind the bishop. Nothing.
“Okay,” Bishop Nickerson said. Then he turned a bit to his right and spoke to the invisible guest, “Guess you got the wrong place Oscar.” The bishop said this with a laugh and I laughed too, more out of relief. But I was there for a reason and I wanted results.
After all, hadn’t I been brought there by my father because of a drawing I had shown him and the story behind the drawing? It was a sketch of a dream I'd been having off and on for almost ten years since 1964. And now, here it is, 1974 and once again-- the dream.
It was a dream in which I awoke in my bedroom with a stranger sitting across the room from me. I recalled looking for my older brother who shared the bed with me, but he wasn’t there, just me and the stranger, a boy, sitting in a high back wooden chair staring out the window with his back to me. In the dream I can recall getting out of bed and walking to the boy who, by his stature, appeared to be my age at the time.
As I walked up to him I saw what held his attention. Outside of the window were brilliant lights of orange and yellow that danced against the window and filled the sky. I stood a bit behind the boy and stared at the lights in awe. I remember that neither I, nor the boy had been frightened by the display of lights because there was no sense of danger just fascination. It was as if the lights were somehow connected to our being there. But to the boy it seemed as if it was more. The boy sat in silence, his feet dangling from the chair, looking ahead transfixed by the lights as if the lights were relating to him, as if there was a silent conversation going on between them.
I wanted to see who the boy was, so I leaned around to look at his face and suddenly I was snapped back to only seeing his profile. I tried again and was back to my original position. No matter how hard I tried to look at the front of the boy’s face I found myself back to only seeing his profile. It was there the dream ended. The dream haunted me for years, recurring once or twice a year from the time I was a child to becoming a young man. Now I was nineteen, just a month from turning twenty years old and needed some answers.
I'd heard about Bishop Nickerson from my family and the wondrous things he could do, but I doubted them. There had been times when I'd been invited to meet him, but me being a young college student, a rational thinker, I always turned the invitations down. But that Saturday afternoon, the day after having another glimpse of the dream I went to my father with the drawing I made. My father felt it was time for me to meet the bishop. So there we were, the bishop and me, sitting in the small crowded office that smelled of warmth, leather and old books.
“So tell me how things are going with school,” the bishop asked. He asked the question partly out of interest with my life, but also to fill time until a revelation came.
I sat back and looked at him. He was a short man, maybe five-two, with a complexion the color of coal, a fleece of silver woolen hair cut close to his head and shocking crystal blue eyes. “School’s alright, I guess.”
“You guess?” He laughed and shifted himself on the old seat pillows he sat on to raise him to his desk. “You’d better be sure!” he remarked. “College is a good thing. We need more of our people in college.”
“Yessir,” I remarked. I could hear my father out in the sanctuary of the small church cleaning and setting up chairs for service the next day.
Bishop and I talked a bit more about what I had been doing with my life besides school. I told him only things I wanted him to know because I was beginning to learn to be cautious about the fact that I liked men. I wouldn’t tell him that, of course.
After a while of talking the bishop stopped and looked across the room. “You sure you don’t know an Oscar? He’s still standing here and he insists he’s your uncle.”
This time I thought more about it. Had either of my parents ever mentioned an Oscar in their stories? I couldn’t remember that name ever being mentioned.
“Call your father in here,” Bishop Nickerson said.
I called my father who came into the office. The bishop asked him the question and my father thought and rubbed his chin. “Can’t say I do.”
“What about Sister Cooper? She didn’t have a brother named Oscar?”
“No. Nope,” my father said, shaking his head.
“Well you really got the wrong office,” Bishop said to the invisible man to his right. We all had a laugh and my father went back out into the church.
A few minutes later, as Bishop Nickerson and I continued talking, my father tore through the door. “Oscar!” He stood with a bright face and his eyes were full of tears. “I forgot about Oscar! He was my older sister’s husband. He died--”
Bishop Nickerson held up his hand. “In 1932.”
“Yeah,” my father said, suddenly remembering. “He always said I was his favorite brother-in-law. My sister was much older than me, so Oscar was like a father to me. My daddy died when I was real young, so I can’t recall too much about him. But then my sister married Oscar and he became like a father to me.”
The bishop nodded with a smile on his face. “Oscar’s laughing. He remembers that too.”
My father went on. “I remember me and him used to sit on the back porch; him in his favorite rockin’ chair with me at his feet every mornin’ and watch the sun rise and we would just talk.” My father continued with the memories coming back. “And he always plowed the field with…”
“His left suspender unbuckled,” the bishop and my father said together.
“That’s Oscar,” my father said. He went on to tell how Oscar had contracted cancer, and how he, my father would sit with him on the back porch knowing that Oscar would be leaving him soon. “And one morning, while was sittin’ on the porch watchin’ the sun rise Oscar’s hand slowly dropped beside his rockin’ chair. I got up and looked at him, and then I went in the house and woke everybody up to tell’em Oscar was gone.”
“Thanks Brother Cooper,” Bishop Nickerson said. “That’s all we need now.”
I watched my father leave the office. I was stunned by the revelation. It was all there: morning, the wooden chair like Oscar’s rocking chair, the boy watching lights almost the color of a sunrise and a ten year old boy (my father would have been ten in 1932). I looked at the door my father had just closed, my mouth open, and then I looked back at the bishop.
“Now he’s talking to me,” Bishop Nickerson said as he listened to Oscar. “He said what happened to you that morning wasn’t a dream. That he came into your room to visit you.”
“But why?”
“He says you remind him so much of your father that he just wanted to talk with you.”
The bishop commenced to tell me what happened that morning. Oscar had come into my room and woke me. He said Oscar didn’t wake the physical self, but he woke my spiritual self so the two of us could spend some time together. I asked what Oscar had shown me, and the bishop said things that I shouldn’t remember. It was why I can only remember flashing lights instead of what he showed me outside of the window. And in answering why the boy in the chair, who was obviously me, would never let me see his face, the bishop said whenever a person sees someone in a dream but can’t see his or her face then the person is the dreamer. I was the boy in the chair.
Time went by as the bishop told me things that Oscar was telling him. Things about me, and how I should not live in fear and that I would travel many places and meet many people in my lifetime, and to trust and have faith because things would be all right.
Then with a twinkle in his eyes, Bishop Nickerson listened more to Oscar, and then Bishop Nickerson turned to me. “Oh, and Oscar says that thing you’re struggling with? You’ll be okay.”
I left the bishop’s office that day stunned but feeling so happy that all I doubted had been replaced with hope and most of all, with faith. As my father and I drove home he didn’t ask me anything. He knew it was all said.
(2011, Doug Cooper Spencer... Photo/Cover Design by Gregory Cooper Spencer)
I thought about it, aware of the room we were in, small and crowded with tattered books and old newspapers. The furniture on which we sat had seen its day. Bishop Nickerson sat behind his desk, a large wooden one. There was so much on his desk, but the only thing that stood out to me was a large book and a tin of smoking tobacco.
“You sure?” Bishop Nickerson asked.
Nodding my head I told him, “Yes sir. To the best of my knowledge.”
“Well he just entered the room and he’s telling me he’s your uncle.”
I moved around a bit in the lumpy old chair I was sitting in, feeling my hands move across the cracked leather, and I glanced at the door that had been closed, then to the corner behind the bishop. Nothing.
“Okay,” Bishop Nickerson said. Then he turned a bit to his right and spoke to the invisible guest, “Guess you got the wrong place Oscar.” The bishop said this with a laugh and I laughed too, more out of relief. But I was there for a reason and I wanted results.
After all, hadn’t I been brought there by my father because of a drawing I had shown him and the story behind the drawing? It was a sketch of a dream I'd been having off and on for almost ten years since 1964. And now, here it is, 1974 and once again-- the dream.
It was a dream in which I awoke in my bedroom with a stranger sitting across the room from me. I recalled looking for my older brother who shared the bed with me, but he wasn’t there, just me and the stranger, a boy, sitting in a high back wooden chair staring out the window with his back to me. In the dream I can recall getting out of bed and walking to the boy who, by his stature, appeared to be my age at the time.
As I walked up to him I saw what held his attention. Outside of the window were brilliant lights of orange and yellow that danced against the window and filled the sky. I stood a bit behind the boy and stared at the lights in awe. I remember that neither I, nor the boy had been frightened by the display of lights because there was no sense of danger just fascination. It was as if the lights were somehow connected to our being there. But to the boy it seemed as if it was more. The boy sat in silence, his feet dangling from the chair, looking ahead transfixed by the lights as if the lights were relating to him, as if there was a silent conversation going on between them.
I wanted to see who the boy was, so I leaned around to look at his face and suddenly I was snapped back to only seeing his profile. I tried again and was back to my original position. No matter how hard I tried to look at the front of the boy’s face I found myself back to only seeing his profile. It was there the dream ended. The dream haunted me for years, recurring once or twice a year from the time I was a child to becoming a young man. Now I was nineteen, just a month from turning twenty years old and needed some answers.
I'd heard about Bishop Nickerson from my family and the wondrous things he could do, but I doubted them. There had been times when I'd been invited to meet him, but me being a young college student, a rational thinker, I always turned the invitations down. But that Saturday afternoon, the day after having another glimpse of the dream I went to my father with the drawing I made. My father felt it was time for me to meet the bishop. So there we were, the bishop and me, sitting in the small crowded office that smelled of warmth, leather and old books.
“So tell me how things are going with school,” the bishop asked. He asked the question partly out of interest with my life, but also to fill time until a revelation came.
I sat back and looked at him. He was a short man, maybe five-two, with a complexion the color of coal, a fleece of silver woolen hair cut close to his head and shocking crystal blue eyes. “School’s alright, I guess.”
“You guess?” He laughed and shifted himself on the old seat pillows he sat on to raise him to his desk. “You’d better be sure!” he remarked. “College is a good thing. We need more of our people in college.”
“Yessir,” I remarked. I could hear my father out in the sanctuary of the small church cleaning and setting up chairs for service the next day.
Bishop and I talked a bit more about what I had been doing with my life besides school. I told him only things I wanted him to know because I was beginning to learn to be cautious about the fact that I liked men. I wouldn’t tell him that, of course.
After a while of talking the bishop stopped and looked across the room. “You sure you don’t know an Oscar? He’s still standing here and he insists he’s your uncle.”
This time I thought more about it. Had either of my parents ever mentioned an Oscar in their stories? I couldn’t remember that name ever being mentioned.
“Call your father in here,” Bishop Nickerson said.
I called my father who came into the office. The bishop asked him the question and my father thought and rubbed his chin. “Can’t say I do.”
“What about Sister Cooper? She didn’t have a brother named Oscar?”
“No. Nope,” my father said, shaking his head.
“Well you really got the wrong office,” Bishop said to the invisible man to his right. We all had a laugh and my father went back out into the church.
A few minutes later, as Bishop Nickerson and I continued talking, my father tore through the door. “Oscar!” He stood with a bright face and his eyes were full of tears. “I forgot about Oscar! He was my older sister’s husband. He died--”
Bishop Nickerson held up his hand. “In 1932.”
“Yeah,” my father said, suddenly remembering. “He always said I was his favorite brother-in-law. My sister was much older than me, so Oscar was like a father to me. My daddy died when I was real young, so I can’t recall too much about him. But then my sister married Oscar and he became like a father to me.”
The bishop nodded with a smile on his face. “Oscar’s laughing. He remembers that too.”
My father went on. “I remember me and him used to sit on the back porch; him in his favorite rockin’ chair with me at his feet every mornin’ and watch the sun rise and we would just talk.” My father continued with the memories coming back. “And he always plowed the field with…”
“His left suspender unbuckled,” the bishop and my father said together.
“That’s Oscar,” my father said. He went on to tell how Oscar had contracted cancer, and how he, my father would sit with him on the back porch knowing that Oscar would be leaving him soon. “And one morning, while was sittin’ on the porch watchin’ the sun rise Oscar’s hand slowly dropped beside his rockin’ chair. I got up and looked at him, and then I went in the house and woke everybody up to tell’em Oscar was gone.”
“Thanks Brother Cooper,” Bishop Nickerson said. “That’s all we need now.”
I watched my father leave the office. I was stunned by the revelation. It was all there: morning, the wooden chair like Oscar’s rocking chair, the boy watching lights almost the color of a sunrise and a ten year old boy (my father would have been ten in 1932). I looked at the door my father had just closed, my mouth open, and then I looked back at the bishop.
“Now he’s talking to me,” Bishop Nickerson said as he listened to Oscar. “He said what happened to you that morning wasn’t a dream. That he came into your room to visit you.”
“But why?”
“He says you remind him so much of your father that he just wanted to talk with you.”
The bishop commenced to tell me what happened that morning. Oscar had come into my room and woke me. He said Oscar didn’t wake the physical self, but he woke my spiritual self so the two of us could spend some time together. I asked what Oscar had shown me, and the bishop said things that I shouldn’t remember. It was why I can only remember flashing lights instead of what he showed me outside of the window. And in answering why the boy in the chair, who was obviously me, would never let me see his face, the bishop said whenever a person sees someone in a dream but can’t see his or her face then the person is the dreamer. I was the boy in the chair.
Time went by as the bishop told me things that Oscar was telling him. Things about me, and how I should not live in fear and that I would travel many places and meet many people in my lifetime, and to trust and have faith because things would be all right.
Then with a twinkle in his eyes, Bishop Nickerson listened more to Oscar, and then Bishop Nickerson turned to me. “Oh, and Oscar says that thing you’re struggling with? You’ll be okay.”
I left the bishop’s office that day stunned but feeling so happy that all I doubted had been replaced with hope and most of all, with faith. As my father and I drove home he didn’t ask me anything. He knew it was all said.
(2011, Doug Cooper Spencer... Photo/Cover Design by Gregory Cooper Spencer)
Dancing for Your Life (June 14, 2013)
The little fella was a good dancer. He looked like he was no more than four years old, maybe five at the most. His moves were pretty good, none of that flinging and shaking stuff a lot kids do at his age. One look and you could tell he was used to dancing.
I watched him as I sat on the plaza relaxing after a long day at work. It was a mild sunny day and the evening sun drifted towards the edge of the city. An occasional breeze swept the plaza spraying water from the fountain on the dozens of people who had come out to enjoy the evening causing some of them to laugh and scurry from the reach of the spray. Kids ran helter-skelter around the large fountain chasing each other, or rather it seemed they were more in a mad dash towards freedom in the evening air than to actually catch the person ahead of them.
On the stage a DJ spun music as people sat in chairs at café tables talking and nodding their heads to the music he played.
I sat along the side of the plaza so I could get a full view of the scene and there beside me the little boy danced. Like the other kids, the little boy wasn’t on the plaza unattended. A bit behind me his mother sat fanning herself and watching him. “Aw git it Rayshaun,” she called out as the little boy grinned up at her and continued to dance his heart out.
“He’s good,” I said, turning back to the woman, but she just looked at me in silence with eyes that were so stoney that it was enough to make me mind my own business. I turned away.
The boy danced as the DJ mixed. I could see his small face glistening from a sheath of sweat and there were beads of perspiration that began on his forehead and ran down along his dark brown face. He danced with his eyes locked on his mother who pushed him on, “That’s momma’s baby! Aw git it!”
After a few more moves the little boy’s attention was pulled away from his mother to the kids running across the plaza circling the fountain laughing and splashing water at each other. He stood for a few seconds gazing at them. Then a look of fascination came to his eyes and he took a few steps towards the children. His steps were tentative and full of caution as he inched away from his mother and towards the other kids.
Suddenly his mother yelled, “Git, yo’ ass back here!” Her voice was so loud and demanding that it caused the boy’s small body to jerk to a halt. He turned around and studied his mother who was now leaning forward in her chair, her eyes glaring at him, and then without further hesitation he went back to the very spot where he had been dancing. The DJ mixed another cut and the little boy started up his dance once again. He grinned hopefully as he danced and watched his mother.
(2013, Doug Cooper Spencer... Photo/Cover Design by Gregory Cooper Spencer)
I watched him as I sat on the plaza relaxing after a long day at work. It was a mild sunny day and the evening sun drifted towards the edge of the city. An occasional breeze swept the plaza spraying water from the fountain on the dozens of people who had come out to enjoy the evening causing some of them to laugh and scurry from the reach of the spray. Kids ran helter-skelter around the large fountain chasing each other, or rather it seemed they were more in a mad dash towards freedom in the evening air than to actually catch the person ahead of them.
On the stage a DJ spun music as people sat in chairs at café tables talking and nodding their heads to the music he played.
I sat along the side of the plaza so I could get a full view of the scene and there beside me the little boy danced. Like the other kids, the little boy wasn’t on the plaza unattended. A bit behind me his mother sat fanning herself and watching him. “Aw git it Rayshaun,” she called out as the little boy grinned up at her and continued to dance his heart out.
“He’s good,” I said, turning back to the woman, but she just looked at me in silence with eyes that were so stoney that it was enough to make me mind my own business. I turned away.
The boy danced as the DJ mixed. I could see his small face glistening from a sheath of sweat and there were beads of perspiration that began on his forehead and ran down along his dark brown face. He danced with his eyes locked on his mother who pushed him on, “That’s momma’s baby! Aw git it!”
After a few more moves the little boy’s attention was pulled away from his mother to the kids running across the plaza circling the fountain laughing and splashing water at each other. He stood for a few seconds gazing at them. Then a look of fascination came to his eyes and he took a few steps towards the children. His steps were tentative and full of caution as he inched away from his mother and towards the other kids.
Suddenly his mother yelled, “Git, yo’ ass back here!” Her voice was so loud and demanding that it caused the boy’s small body to jerk to a halt. He turned around and studied his mother who was now leaning forward in her chair, her eyes glaring at him, and then without further hesitation he went back to the very spot where he had been dancing. The DJ mixed another cut and the little boy started up his dance once again. He grinned hopefully as he danced and watched his mother.
(2013, Doug Cooper Spencer... Photo/Cover Design by Gregory Cooper Spencer)