This is my song, oh God of all the nations,

A song of peace for lands afar and mine.

This is my home, the country where my heart is;

Here are my hopes, my dreams, my sacred shrine.

But other hearts in other lands are beating,

With hopes and dreams as true and high as mine.

My country’s skies are bluer than the ocean,

And sunlight beams on cloverleaf and pine.

But other lands have sunlight too and clover,

And skies are everywhere as blue as mine.

Oh hear my song, oh God of all the nations,

A song of peace for their land and for mine.

May truth and freedom come to every nation;

may peace abound where strife has raged so long;

that each may seek to love and build together,

a world united, righting every wrong;

a world united in its love for freedom,

proclaiming peace together in one song.

Only in my dreams...

I know I'm not the only person on Earth who has a recurring nightmare.  Mine started shortly after my eighth birthday and I still dream it to this day.  That's thirty years of the same, exact nightmare, for those of you keeping score at home.  A darn long time to be haunted by the same dream.

Like I said, I'm not the only person on Earth who has a recurring nightmare, but I betcha I'm one of the only people on Earth who has a photograph of it.  You see, on my visit to my childhood home this past week, I was going through old photographs that my parents have in boxes (and boxes, and boxes) in their house.  I was looking for a few, specific pictures out of what must be tens of thousands of photographs, and I wasn't holding my breath that I would find those few for which I searched.  (My father has been an avid photographer for my entire life, photographing just about everything right down to my very first diaper rash.  I kid you not, though that wasn't the picture I was trying to find.  I've inherited his shutterbug tendencies, and as such can rival Dad's collection of pictures already, though the vast majority of mine are digital and therefore just taking up space in the external hard drive, instead of haphazard piles in no particular order stuffed into cardboard boxes.)  I found some of the ones I had hoped to find, along with many others that I set aside for future blog posts and/or blackmail (I've already sworn a solemn vow to one of my sisters that certain photos of her from our childhood will never be posted by me to Facebook...).

The one I didn't intend to find - one I didn't even realize existed at all - was the one that captured the moment of my recurring nightmare.  Here it is:

It doesn't look too nightmarish, I know.  What you're looking at is a photograph of an evening in December, 1979, when my parents took me, along with two friends, into New York City to celebrate my eighth birthday.  We went to Rockefeller Center and saw the Christmas tree.  We saw the Radio City Music Hall Christmas Spectacular.  We saw the decorated windows at Macy's and along Fifth Avenue.  We then went to the Trump Tower, which is where the picture above was taken.  I am the girl in the bright orange hat with the pompom almost as big as my head on top.

If you aren't familiar with Trump Tower, the interior is gorgeous.  Here's a shot I found online of the inside:

Coincidentally, it appears to be decorated for Christmas as it was on that night in December 1979.  (There are other shots of the Trump Tower here and here, for those of you who aren't familiar.)


That night, as we went up the series of open escalators, I first felt the gripping fear that would become my biggest phobia - a fear of falling from a great height.  (I do not have a fear of heights, per se, but only one of falling from a height.  I feel perfectly fine on top of the Empire State Building, where falling over the edge accidentally is a virtual impossibility - falling on purpose from the top must take some serious effort, indeed! - but standing on a balcony just one or two stories up and looking over a railing freaks me out.  I do not know if this technically is just acrophobia, or fear of heights, or if it is something separate.)  I was looking down as we climbed the floors and my palms began to sweat, my heart began to pound, my skin became clammy.  I shook it off at the time, but that was the beginning of the end of my previously phobia-free existence.


The nightmare, which I first had that night, is this: I am with my family at the Trump Tower at Christmastime.  In my dream, I am of varying ages; sometimes I am a child, sometimes I am my actual age at the time.  However, in my dream, my youngest sister - who would've been two at the time of the dream's onset - is always an infant, and for whatever reason, my mother has given her to me to hold.  I am holding her, both of us bundled in our winter coats, scarves, mittens, and we're climbing the escalators.  As we rise higher off the main floor, my sister moves suddenly in an attempt (I always think) to see the waterfall that cascades down the one interior wall and I lose my hold on her.  She falls from my arms, plummeting over the side and then I wake up.  She never gets rescued nor does she hit the floor before I am awake, panicked and sweaty, sometimes having screamed aloud.

That was the nightmare I had that first night, back in December '79, and it has been virtually the same since then.  I do not dream it as often as I did as a child, and there doesn't seem to be any one, specific trigger for it, but I do still have it occasionally to this day.  This is the only recurring nightmare I have.  I had one other as a child, but that one (about a giant, floating eyeball, of all things) stopped when I was maybe 11 or 12.  I just never realized there was a photograph to go with the dream.  Freaky, huh?

(By the way, I have been to Trump Tower many times since that night.  I've even ridden those same escalators, both as a child and an adult.  It never did alleviate the nightmare.)

What about you?  Am I the only one to have a recurring nightmare that began in childhood?  Anyone else share my fear of falling from a height?  Have I just outed myself as certifiably freaky?
 

Blog Around the World: In a New York State of Mind

Greetings and welcome to New York, BATWers! So glad you could stop by today and visit our great state. Now, I know the other hostess for NY is a city girl, but I'm here to represent the rest of the state. While New York City certainly is fantabulous (I am originally a Jersey Girl and grew up within an hour of NYC - my first real job was in Manhattan and NYC remains one of my most favorite cities ever), there is a lot more to the state than just those five delightful boroughs. I'll leave the city tour to her, and show you around upstate. As our state motto says, Excelsior! (That means "ever upward" in case you can't recall your high school Latin. I know I can't - I had to look that up!)

There are several great places to visit in New York. We've got vineyards and apple orchards and farms aplenty. We've got mountains - the Adirondacks, Catskills and Alleghenies (which are part of the Appalachian Mountain range) all go through our state. We've also got lakes, including a couple of the Great ones (Lake Ontario, where I live, and Lake Erie, too). We've got dibs on one side of Niagara Falls (though, props to the Canadians for having the better side - though that was just luck of the draw on the border, eh?). Some slightly less massive, yet still amazing and beautiful waterfalls can be found all over our state, along with the gorges they cut into the land - gorgeous! Oh yeah, and we've also got kind of a famous canal, that runs right through my town....



Is the sightseeing making you hungry? There are loads of "good eats" that originated here in NY! For example, we all know and love Buffalo wings (or just plain old "wings" as we call 'em around here). A delicious sandwich you may not have heard of that also comes out of Buffalo is the Beef on Weck, which is a roast beef sandwich with horseradish on a Kimmelweck roll. Closer to my neck of the woods, there's a little dish known as the Garbage Plate. Despite its name, it is delicious, if a bit messy. Salt Potatoes are native to central NY, and you can find them at fairs, festivals and summertime BBQs and picnics across the state. Another delicious dish with NY ties is Chicken French, though veal and artichokes can also be done French and are all equally tasty.

Besides our land and our food, there are lots of cool things to do in upstate NY. Each August, you can visit the Great New York State Fair over in Syracuse. That is a can't miss trip for my kiddo and me every summer. We have music festivals aplenty - Rochester and Syracuse both have annual jazz festivals, for example, oh and there's a little music festival you might of heard of called Woodstock - that's a NY thing, too! There are many great arts and crafts festivals, along with the music festivals. For example, Rochester is home to the Lilac Festival, which is lots of fun and another can't-miss for my family. We have one of the top children's museums in the country right here in upstate New York, not to mention several terrific zoos and 176 state parks to visit. New York is home to several great educational institutions, from Cornell (if you're feeling Ivy-ish) to the SUNY schools, to Syracuse University (have to plug it - Hubby and I are both Orange! Yes, I know, our alma mater's mascot is a citrus fruit, what can I say, we didn't pick it and he is pretty cute!). West Point is also in NY, to give a shout out to our military. And did you know that the women's rights movement has its birthplace in upstate NY? Yep, the first ever Women's Rights Convention was in 1848 in Seneca Falls.

What else can I tell you? Our state insect is the ladybug and our state flower is the rose. We are, of course, the Empire State. So, please enjoy your visit to our great state, and be sure to pop by NYC and check out that wonderful corner of the state, too!