The Gift

The Gift

Harry Buschman

Emile woke one morning in the month of May and thought he had never had a dream so beautiful. It was only a dream, but it was so detailed, so exquisite, so completely wonderful that he felt he had to share it with the world.

He thought if he could write it down, or paint it ... or maybe express it in music so others could see or hear it ... what a gift to the world it would be. Emile spent the whole morning wondering just which form would be best. That was his first problem. He had no talent of any kind in the arts, and he couldn't just sit down in front of somebody and tell him about his dream, that would be like trying to describe the Mona Lisa or A Midsummer Night's Dream or, God knows what – maybe even Beethoven's Ninth Symphony to someone who had never heard it.

But he could write a little. "Everybody can read and write," he thought... and so he made up his mind to create a work of literature which would describe this remarkable dream. He knew nothing about painting or music, but he could write a poem. It would describe his dream in literary terms, and anyone reading it would see the beauty and wonder of the dream he had last night.

So he stayed home from work that following morning and sat down at his living room window with paper and pencil and waited for the words to come.

He sat there a long time, in fact he was still sitting there at lunch time. He looked down at his paper and was disappointed to see he had written nothing. He tested the pencil on the corner of the paper ... made a few squiggles ... and stared out the living room window at the people passing by. Writing a poem wasn't as easy as he thought. In fact he was still there when the sun went down that evening with nothing on his paper but the squiggles he made at lunch time.

It was growing late and the memory of the dream was fading. Before he forgot it completely he made a few tentative beginnings, using words he heard the priest use in the church, others he found in the dictionary and a considerable number from the speeches of famous men in the pages of history. Strange to say, when he read them over, the words didn’t mean what he wanted to say.

He began to despair of ever finding words to describe his wonderful dream, and what troubled him even more was the growing realization that the dream itself was fading from his mind.

Harry Buschman