Synopsis:
Daniel Pentland is a broken man;
torn between the two women in his life. He is tormented by guilt over his love
affair with a beautiful English girl he met while living in Italy, and the
loyal devotion of his wife, Amanda.
Two years after the tragic death of
his lover Kit, he is continually haunted by her memory. Across the sands of the
Mojave Desert, her voice calls out to him, pulling at his heart and his
memories.
Each night as Daniel wakes screaming
and fighting against the phantom of Kit’s killer, his wife does her best to
soothe his pain and help him overcome his grief.
Sometimes
in Dreams is a story of redemption through a love that simply refuses to
die.
MILITARY FAMILIES IN
REVERSE
As depicted in Sometimes in Dreams
Sometimes in Dreams is in part about a
military family where the wife is the military member and the husband is a
civilian. This is something I know
about. In 1977, I was out of work and it was decided that my wife would join
the U.S. Air Force. There was a lot of talk about women’s lib at that time but
we joined up because the job prospects for me were slim. Besides which I wanted
to be able to write full time. This issue was complicated by the fact that my
wife and I already had two sons, one six years old and the other just under
three. When we joined up we were one of
only a half dozen reversed families in the Air Force. It is much more common
now, but still not something that is encountered every day.
In Sometimes in Dreams, the Pentland family
has fallen into the same trap that many military families fall into. The
service tends to swallow up the military member and if that member is dedicated,
the strain on the family is great. Added to that normal strain, Daniel and
Amanda Pentland had the strain of being reversed and Amanda, a dedicated Air
Force member has let her career interfere with regular home life. At the time
of the Bosnian civil war women were still not technically allowed in combat,
though there were many young women who actually were very close to the front
lines. Amanda had volunteered for
dangerous missions in the past and now she volunteers for another, that is to
carry a kidney dialysis machine into the Sarajevo Airport. She is fully aware that this will not make
her husband happy and, if the mission had gone smoothly Daniel would never have
known about it, but the mission gets shelled in Sarajevo which gets broadcast
all over the world so Amanda can’t simply forget to tell her husband.
As with
normal military families long absences make the possibility of “short term liaisons”
ever present. This is partly what
happened to Daniel. He was lonely and smitten with the beautiful Kit. Amanda
was away and Daniel tempted fate by going to Venice. He didn’t seek out Kit,
but fate, or God, or Satan decreed that Daniel and Kit should meet when both
were most vulnerable and the affair began. It is possible that if Kit had not
been in such need of comfort and Daniel was not the man he was, the affair
still might not have happened, but again fate in the form of a group of
revelers dressed as characters from the Commedia Del Arte stepped in and forced
them together.
The major
trouble with military families is that the military member is “owned” by the
service. That means the military member is on call twenty-four hours a day,
seven days a week no matter what. Death or grave injury are the only acceptable
excuses for not reporting for duty when the call goes out. This again
contributed to the liaison of Kit and Daniel. Amanda is sent away from home
again. That separation again makes possible Daniel and Kits on-going affair.
They are almost like husband and wife because Amanda, the real wife, is absent
because of duty.
During the 22
years that my wife and I were in the Air Force there were many separations,
some for mere days, but some for months. Several times my wife would be gone
for three months, return home for two or three days and be put on another air
plane for another three month assignment.
While she was gone I took care of children and wrote. Luckily I was
never faced with a situation like Daniel’s. No beautiful English, or Spanish,
or Italian woman crossed my path when I was vulnerable, but I did see many
other military people fall into that quagmire. Some managed to reconcile and
save their families, some broke under the strain and considering that, makes
the affair between Daniel and Kit very real now with so many military families
both the reversed and the regular separated because of deployments around the
world.
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Author
Bio:
G. Lloyd Helm is a 'ne'er-do-well scribbler'—novelist, short
story writer and poet—who has tramped around the world for the last forty years
thanks to his long suffering military wife. He has lived in Germany, Spain, and
Italy. His epitaph will read, “He married well.”
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