How do you teach a method of connection? What do we connect with? Or who do we connect with? The biggest question for Jack, what IS connection? The subject just ‘happened’ to come up in one of the myriad books that Jack leaves around the Gator house. Perhaps you know, or are, one of those people that read when eating, before sleeping, when waiting for those two things. Skimming, flipping through chapters, some of the pages dog-eared in a good place to start again.

So, the subject of connection was in one of those scattered piles throughout the house and it stopped Jack’s thought train with screeching brakes and a trail of sparks on the tracks of his otherwise placid reading. Connection. Why would he want to connect with someone he has never seen, but just read about? Perhaps in a dream about Hemingway he just had? Why try to connect with a great author that has left the world decades ago? Perhaps there is a way to connect with him by reading his writing and taking notes. Was the dream a connection with Jack’s memory, one which Jack has been missing or ignoring for decades? The dream seemed to be from Jack’s best friend who tells him these things.

It was a vivid dream. Jack was in the big city and drove by a splendid home that triggered a memory of connection. He went up the sidewalk to the familiar home and was welcomed in by several people that knew him. The memory of living across the street and being mentored by Hemingway when Jack was a boy flooded in. The books from the fabulous library loaned to him, hours sitting with ‘Papa’ and being told, someday he would be writing truth with skill to make images with his words. Stories of adventure. The dream ended with one of the daughters telling Jack it was so good to see him again and would he like to stay for a while?

There was a loud noise that sounded like explosions and Jack was awoken suddenly with a strong desire to remember the dream by writing it down. At 4am. (The sound sounded like the summer people having fun blowing things up.) It was only the family dog.

It seemed the dream was a message from Jack himself. Deep in rem sleep, dredging up ‘connections’ that surfaced as reality sleeping dormant. Or was the dream a connection with someone else that had spoken it? Jack likes to write about life, but to develop a story like this one was perhaps ego and desire palpable. Still remembering the dream Jack knew what the connection was and with who.

It was encouragement and confirmation from the greatest authors ever known. “Keep writing, stay steady and tell the truth Jack. Don’t try and make your writing original, write the truth and and write the story as best you can and originality will come forth.” Indeed, the question of ‘what is truth’ was asked centuries ago and the answer was silence. The truth of that life was obvious and the words written about that life still capture and hold us. When truth is revealed, it is a beauty sought.

Sometimes only five words can take your breath away and be remembered forever. Connection. As coming awake again from the dream of life. The reason, the hope, the answer to so many questions. The book that can be read again and again that speaks and shakes our inner man with it’s truth. A book worth dreams awake or asleep. Dreams of destiny and worth.

As Johnny Cash said: “Sooner or later, everyone comes back to Jesus. The Bible, It’s pretty good.

Jack Gator