The details of Wednesday morning’s dream are lost to me now in distance and fog. Waking spirited me away from them, and it was day, and time for work.
In the dream, I was re-encountering an old love, having that first face-to-face conversation after years, gingerly navigating what was then and what is - this was a dream segment unto itself - when my father appeared, took me by the elbow, and pulled me aside to tell me that I deserved more than to be merely a casual or occasional romantic interest, that I deserved to be cherished, for someone to want me to have and to hold instead. It was the sort of lecture that embarrasses daughters, even in dreams and even when daughters are forty-five and fathers five years dead. I don’t know if my father actually used the word cherish in the dream; I remember only the gist of his admonitions, his familiar face, rectangular and square-jawed, his khakis from Sears, his suede hush puppies, those pens in his shirt pocket - the clickable ballpoints with four colors of ink.
It is the word cherish, however, that has been with me since Wednesday morning. It seems to be the residual gift of the dream because it defines what it is that the heart seeks better than does that hard-ridden, used up warhorse of a word, love. My father was the persona the dream resurrected to tell me what my heart would have me know. It is cherishing I want, and to cherish in return. It is good to know such things, even when they are not readily to be had, because it doesn’t do to get confused and settle for something else.
My Mac has a dictionary widget; I conjured it that morning with a click of my mouse and typed in the word cherish:
Cherish [verb, trans.]
- to protect and care for (someone) lovingly: he cared for me beyond measure and cherished me in his heart.
- to hold (someone) dear: I cherish the letters she wrote.
- (of a hope, idea or memory) think of longingly or lovingly: we will cherish your memory.
ORIGIN: Middle English (in the sense [treat with affection]), from Old French … cher ‘dear,’ from Latin, carus.
I think people need cherishing. Children need cherishing, and when they are not cherished, they are terribly wounded and slow to recover. Partners and friends need cherishing. The cat, the madcap dogs, and the soft white rabbit all need cherishing. So do the garden, the skies, the ocean, the earth. There is altogether a shortage of cherishing in this busy, disconnected and distracted world of ours. What does it mean even today that I sit down to write deepest things on a screen instead of speaking them across the kitchen table at breakfast to someone who has chosen to hear both today and tomorrow?
Sometimes I say under my breath and into the air, without thinking, “I love you,” and these days I shake myself a little and ask, “Who in the world are you talking to?” I think we come into the world to cherish and, in the best of circumstances, to find ourselves cherished as well. We want to be cherished not just when we strive to please, but when we are lying asleep with our mouths half open, or when we’ve forgotten the thing we were supposed to remember at the grocery store.
In the end we must learn to cherish ourselves - to extend ourselves a measure of grace, forgiveness, and mercy, approval and love, and to hold ourselves close when there is no one else to hold us close - and even when there is. We must give ourselves our own blessing.
On Wednesday, in the half hour between waking and the tyranny of clocks, I traced the word cherish back a little farther. I wanted to know about the Latin root carus. Google’s first result landed me at Narrow Shore, assuredly the blog of a lover of words. Carus, it turns out, gives us not only cherish but caress, charity, an Old Irish word for friend, and the kama (’love,’ ‘desire’) of the Kama Sutra.
It is also, ironically, the etymological ancestor of the word whore (originally ‘one who desires’).