This article was originally published in The Cornell Daily Sun, Volume CII, Number 88, 14 February 1986. It was the guest feature article, appearing on page 5. See Source article (in new browser window/tab).
The other night I had a dream, and that it stayed with me until now surprises me into believing it was very important. My father and I were in the dream-invented Ithaca Port Authority, waiting for a bus to Columbia, South America. I had convinced my father this was the best way to travel, since STS is even cheaper than Greyhound — and so there we were.
Of course the bus was late, and even though the dream is half-faded, I remember they kept delaying our boarding. This inevitably led to two things travelers try to avoid more than we try to avoid Saturday morning classes: going to the public bathroom and eating in the sky-high priced (“airport-priced,” Dad calls it) station restaurant. My excursion to the bathroom has mercifully faded in my memory, although I got the sensation that I was acquainted with all the low-life specimens I found therein (1 think most of them were drug dealers; certainly I must have known them from high school...). The trip to the restaurant was as bad as we expected, and Dad and I left without eating. No matter how hungry one gets, my father told me, a cup of bad coffee is never worth $4.95.
I remember little more, but I was left with the sense-dulling sensation one gets on return from a large transport center; namely, I felt small.
It was particularly good to see my father, who’s been away for the last month — in Columbia, in fact. It’s been too long since I’ve been able to speak to him. Since I was accompanying him to Colombia, I was very much aware of my feelings toward that exotic, backwards, scary and alluring place. The dream seemed to bring back all the anxieties, good and bad, of traveling far from home, accompanied by my father.
Most of my thoughts throughout the dream concerned my father. He was beardless in the dream, which hasn’t been the case for a few years, and looked younger. He is a huge man in my mind, although he stands no more than five-foot-eight; very much like the land he lived in for 12 years, he is both ominous and inviting, stormy and peaceful. He is cosmopolitan, and yet limited, choosing to accept only certain ways of thinking and living — and yet living a very complete life within those bounds. Suffice it to say that my father is a man who always makes his presence known.
Stuck as I am out here in Ithaca, I choose this exile of a sort for many reasons, distance from those I love being a positive point rather them a negative one. When I go home this weekend for my sister’s wedding, I’ll speak to and see my father (“my father” he is in reference, but always “Dad” or “Pop” in person) for the first time in a month, my vacation from parental stress will come to a not-unlooked-for end. And all the same feelings — including the anxieties the past few years have given birth to — will return.
I wonder if by some chance he shaved his beard ...
— Sami Besalel
When published, Sami Besalel was a Junior in the College of Arts and Sciences at Ithaca's Cornell University.
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