06/13/99

The Stuff of Dreams

I've always been a dreamer, a spinner of elaborate fantasies about grand adventures and astounding success. Most people are like that, I find. Whether everyday life falls short or rewards us beyond our wildest expectations, dreams guide us into the future. I met another dreamer recently, whose courage to follow her dreams took my breath away.

Adopted as an infant and raised in Sacramento, Barbara says she always felt like an outsider as a child. Shy and overweight, self-conscious and precocious, literary characters were her constant companions, diaries her confidantes. "I never expected to be popular, so when I eventually was, I was shocked. I was better at being unpopular."

She wore adolescent popularity awkwardly, acting outrageous and brash one minute, sly and secretive the next. Emotional storms raged at home, where Barbara eventually became so defiant, that her parents arranged for her to live with friends of theirs for awhile. She remembers feeling shocked and embarrassed by this perceived rejection; she managed to hide the truth from her friends until she negotiated a return home. Part of the "treaty" was enrollment in an alternative high school that provided just the environment she needed to explore her mind and emotions with equal intensity. The storms at home subsided.

Barbara's life was marked by what she calls "whimsical moments," when carefully laid plans abruptly shifted. As an undergraduate at Barnard she considered English Literature an impractical major, so she prepared to enter law school. During a summer internship in the U.S. Attorney's office in Manhattan, however, she kept losing track of the courtroom proceedings to watch people in the visitors' gallery. With her attention riveted on an old woman comparing sandwiches with an elderly companion, she didn't notice her boss approach. Once a frustrated writer himself, he recognized the signs in Barbara and candidly told her so.

Her literary Muse acknowledged, she left the courtroom to write for a New York City newspaper and to attend journalism school. She met an elegant African woman there whose mesmerizing stories of apartheid in South Africa moved Barbara so deeply that she decided, during another whimsical moment, to experience and write about South Africa firsthand. She booked a flight the next day. Within a year she had established herself as a freelance writer for newspapers in Johannesburg and Miami.

A study in contrasts, this petite, twenty-eight-year-old woman boldly outmaneuvered the international press to land an interview with the dictator of Malawi, Africa, a man who had refused interviews for decades. Her working book title, The Great Men of Africa, provided just the right touch of ego massage to coax her way into the offices of five more African leaders. Her fiancé and photojournalist, Carl, took pictures while Barbara conducted the interviews. She returned stateside only to discover that a friend's promise to publish these remarkable profiles had evaporated.

Discouraged but determined to complete the project and find a new publisher, Barbara has turned to other things for now, like settling back into life in the United States after four years in South Africa. British born Carl, now her husband, needs adjustment time, too. Hardly a whimsical choice, Barbara and Carl's passions intertwine. Their first book will undoubtedly be one of many important collaborations in the future.

Thanks for the dreams, Barbara. Maybe, just maybe, I could publish a book, too. Readers, how are your dreams coming along?

Please send questions or comments to bbruno@snet.net.