Not a Nice Hotel

I don't even know where I go in my dreams anymore. But I awake up feeling like I have jet lag. Maybe I had a layover in Singapore. Maybe I went from there to somewhere else. The waitress on the plane over Hong Kong asked me twice if I wanted peanuts and 7-up because I was asleep the first time and didn't answer. A professor of literature from Oxford told me stories of medieval knights as we cruised down over London. I fell asleep again in a nice hotel with sheets so soft I felt held by them. That's what I would like to imagine my dream night was like. But I rather think, given how I feel this morning, that I was on foot, that I walked a long way through brambles.

Late Fragment

And did you get what

you wanted from this life, even so?

I did.

And what did you want?

To call myself beloved, to feel myself

beloved on the earth.

-Raymond Carver

Throwing Shoes

My RA, at one of several colleges I attended, had bad knees. She often joked that she was going to trade them in at the next Blue Light Special. Today, I'd like to trade in my biochemistry, all of it, for something sturdy. I'd become consistently cheerful, the sort of woman people turned to for recipes of whole-hearted optimism. Why can't I be her? Why is my shrink out of town when my anti-depressant needs to be raised? Mine is a finicky biochemisty. Like a horse, throws shoes on a regular basis.

Faces

Going to bed is hard. I start projects at 10:00 at night knowing I'm flunking Sleep Hygiene 101 but loathe to face the vast expanse of my sheets. Do I think I will get lost in there? Or am I most afraid of my dreams? That they will take my sadness and give it faces.

Then and Now

I was nineteen and staying in a cabin near friends of my parents, not close friends, and, thus, not close friends of mine. They picked me up at the bus depot, welcomed me warmly, and left me alone the entire week. Brought me food and water. I was in Canada, miles away from anyone I knew. Night and day, it rained torrents. There were a few books, a couple of Readers Digest Condensed. These friends of my parents were not what I expected. The visit could not have been called a vacation, more like some kind of weird punishment for something I had never done. Except that with the food, they brought me tapes of Liona Boyd, the exquisite Canadian guitarist. I am listening to her now.

Conveyor Belt of Warmth

Yesterday, at my agency, we put on a Thanksgiving dinner for several hundred people. I manned the coffee table. On the bus that morning, I had sat hunched around myself, quarrelsome with my life. "What are you doing to me?" Like that. As pleasant as hives. When I started handing out cups of fresh hot coffee, everything changed. Cold and wet outside and I was a stop on a conveyor belt of warmth.

Now You Know

"People always ask me, 'Were you funny as a child?' Well, no, I was an accountant." (Ellen DeGenerous)

Yes to Adventure

In the movie, The Mummy, an English officer has lost his way in the desert. More metaphorically than literally. Since his heroic days in the war, he has found his solace in sherry and in rambling rembrances of what happened long before. He longs for adventure, the wind in his face and death at his heels, but when offered it, hesitates. Easier to talk than act. He says yes. His last moments on earth are spent piloting a small plane which spirals to the sand in a sand storm. When the hero of the story, played by Brendan Fraser, finds the pilot in the wreck, he is dead but his face is blissful. All my adult life, I've thought, "This is my last large piece of work, the last ride in my recovery from many things." I wonder now if I'm wrong. Before he says, yes to adventure, the old English officer sits on his air strip with a servant holding an umbrella over his head--bored. Maybe I would be too if my life settled down.

White China

Yesterday, I discovered that the teller cashing my check was a song writer. The check was for an essay of mine, and the title was on it, and he noticed. Two seconds later, he shyly confessed he wrote pop songs. Earlier, I had used a word I like, and, later, he elegantly handed the word back to me like a baguette on white china. We smiled at each other, one writer to another.