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Saturday, May 4, 2013

A Dream! A Fantasy!



Grandpa's Home!

In an earlier post I described how I had bought a pre-paid funeral plan from Golden Leaves Ltd, last August, and I had chosen cremation for my body. No sooner had I done that a September raging fire that covered six communities rolled over our house at 3.30 in the morning and we had to run for our lives, staying ahead of the fire by no more than one minute.

Let me make this abundantly clear: I choose cremation, but only AFTER I have well and truly finished with my body. Perhaps this was a case of being really careful about what you wish for.

A few nights ago I had one of those very long dreams that seem to take up the entire night. It was a really sweet dream in spite of the fact that it began with my death and cremation. My family were given my ashes to take with them, and as I am originally from the beautiful islands of Bermuda, they decided to make sure that my urn was unsinkable and indestructible so that they could float me in the Atlantic in the hope that I would find my way back to Bermuda.

They fit the urn with a tracking device and painted the destination on it, and together with family from Bermuda they travelled from Valencia, Spain to Lisbon, Portugal, and there, they caught an offshore breeze and gave me a gentle push. The monitor was given to my grandson, Ramon, who lives in the house that I purchased that is located along the Western shore in Bermuda.

Ramon tracked my movements every day. He could see that I had floated from Lisbon across to, and through the Azores. This is significant because Bermuda has many immigrants from the Azores who are a hard working, law abiding group of people who have given Bermuda much to be thankful for.

After the Azores I turned left and drifted Southeast down along the African coast until I washed ashore on the beach at Kribi, Cameroon. This was an important stop, because I have come to believe that my original ancestor was taken from Cameroon. For the past fourteen years, myself, together with a small group of people have adopted a village in the far north of Cameroon named Gouria. We have worked with the villagers to bring them forward into the 21st century, and in doing so I have come to be very close to my brothers and sisters in Cameroon. It was appropriate that I should make a stop at my spiritual home to bid Cameroon goodbye.

Some boys had found the urn and were about to take it home, but a tourist who knew what it was and who was literate in English convinced them to place me back in the water in a small ceremony. So, once again I was on my way. As luck would have it, one of the many storms to begin as tropical depressions off Africa took my urn across the Atlantic in a Northwesterly track and I ended up on the beach in Barbados.

My island of Bermuda is breathtakingly beautiful, but Barbados is indescribable. That country is also the host nation from which the original of the Carmichael family in Bermuda came.  My original ancestor was shipped to America as a slave on the estate of a Scotsman by the name of Robert Carmichael, from Glasgow. Hence our family name was taken from his as as brand. After emancipation, the freed Carmichaels left America and went to Barbados, and from there our Great, many times over grandfather, Nathaniel Daniel Carmichael made the very wise decision to emigrate to newly found Bermuda. I have one son, whose name is Nathaniel Daniel Edward Carmichael, which is a really big name to live up to, but he is more than capable.

Having touched shore in Barbados the urn was caught by the northerly current flows of the Sargasso Sea that brought the urn closer to Bermuda. Ramon could see that on the monitor, and in spite of the fact that he was himself getting on in years, he put everybody on notice that Grandpa was almost home. On one perfect Bermudaful day, early in the morning, my urn was just offshore from "MySugarAppleSunSet", the name of the house.

All the family and friends, including the media gathered on the lawn overlooking the ocean to watch as I gently drifted straight in on the waves to make a perfect docking in the lagoon below. They were all waving and my urn, moved by the sea waved back. And then, I woke up.

I would have added a part where they fit a giant sky rocket to the ashes, then sent it up into the air so that it could go off with a giant bang, scattering my ashes gently in the wind, with the ashes just reaching the shoreline and the cliff upon which the house sits. 

It's a fantasy that I thoroughly enjoyed in my dream. Perhaps it might not be too much of a fantasy to be made into a reality. Hint! Hint!

Copyright (c) 2013  Eugene Carmichael