Standing in a gas station restroom off the interstate, washing our hands at side-by-side sinks, my 8-year-old son, Ben, asked me, "Do you think this is all a dream?"
"I don't know. What do you mean?"
"Well, maybe this is all a dream we're having; maybe it's not real, but it feels real. How would we know?"
"I guess we probably wouldn't know," I said. "Maybe it's a dream one of us is having, or maybe we are both part of a dream someone else is having. Either way, I'm really glad we're in it together."
"Me, too," he said, drying his hands on his shorts. "But OK, do you think it's a dream?"
"Well no, not really. I think we are real, whatever that means, and this is our life, and we are responsible for our actions and their consequences. But honestly, I couldn't prove this isn't a dream. One day we'll be gone, and all the people who knew us will be gone, and then who's to say whether it was real or not?"
As we clambered back into the car, Ben chirped to his 13-year-old brother, "Mom says maybe this is a dream."
Jack looked up impassively from his iPod. "How much longer to Florida?" he asked no one in particular.
"Just a few hours," I said. "Assuming no one wakes up and stops the dream."
We go to the same place every year, spend the same week at the same beachside condo, visit the same restaurants, golf the same courses, stand and gaze at the same bay where manatees loll. I run the same stretch of beach in the mornings, we have smoothies at the same café every afternoon, walk the same boardwalk together through the dunes.
The kids, who have done this every year for all their lives, relish the repetition, object with near-alarm to any deviation from the annual routine. Every year, when we come back to the beach, we all talk about the years before, discuss what has changed, what hasn't.
"There's my old ocean," my mother always says when we arrive, gazing out at the vast, churning Atlantic she grew up watching.
"Right where you left it," I always reply.
My grandmother is still here, too, still in the home where she's lived for decades, but now she's dying by inches, bedbound and helpless, both in and out of this world. More out than in every day. I guess her dream is winding down. Somewhere, someone is waking up.
In my memory, she is fierce and funny, irreverent, whip-smart and open-hearted, the breadwinner for her family generations before that became downright pedestrian. Last summer we doubted she'd make it to this one.
"Should we book the condo again?" my mother asked as we packed up to head home.
"Of course," I said.
The traditions of this trip long ago transcended the visit to my grandmother's house. It's grown its own life, and the kids will expect it even after the one my grandmother is slowly shedding finally dims and quiets to stillness.
I took the boys to see her, for what I expect will be the last time. But you never know. Her pale, familiar eyes were briefly bright at the sight of my children and me at her bedside, and she startled and turned toward the sound of my mother's voice. She told us Abraham Lincoln is the president, then devoured a chocolate éclair my mother cut up and fed her. She's still in there, somewhere, 89 years of memories unspooling in wild ribbons across what's left of her consciousness.
As we left, Ben announced that he's pretty sure this isn't all a dream.
"It has to be real," he said. "It's going on for too long."
Contact Mary Fortune at thirtytensomething.blogspot.com.