Buddy Holly Dream

This is going to be a rambling post, as I've just woken up a few minutes prior and my head is full of cobwebs, but there are some thoughts that I want to write down before they are gone.

I've decided to start writing down my dreams here as I rarely remember them since I've become an adult, and when I do, I assume they're important. I dreamt not only about Buddy Holly last night, but I also woke up with the song True Love Ways in my head. Reading about Buddy Holly's death in the encyclopedia was one of the first times I remember being genuinely frightened growing up. His death not only in a plane crash but also during a freezing cold winter was something I could not get out of my head as a child. (Interestingly, his death near the city of Mason City, Iowa, was the same location as the disappeareance of KIMT anchor Jodi Huisentruit 36 years later). His death reminded me not only of the harshness of the winters in North Dakota but also of driving through the bleak empty soy fields in November to see my family in Northwest Ohio.

I used to play his music when we lived at The Mews in the mid- to late nineties and be filled with a certain dread, having first felt that several years prior when the episode "The Tale of Dead Man's Float" on Are You Afraid of the Dark? aired, then having surmised that the 1950s was filled with horrible, scary deaths. (The release of the Mark Dinning song Teen Angel nine months after Holly's death in October of 1959 definitely didn't help this impression. As an aside, Buddy Holly died on February 3, 1959, exactly 8 years after the death of my favorite singer, Fréhel, on February 3, 1951).

For some reason, my fear of 1950s deaths was somehow tied into the sickly, mesmerizing shade known as hospital green, which, unlike my second favorite color seafoam green, contains enough fear (and a slight yellow shade) that it ruins the color entirely. (I will be writing more about my association of hospital green with dread and a pale, sterile shade of light blue later on in this blog. This blue shade is tied into a specific scene in the movie Picnic, which, ironically, also takes place in a small town in the middle of the fields of Kansas in the 1950s, although it doesn't fill me with dread the way hospital green does).

Why do I mention all of this? Because I dreamt about Buddy Holly last night for a reason, although I'm not quite sure why, and suddenly my head is flooded with that same sickly green color and feeling of dread I got reading about him in the encyclopedia and on the early internet as a child. I wonder if this is going to be a very long, harsh winter. Each year I go through a very specific phase as autumn and winter approach: depressed introspection begins first, as fall is associated with the death of my paternal grandfather; my divorce on October 21; and the last time I saw the brother of a former boyfriend at Thanksgiving, who was killed a month later in December of 2006. Then this introspection becomes tempered somewhat by my desire for the cooler weather of fall and the coziness that will inevitably fill my house (along with candlelight and the scent of baked goods). Then winter comes. I used to hate winter, with the exception of my birthday in January, which is always filled with bright colors, but our December trips to Bath have helped this somewhat over the last year. But this morning, however, I feel very strange about it all.