Put Your Arms Around Something as Big as the California Sky

It's not unusual for the man who loves me to pull out his notebook and jot down a line or two for a song. We might be cooking dinner when the notebook appears or sitting with a glass of wine, talking. Quite often, as it did last night, the notebook came out when we were getting ready for bed. I was already under the covers as he stood in the dark, scribbling at the dresser in the corner. I never peer over his shoulder at these moments, never ask "What's the song about?" I wouldn't especially like to answer questions like these when an idea for a story or an essay first occurs to me. I've witnessed quite a few lines being recorded in the notebook over the past four years, and only a couple have been shared with me.

As we lay in bed this morning, I told the man who loves me my dream, admitting that I'd dreamed of The Someone. The dream had an incoherent narrative. Something about a car and a pair of shoes. And my concern about my real-life recently reduced alimony played against a backdrop of some dream-world global impending financial crisis. In the dream I was trying to ascertain if The Someone's finances were going to hell, and my own fortune, shackled to his as it is--was I destined for ruin, too, and would this happen before or after the financial apocalypse? It was still dark when I woke just enough to realize that I was pressed against one man while dreaming of another, and how absurd that was. I made myself stop the dream and go back to sleep.

This morning as the man who loves me and I stood pulling on our clothes and talking about coffee, the notebook lay open on the dresser. "Look at this," he said, "you'd think I wrote these lines this morning, but I wrote them last night." And in the notebook, was the beginning of a song about a man pulling his lover back to him although he knew she was dreaming of another man.

I can't get my arms all the way around this intangible thing any more than I can put my arms around the California sky. But there it is.

photo note: The man who loves me took this picture in his neighborhood. Don't you love it?