A Dream of Margot

Vancouver, November 1990

I am dreaming. In my dream Margot is receiving people from all over the world. They are coming in to a small room in Oxford, many of them young men, and they are literally sitting at her feet as she gently teaches them her wisdom. She is about forty-five, wearing a sweater with a collar and a pleated skirt in the style of the forties. Her hair is curled under, close to her head, her face radiant as she turns to me. She tells me, "Don't give up. you have at least twenty years left to teach.' I wake up from this dream puzzled. Although Margot has been a figure in my life for many years, never once has she appeared to me in a dream.
It is a weekend morning. I get up and go down t to collect the mail from the mailbox at the foot of the steep driveway. There is a letter from my cousin Paul in New Zealand. As i open it I am shocked to see Margot's face, shrivelled, grey haired, but still with that glorious smile, looking up at me from a folded magazine article my cousin has clipped to send to me. Margot's husband has recently died, and she is heartbroken, greiving and dying of cancer, alone and destitute on her farm in Panama. The author of the article has travelled all the way from New Zealand to reach her. She tells everyone not to worry, that she is where she needs to be.