It was a summer day in the San Joaquin Valley when that wiry old Okie, Tarlton Byrd, indulged himself in sentiment, which he rarely did. You could read his character in the resolute set of his jaw, in the way he overruled his limp and pushed his leather face against the world. Now he sat on the edge of a narrow cot in the room he called his office, and from a shoebox full of photographs, he pulled out the image of a lady named Edna. And she was a pretty one, her faded face framed by dark tendrils, her mouth a small heart. Sixty years had fled since the last time Tarlton had seen her; he had no idea where she was or what she had done during this time.

Up in the living room, Tarlton's wife Virgil sat on the sofa with a Bible by her side, a half-written letter, and the TV on for conversation. She had pale paper skin and hair like white clouds. She had stood by Tarlton during dust bowl poverty, raised a family with him, and been an elementary schoolteacher. Her children and students were grown and gone, and she and Tarlton now lived together in peaceable comfort. But in his private moment of reflection, Tarlton let me in on a little secret: "If Virgil dies before me, I intend to look up Edna. I figure I can still make a pretty good life with Edna."

It seemed a kind of treachery to harbor such a plan, and the simple-hearted hubris of it appalled me, despite its breathtaking lack of likelihood. Yet I was intrigued by the man's implicit refusal to admit that any doors had shut in the course of six decades. It fed into my lifelong fascination with the illusions that we all have about ourselves, with our loony human capacity to hope, with the inexorable kind of faith it takes to hold our Ednas forever as they were, and even to assume they'd remember us.

Years later, I worked at a bus company for a fellow named Tom Callahan. Tom had been scrambling to make a living since the age of seventeen. He never finished school, and was soon enough the breadwinner for a family of eight kids and an alcoholic wife. He started out as a conductor on a San Francisco trolley and worked his way up to management by dint of a shrewd mind and scrappy nature. He never missed a day of work, and he never had a carefree moment in his life. And yet he saw himself as an irresponsible drifter, a Huck Finn on a raft. "I 'm just a hobo at heart," he told me once, "You never know when I'll wander off."

I like to ponder this gap between one's self-image and the face the world beholds, between the dream and the reality, oblivious to one another. I think of Vito from Brooklyn, who claimed (and believed) he had no appetite, but was the most voracious eater I have ever known. Or Bettina, a former actress, who still puts on enough make-up each morning to look good to the folks in the farthest reaches of a theater. It's my mother entering sweepstakes and expecting to win; nylon duffel bags waiting for the Orient Express; Gatsby's green light ever beckoning from Daisy's dock across the sound.
I have my share of illusions, too, but, naturally, I never recognize them as such until they shatter. And many have. I used to believe that you could go home again. I also operated on the assumption that there were people in charge of things who knew what they were doing. As a young girl, I thought that if all else failed I could just marry someone who would take care of me. Later, I believed that having a baby would completely cure my existential emptiness and that I would never put my child in front of a television set to amuse her. I was certain that I could learn to speak Italian if I simply put my mind to it, that teachers' unions were good, and that wearing pantyhose under my jeans made me look thinner and was therefore worth the misery. I believed that if I ever lived within walking distance of the ocean, I would never again get depressed. And whenever I went to my mailbox, I anticipated a small tidy package or an actual letter - something I now simply retain as a wish.

Pure folly, all of it -- but beautiful folly, in its way. We are a fragile species made durable by our ability to believe in things far-fetched and ridiculous. If bravado propels us, even unfounded, we do move forward. When our flattering self-deceptions dissolve, the days they helped us to endure are not retracted. When our pipe dreams fail to materialize, the disappointment does not diminish the comfort they brought while their promise and truth seemed viable. Illusion keeps the old ones young and the young ones brave, and all of us warm as we walk against the wind.

My own dream-damaged grandfather was seventeen when he left Naples in 1905. He arrived in the New York City harbor on a muggy summer day with seven dollars in his pocket and the ability to read and write, though unfortunately not in English. The ship's manifest lists his occupation as "peasant", one of hordes that would be disembarking onto the already crowded shore. With not even a backward glance, he walked into the raucous future and a thousand dead end streets, never thinking of himself as anything less than an entrepreneur. He was forever to dwell at the skirts of fortune, near enough to feel her breath, never her kiss, but again and again shoved forward by his restless, irrational heart. A restless heart unbound by reason became my father's legacy, and mine. The clumsy footsteps of great incongruous dreams still steal my sleep but fill its empty rooms.

I was lured to California by a dream like that. I quit my job and left New York alone in the bleakest part of January, despite the well-meaning chorus of caution and disapproval that I realize in retrospect, has preceded everything big I have ever done. Stuffing my paltry possessions into Hefty trash bags --my matched luggage --I headed south and west in an avocado green Buick with a vinyl roof whose tattered strips blew like sails in the wind. I was old enough to know better, but I saw myself as a pioneer and I knew that this was my great migration, one of my life's defining moments. It would be a lie to say I wasn't scared or that everything was easy. But in the midst of winter, I found trees heavy with oranges, and this alone is consolation for any number of losses. Things worked out; I stayed.

Optimism seemed to be the lesson, or maybe a kind of faith. Reward one screwball dream and all the others puff up as though they have a chance. And so, like Don Quixote, I careen about absurdly, both dismayed and delighted by other fools who hope against hope and refuse to be defined by the obvious. Who can say what nutty fantasies will distract me when I'm Tarlton's age? I only know to marvel now at the savage faith of the secret heart, swelling in its weathered case, refusing to admit that anything has ended. And why not? There is plenty of bad news. There are also oranges. It is, after all, a most unlikely world.