“The Temptations” were on the Ed Sullivan show, and I was watching it with my fiancé at her parents’ house. I believe that the lead singer on the song, “The Impossible Dream” was Otis Williams, but I remember the camera showing a close-up and sweat was streaming down the soloists’ face as he sang. In later years, both before and after we married, my bride’s parents would ask to me sing that song. I always did as I was asked.
The year after we married, and after we had buried my father-in-law, we left Pittsburgh and traveled toward California, where I expected to pursue my dream of being an artist. My bride’s mother called us “The Dreamers,” and we named our 1963 VW Bug, “The Dreamer.” The humans lived in California for 8 years, but the Bug expired six months after it had carried us more than 2,000 miles across the country.
I sang “The Impossible Dream” for years before I learned of its connection to the stage play, Man of La Mancha. I tilted at windmills in Los Angeles and finally conceded that my dream of a career as an artist was not to be. I started working in another profession, one that would sustain the Dreamers for 10 years: Small loan office manager. In 1972, despite great difficulty and the fear of loss, we realized our dream of having a child. In 1974, we bought our first house and the former high school swim team member brought to fruition his dream of having an in-ground swimming pool and an Irish Setter. Man, woman, daughter, and dog would sometimes be in the pool together, though it was sometimes dangerous to swim with the dog, whose paddling feet could scratch a bare belly.
The two most recent dreamers are my 19-year-old grandson, a sophomore at Drexel University who dreams about – and works toward – a degree in material science engineering. His sister, on the cusp of 15 years, and a varsity player as an outside hitter on her high school’s volleyball team, dreams of studying in Korea. Her school permits students to develop independent study plans, which she has done; she has a teacher to sponsor her and my niece, who was stationed in Korea when she was in the U.S. Army, has agreed to take her cousin to that country.
Paul Williams and Kenny Ascher wrote a song called “Rainbow Connection”; Kermit The Frog – from the Muppets – sings it plaintively, asking why there are so many songs about rainbows. Rainbows are “visions/But only illusions,” Kermit sings, but continues to voice the hope that people make that “rainbow connection” for the “lovers, the dreamers and me.” My third dream, my youngest granddaughter, exclaimed to me one day, “This is the BEST. DAY. EVER!” The 5-year-old pointed to a rainbow on the wall inside the bathroom of my apartment, and its companion reflections on the doorplate and a wall in the hallway. “Three rainbows!”
I can no longer sing “The Impossible Dream” in the way that “The Temptations” did on that long-ago day in the home of the parents of my first bride, in the way that I did for so many years afterward. I have also set fire to many of my dreams, but I still have the hope that my three grandchildren will dream the impossible dream and reach the unreachable star. I don’t know how many songs there are about rainbows, but those three are for me, the rainbow connection: From the lovers to the dreamers, and then, to me.
cjon3acd@att.net