Gardens

I tried to get the Wolvog and Josh to guess my favourite Pete Seeger song, but they couldn’t get it after three guesses.

“It’s his cover of Garden Song,” I told them. “But my friend banned us from singing this at camp because I would always burst into tears at the same line.” I hit play on my phone, and the song filled the kitchen.

Sure enough, even though I didn’t feel sad, when I heard the line, “We are made of dreams and bone,” I burst into tears, and we turned off the song.

I don’t know why that line still gets to me almost thirty years later. That idea that everything feels so precarious; we’re so small and insubstantial: dreams and bones, soul and body.

The friend who banned the song died a little over ten years ago. I knew he died at that time, but I didn’t Google him until after I cried listening to the Garden Song, even though I’ve thought about him a lot over the last few years because we keep returning to the camp area.

I found a Twitter account he set up a few days before he died, with about ten tweets in quick succession, most of them links. Five people followed it: The man’s other Twitter account (a replica of the one I was on but under a non-English version of his name), three other people, and Yoko Ono.

My first thought was, “What is the story there? How did Yoko Ono find your account?” And I wanted to write to him and ask, but I couldn’t because we’re just dreams and bones, and he’s gone. There was this great story in the universe, and I would never know it because he was not here to ask him about it.