Miscellany
My brother's birthday was Monday. He's seventeen. I have a present for him, but I have yet to mail it off.
I had a very vivid dream this morning that saturated my whole consciousness and made me uneasy. I was in a plane that was trying to get back to America, and when I looked down and saw we were flying over Jerusalem, I knew we were in big trouble. Sure enough, a heat-seeking missile came after our plane; we managed not to get blown out of the sky, but the pilot came on to say that we couldn't avoid the hijackers any more and had to land. Then compartments opened above our heads and various colored packages spilled into our laps, containing different sorts of sharp tools that could be used as weapons. The directive was that we were to use them to fight the hijackers when they came; their intent was to kill all the Americans as brutally as possible, and we weren't going to give them the satisfaction by being cowards. So then out on the tarmac I took my strange, angular knife and cut and slashed until I was one of three or four Americans left standing. An Israeli woman, a friendly, got hold of me and rushed me off the scene to hide in a shed full of pig droppings. I still had the bloody knife in my hand. The woman kept calling me by some Semitic term -- I struggled to remember it as I waked -- "hamedi", I think it was. I couldn't tell if that was a flattering or friendly thing to be called or not. Eventually I was handed over to friendly officials who took the remaining Americans and put them on a Korean airliner -- a much slimmer and more agile craft, with green wings -- that was changing its flight plan for the U.S. The plane took off...and I woke up.
I went back to sleep and dreamed I was staying in this old house, walking back and forth to an ancient Catholic church to pray Morning and Evening Prayer. I was acting surreptitiously for fear that they would discover I was not a Catholic and bar me from praying there. I wore a rich green cloak and soft gold chemise, and when I looked in the mirror I looked like a queen, though I felt like a fraud. The squirrels were acting strangely when I went outside, not running but clinging to me.
Phew. I haven't had a slew of dreams like that in a long time.
The other night my roommate and I were driving along a back road toward a friend's house, and I saw a mailbox next to a farm lane with a rusty milk can beside it, for decoration. It seemed like a picture of decay for a moment; I wondered what someone from a few generations ago would say about a rusty milk can left next to a mailbox for no purpose whatsoever. Maybe he'd think the world had ended.
I got up this morning and made orange rolls, and that made things seem better.
My brother's birthday was Monday. He's seventeen. I have a present for him, but I have yet to mail it off.
I had a very vivid dream this morning that saturated my whole consciousness and made me uneasy. I was in a plane that was trying to get back to America, and when I looked down and saw we were flying over Jerusalem, I knew we were in big trouble. Sure enough, a heat-seeking missile came after our plane; we managed not to get blown out of the sky, but the pilot came on to say that we couldn't avoid the hijackers any more and had to land. Then compartments opened above our heads and various colored packages spilled into our laps, containing different sorts of sharp tools that could be used as weapons. The directive was that we were to use them to fight the hijackers when they came; their intent was to kill all the Americans as brutally as possible, and we weren't going to give them the satisfaction by being cowards. So then out on the tarmac I took my strange, angular knife and cut and slashed until I was one of three or four Americans left standing. An Israeli woman, a friendly, got hold of me and rushed me off the scene to hide in a shed full of pig droppings. I still had the bloody knife in my hand. The woman kept calling me by some Semitic term -- I struggled to remember it as I waked -- "hamedi", I think it was. I couldn't tell if that was a flattering or friendly thing to be called or not. Eventually I was handed over to friendly officials who took the remaining Americans and put them on a Korean airliner -- a much slimmer and more agile craft, with green wings -- that was changing its flight plan for the U.S. The plane took off...and I woke up.
I went back to sleep and dreamed I was staying in this old house, walking back and forth to an ancient Catholic church to pray Morning and Evening Prayer. I was acting surreptitiously for fear that they would discover I was not a Catholic and bar me from praying there. I wore a rich green cloak and soft gold chemise, and when I looked in the mirror I looked like a queen, though I felt like a fraud. The squirrels were acting strangely when I went outside, not running but clinging to me.
Phew. I haven't had a slew of dreams like that in a long time.
The other night my roommate and I were driving along a back road toward a friend's house, and I saw a mailbox next to a farm lane with a rusty milk can beside it, for decoration. It seemed like a picture of decay for a moment; I wondered what someone from a few generations ago would say about a rusty milk can left next to a mailbox for no purpose whatsoever. Maybe he'd think the world had ended.
I got up this morning and made orange rolls, and that made things seem better.
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