Dreams and Dream Journaling

(I did not make the marbled paper. But I'm going to learn how to do that.)

It's been years since I've kept a dream journal--though many dreams (mostly about the dead)  have been blogged about here. I'm taking a class about dream journaling where we make the journals and learn some tips about capturing the dreams. The process has surprised me. In the past three weeks I've learned that I'm still processing the end of my marriage, that I'm often trying to please people or to get something right in my dreams and not quite succeeding at it. I've had several dreams of the future with new iterations of current everyday things, and I dream of a future Earth with rising water, intense heat, mounting corruption, and shrinking resources. It's as if I am dreaming the dreams the Earth herself might dream. One night last week, I dreamed I had lung surgery, and the next morning I read an article about the burning of the Amazon in which the Amazon rain forest was described as the lungs of the planet.

I've also had two classic actor's nightmares and a naked dream which fit well with the kookie idea of making books out of paper bags with secret compartments where you can hide a troubling dream and maybe even glue it or sew it inside.

I've learned techniques for delving into dreams.

And there's something good about forcing one's self to write first thing in the morning. The co-ordination of eye and hand, the exercising of memory and beginning the day wondering what all of those midnight workings of the brain mean.

When getting dressed choose to wear a color that appeared in the dream is one of the tips from class. I meant to do that this morning but forgot.

Today I went to the gigantic Minneapolis central farmer's market and couldn't take my eyes off this plant.

I was wearing a green raincoat in last night's dream about a bicycling trip wherein I pulled a little trailer with all my gear. In the dream I was maybe 30, and I was traveling with good friends. In my waking life I don't know these friends, and I find that detail fascinating.

The plant is called "Mother of Thousands. It's easy to see why. Whenever it catches my eye, I say a prayer for the Amazon.

It's in the candleholder that was in Dan's bedroom.

Bicycles and Sheep

Last night I met a woman. She asked where I was from and I told her California. “I’m loving my time here in Vermont,” I said.

“You should buy my house,” she said. “You’d love it.” She told me it sat on 40 acres. A studio to rent out that would cover the mortgage. A pond. She tore a strip of paper from her notebook and wrote down the address. “You could have sheep,” she said.

I had fantasies of becoming a weaver once.

She told me the house was on Zillow so I looked at the pictures online. It’s off the market, Zillow says. I think she told me this, but said it was going to go back on. The rooms in the house are painted the colors of the rooms in my house. There’s a bright red table.

I thought I might dream of sheep last night, or speaking French, or standing at the edge of the pond, marveling at how I’d made this new life on the Canadian border surrounded by sheep and sugar bush.

But I dreamed of a bicycle trip and training to ride in it. The training had been going on for months, but I was still learning to repair my bicycle, being drilled on how to take this and that apart and replace it. Parts were laid out on a grimy towel, and the instructor held a shiny metal thing-a-ma-jig in his hand. “This is the piece you want,” he said.” You’d have to pay me big bucks to go on a bike trip. I’d rather just step out in front of the roaring truck than have it hit me from behind. There have been two men in my life in the last decade who were rather taken with me, and these men were serious about biking. That wasn’t the only reason it wouldn’t have worked out, but if I’d made a list of pros and cons, biking would have been written in all caps on the con side. This bike trip in the dream was going to last months. Hundreds of miles. It was a bike trip in which we followed a soccer team, peddling from city to city. Soccer. Sure. I like soccer if I’m in a bar with a soccer fan, or if it’s the Women’s World Cup maybe, or I’m watching some little girl I love.

“I hope this isn’t one of those conversations that changes my destiny,” I told the woman with the house.

“It could be she,” said. There was something about her. Something about the whole idea, something about the dream of the bike race that made me think about how capable we are of changing everything.

Wednesday Beach Report

The wind is blowing here in its usual merciless way. Sand in the eyes. Waves too big for an underfed sea lion trying to haul out onto the sand to get warm. "Wait," I said to the man with a gaggle of kids. They were all carrying sticks in the harmless way that kids do. "Don't let them get too close." I think he thought I was worrying about the kids. I explained that we didn't want the kids to scare the sea lion back into the water. "It's cold," I said. "See how skinny it is. It's coming out of the water to get warm. I'm going to call the rescue hotline right now," I said, pulling out my cell phone. I became someone with authority to him then. He commanded his kids back from the surf. But it was too late. The sea lion was washed into the waves, too weak to even swim. Which I suppose made it a bad candidate for rescue in the first place. I consoled myself with that. And the fact that another family now knows about starving sea lions.

I had a dream last night. Flying like a kite in a tireless wind, I caught only the tail end of it before I woke, mumbling. I said something to my father. He said something to me. Something about my mother.

I don't remember my dreams often. But a night or two after I returned home from Iowa, I had a terrible nightmare. There were plot twists galore, betrayal by friends, and when I lay helpless on the floor, a zombie grabbed my foot and began to drag me away. Help me. Help me. Help me. I whimpered in a tiny voice that took every ounce of my strength. I've wondered if the zombie might be my mother. Weird, I know. But I don't believe in zombies, and she is the most recent loved one to have crossed into that other world. Maybe she wanted company.

On a more encouraging note, I came home from Iowa, and my son and his family came to visit the very next day. We went whale watching and the water was as flat as glass. We saw sea lions, and two kinds of dolphins, and gray whales.

Heron in the harbor

Dolphins, not sharks

whale's tale

Hotel de Pillville: a retrospective

First read this.  The flow chart still makes me laugh hysterically.

Traveling with my mom is easier now that she doesn't smoke. Last night we stayed at an Embassy Suites. I chose the couch in the living room and let my mom have the bedroom to herself. There was some pretty terrifying shouting at the dead around midnight. She was yelling at her twin sister Millie. If I'd already been asleep, I'm sure the noise would have awakened me, heart pounding. As it was, I just got a case of the goosebumps and resolved to fling open the door to the hallway and run if a ghost came through the bedroom door.

Last evening as she was wheeled off the plane with the aid of an aisle-sized wheel chair and three attendants, the logistics of it all blocked the incoming crew from boarding. The end of the jetway was lined with people in navy blue as she was transferred to her own wheelchair. This is my last flight, she told them. I'm coming home. I'm not sure if she actually spoke the words to die. But it was in the air. Not a single person tapped a toe or sighed impatiently. They waited, almost at attention, thanking us for flying Delta, telling her to have a good time, a good night, to rest.

My mom is exhausted. She's still asleep. I have her toast and coffee ready. I'll have to wake her soon. Then Pillville will be hitting the road.

Report from Pillville: How my hair stood up

I wish I still had the Christmas lights on my bed.

I am listening in the dark. My mother is quiet at the moment. If I listen a little harder I can hear the click and hiss of her oxygen machine.

Earlier this evening as my friend Ellen and I sat on the couch, my mom was talking in her sleep. Not just a mumbled word, not just a line or two, but a monologue. Excuse me, I said to Ellen. I have to check out what's going on in there. I stood to the side of her partially open door and listened.

"And now they roam the house at night. Two of them. And they're not really fond of each other." My mom was speaking in a dramatic voice like she was telling a ghost story. The hair on my arms and the back of my neck stood up. I can't even watch TV because the commercials for scary movies terrify me. Now I'm imagining Thing One and Thing Two roaming through my house, stalking one another--stalking me.

If there ever was a night to have a friend staying over, this is it. A few months back, Ellen and I both leapt from our beds and nearly collided at the top of the stairs after my mother yelled at the top of her lungs. For a moment it sounded like my mom was arguing with someone and we thought there might be an intruder in the house.

I may have to sleep with the light on. But then again, that might make it easier for Thing One and Thing Two to find me.

Monday Morning Beach Report

Post-holiday Emptiness

It was quite a bit busier in Pillville. We had a meeting with the case manager. I was barraged with phone calls from the medical equipment place. Due to the ins and outs of who pays for what, we must get rid of my mom's current hard won hospital bed and get a different one. We have to change out the oxygen concentrator too. It all has to do with who will pay for what, and hospice has its own pipeline. I really have no beef with that basic concept (well, I do, really, but never mind) but I did draw a line in the sand when I got the call that said the bed was about to be delivered, and I was having my time off, and the caregiver told me my mom was napping in her current bed. The medical supply office called me twice. When would I be home? The driver called me once. Why wasn't I home? And why wouldn't my mom's caregiver let him in?  I called the hospice case manager and asked for her help. She jumped in and sent the guy with the truck idling in my driveway AWAY. It's all funny, really. First we couldn't get the fucking hospital bed a year ago, and now they're beating down the door to give us another one.

Here's the best Pillville news today. My mom looks radiant. Most of her pain is gone. She feels good. She's a bit dreamy. While I was fixing dinner, she asked me if I remembered the time we stopped at the baseball diamond. She was sitting at the table with her martini, halfway between real life and dream life. For some crazy reason, she dreams a lot about baseball. I have absolutely nothing to say that can explain that.

The Korean Tailor and the Golden Tortoise

Dan had a jacket he wore a lot. He was wearing it the first time I met him. I kept it and another one similar to it, and for months, both jackets sat neatly folded on my closet floor. They were way too big for me, the shoulder seams halfway to my elbows, the sleeves half-again too long. I finally decided I'd have them tailored and asked around for a recommendation. Rome Tailor, someone said. That sounded spiffy. I imagined the tailor would look like an older version of this, and that he'd do a meticulous job remodeling the jackets to fit me :

The tailor did do a marvelous job, but he was Korean. According to the Census bureau, this county is only 7.3 percent Asian. I would imagine that the Japanese and Chinese ethnicities far outnumber the Koreans. Of all the gin joints. 

The tailor couldn't imagine why I'd want a couple of not very remarkable cotton jackets altered, so I explained. He nodded rather gravely and had me step up onto a platform and then circled around me, marking out his plan with chalk and pins.

When I stepped down and went to his counter to pay, I saw the array of carved turtles/tortoises stretching across it. Big wooden ones, little brass ones, some made of stone, probably one of jade. I thought of a dream Dan had when he was almost recovered from his surgery and thinking about moving out of my house back into his own place.

In the dream he was in an antique store and spies something he likes: a golden tortoise. What follows are Dan's own words as he wrote them to journal the dream:

"...... I ask the cashier the price of the tortoise. She says "it's a designer piece of (gives a woman's name) so the price is $24,000. I smile and dismiss the idea..

Then I'm in a house, guy knocks on my door. I answer,someone I vaguely know is talking about something and then asks if I know who the vigilantes are the yard. No, I say and I look out to see four good old boys who are sitting in an open car with their seats reclined to the same angle, looking at me and smiling. I know that they are from the store and are there to do me harm. I rush inside, grab the tortoise and toss it to them, cognizant as I go inside that I still have a beating coming. I awaken, eyes wide open scared."

The dream left a very vivid impression on him. He couldn't stop talking about it. He even posted it on Facebook.

We exchanged a lot of texts and talked on the phone a bit as he rode the train back to L.A. that morning. We exchanged some links that might explain the tortoise as a symbol. I scrambled and unscrambled the letters in the words golden tortoise to present a variety of messages. As I recall, the one that got the biggest laugh from Dan was "Lo! Go rt. to Denise. I was, at the time, trying to talk him into continuing to live at my house while he got his chemo and radiation treatments.

So. The Korean tailor. The tortoises.

The same night he had a second vivid dream. Also Dan's own words:

"Dream 2: last night, I'm made aware that I have somehow received a gift of great material wealth. I'm seeing it as a cloak or a curtain, perhaps with valuable coins sewn into it. I accept it with quiet pleasure but go on with another activity, as though wealth was given me every day. Later, on closer examination the cloth seem to be wrapped around me. In fact the wealth beneath the cloth seems to actually be my own body. I awaken."

Now the cloth, the jacket, that Dan wore will be next to my skin. Having it on feels like a sort of wealth.

Report from Pillville: Ghosts, the Grim Reaper, and Other Thrills

my mother and her twin Millie

If you're a regular visitor here, you've probably heard that my mother frequently yells in her sleep. Or maybe you've just plain heard her. She's loud.

One morning just past dawn I heard her proclaim, "I really don't know all that much about baseball," and then proceed to sing "Take Me Out To the Ballgame." Mostly though she yells things like: WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE? WHO ARE YOU? AAAARRRGG. NOOOOO!  GET OUT OF HERE RIGHT NOW! I'm usually awakened from a sound sleep sometime between 3 and 4 a.m., heart pounding, adrenaline rocketing through my body. Fight or flight, the horrified brain and body ask each other. Don't know. Pantpantpantpant. Don't know. 

Last night it was 4:45 a.m when she screamed all of the above. I leap out of bed and run to my door to lock it, considering that there might be an intruder downstairs. I dash back to my nightstand, grab my phone, go to the keypad and dial 9 to get a head start on 911. I listen. More screaming. Do I grab the martial arts stick of Dan's and go downstairs? Hahahaha. (Anyone who's seen me actually panic is laughing right now.) But, hey, I do grab the stick--I just continue to cower behind my locked door, a third of the way to an emergency phone call.

Holy shit, right?

Well, I determined that it was just my mom yelling, and I got back to sleep and then had a ridiculously stressful dream wherein I drove to Phoenix to help my friend P with her mother, knowing full well I had less than 24 hours to do so while M was here with my mom. I got lost. But finally found P's apartment which was massive and shaped like a Mayan temple with narrow curving driveways to each of the levels. It was so confusing I parked my car down below and then realized there was no way I could walk to the top. Plus, I had my cat from decades ago, Little Guy, with me, and he was squirming in my arms and I was afraid he'd run away, and then trying to get back to my car, I forgot where I parked it and then, in a panic, called M who was completely unsympathetic, but I found the car, and drove it up the terrifying driveway and found my friend P. Maybe I helped her, I don't remember, but when I went to leave I accidentally let her chihuahua, Max, escape, and he went running down the street with a pack of dogs who were chasing a car. But when a car came toward me, they turned around to chase that car, and I somehow grabbed him before P noticed and put him back on her patio, but I got lost again, this time in the network of courtyards and nearly bumped into an old tattooed woman who called me stupid. When I finally got to my car, driving down was more terrifying than going up, and I kept thinking that I must be on a pedestrian path instead of a street, so I kept turning onto an intersecting route every time I had a chance, but the roads kept getting smaller and smaller until eventually my car was squeezed and tipped onto its side, wherein a grumpy old guy with a narrow trailer just wide enough to hold a Prius on its side, said he'd take my car down the hill for me. But when I turned my back, he'd pulled it into his garage and covered it up with an old carpet and said he didn't know anything about my car. I realized he was a thief and then I woke up, horrified that I'd lost track of my cat.

Today I asked my mom what she'd been dreaming about, thinking maybe she'd seen a ghost or the grim reaper. "Oh, Millie and I were lost in the woods again," she said. "I thought we'd never find our way home."

In Which I Dream of an Apartment

Dream:

I went back to Dan's apartment (except that it wasn't his real-life apartment) and was amazed at how beautiful it was. His ex-wife and her husband had moved in and covered the bedroom walls in a textured white fabric that matched the bedding. There were twinkle lights around the edges of the ceiling like stars in a snowstorm. The other bedroom (in real-life, there wasn't another bedroom, but in the dream it had always been filled with boxes) was cleaned out and there was toilet in one corner with a shoji screen around it. The walls and the upholstery on a chair were the most beautiful sea foam green. There was a white daybed and on top of it was a tabletop size old-fashioned pinball game. "Novel plots at the flip of a switch," it proclaimed in fancy script. After you launched the ball, it would ping around and land in a slot marked with some life event or plot twist. Heroine poisons ex-husband. Beloved son killed in car accident. A entire game board of terrible things. It was a beautiful vintage thing, this pinball machine. Used, but well-cared for, and everything seemed to work. He'd probably gotten it for me at a garage sale and had planned to give it to me for a present, and forgotten about it when he got sick. I kept wandering around murmuring about how beautiful it all was, feeling impossibly sad. There was a little secret garden out the door and down a narrow flight of steps. Ferns and colorful mosaics. And in the kitchen, the faucet was a sleek red bird. You pulled up on its tail feathers to turn on the water. It was a piece of art, so lovely that I cried when I saw it. 

I woke up feeling so confused. Why the apartment that wasn't really his apartment? Why the red bird? Why the apartment and not him? It's been forever since I've dreamed of him.

Queen of List-Making Disappears

Fog on the Beach/Early Sunday Morning

In a mere 15 hours, my mother and I will be getting into a car and heading for the airport for her 2nd annual return-to-the-east-coast birthday visit.

I have not made a list. I did not even realize I had not made a list until I uttered the words, "I have not even made a list," to a friend a couple of hours ago.

I have not made a list. I am the Queen of List-Making. Or recently abdicated queen. 

It's quite probable that an alien intelligence has taken over both my body and my brain. 

My mother, Queen of Pillville, is on a lot of medications. I have, at least, made a list of those for her to take with her to my brother's house. And it's an illustrated list. So there.

It's quite possible that I have not sweated any of the other travel prep because I am delirious with the prospect of my impending freedom. My mother is going to stay at my brother's place for 2 months. And I am going to do All the Things!!!

Here's a list for you:

Visit daughter C and go to a family wedding with her

Go to a T'ai Chi Chih retreat in New Mexico

Go to Maui for a friend's birthday week celebration

Visit one of Dan's oldest friends in Hilo

Go to Kauai for another friend's birthday celebration

That's just September. I am not making up the Hawaii stuff. I do indeed have two friends (who don't know one another) who have invited me to their birthdays celebrations on 2 different Hawaiian islands. And by some incredibly fancy luck, the party dates did not conflict with one another or the T'ai Chi Chih retreat or the T'ai Chi Chih teacher accreditation week in October. 

In addition to (hopefully) becoming a T'ai Chi Chih teacher in October, I will: (here comes another list)

See friends in L.A. and actually go out somewhere at night

Read from my memoir with other Shebook authors in L.A.(more about that later)

Have a wild party with wine... and...wine (please send wild party ideas)

Host a mini writing retreat chez moi 

Return to the east coast to pick up my mom

As if this weren't enough good news for one day, I also had a sweet, sweet dream about Dan last night. It was black and white--like a classic movie. We were having a secret tryst in a library. Through most of it, I was unaware that he had died. He was alive, in my arms, and we having a fabulous time sneaking around in the dark among the books. Every now and then a man in a suit would show up at a desk, and Dan and I would have to straighten our clothes and look presentable. The man in the suit had some kind of account book, and Dan wanted to ask him something about money, but I'd try to discourage him. It was at these moments that I knew Dan was dead. I wanted to tell him nothing about money mattered, but Dan didn't seem to know he was dead so I had to skirt around the issue.  But it was fairly easy to distract him, and then we'd just go back behind the shelves and forget that he was dead.

The Bright Spot

Gray day at the beach with a bright spot.

Love is always the bright spot, isn't it?

Only sometimes I get confused and think it's wine. I've gone through long stretches of just having water at dinner since Dan died. Alcohol is a depressant, right? It would be wise not to drink, right? Of course. 

But there I am at the dinner table, and my mom is doing her weird sashay between this world and some other world. "Where did you take that casserole?" She asked me the other night as she awakened from her dinner table doze. She'd dreamed I'd made a casserole and taken it somewhere to a pot luck. Last night she began feeling around on the table, eyes closed, touching her napkin, the silverware, thin air. When she began tugging on the edge of her placemat, I asked her what she was looking for. "The shooters," she said, opening her eyes. "You know, the things for leaving something on the table." Or something like that. It didn't really make sense. But she was dreaming and whose dreams do make sense? Me, I dream about bears. A lot. Does that make sense? She woke up. "Oh, never mind," she said. She knew she'd been dreaming and that it didn't make any sense. She knew what was what.

The night before last I was at the cooktop when I heard the martini glass topple and felt a splash on my heels. The glass had only tipped to the countertop and miraculously didn't break even though its contents flew through the air. It's like she's a poltergeist. You think she's just your mom reading the newspaper on the iPad, then she closes her eyes while her hands cast spells and the next thing you know things are crashing around you. I went for the wine that night. And took a walk. Maybe I'll walk with wine. A nice travel mug. Me and the sunset. Wine and a podcast. That's about as perfect as it's gonna get for now. 

But speaking of love and bright spots, where's your bright spot these days?

A good book is always a bright spot. I just finished Kate Atkinson's "Life after Life." It's going to churn around inside my head for a while. You can read about it HERE if you want.

Dreams of the Dead/Dreams of Dreams

yesterday morning at the beach--which has nothing to do with this post

Dream: 

Dan and I were lying in  a car with the seats reclined, kissing and talking. He was dead, but had returned. I understood this 100%, but he seemed to vacillate between acceptance and denial. We were remembering a previous conversation we'd had about what his name might be if he returned to this world in a different body. "Julian," I said. "You'd be called Julian." 

"No," he said. "There was another name, something unusual. You told it to me because you heard it in a dream, but I forgot." 

"You're right," I said. We made sounds trying to get the name to come out of our mouths. "I told you the name not long before you were gone," I said, not wanting to say the word dead. He looked sad then and unsure of himself, as if he didn't want to admit that he was dead. I wanted to explain to him that it didn't matter if he was dead because he was right there, kissing me, but the name began to take shape inside my mouth. "B-B-Br...," I said.

"Right," he said. "Something European." And we made sounds together until the name Bruges tumbled out of our mouths. "My name will be Bruges," he said. Our car was parked, not in a parking lot, but almost in front of the doorway of a supermarket. We were waiting for it to open so we could get groceries, and just at the moment of remembering, a bag boy in an apron came out and talked to us. It spoiled the moment, but while he said whatever he said, Dan and I muttered his new name so we wouldn't forget. 

I moved the car, still not to a proper parking spot, but up against the side of the building so we could kiss and talk some more.

When I woke the name Bruges was on my lips. What kind of a name is that, I wondered. Am I supposed to go to Belgium? Did I just have a dream wherein I remembered a dream--a dream that was just a dream dream and not a dream I actually had? Did I just have a dream about a person who's dead and in the dream was also dead, but was there kissing me and talking to me?

I need coffee.

Report from Pillville: In the revised version of Sleeping Beauty, a MRSA infection travels to her brain

November Sunset

My mother slept for 22 hours. Half of it at home and half after I took her back to the ER yesterday. When she finally was admitted to the hospital, she didn't even notice when they moved her from the gurney to the bed. Last night after I came home I couldn't sleep. The winds had kicked up while I sat next to my mom in a curtained cubicle in the ER, and I felt like I too had been transported somewhere strange and different without my knowledge. All night long trees clawed at the windows as if they were desperate to come inside. Every now and then there was the crash of someone's patio heater or trashcan. My body ached from sitting, and I wanted to be outside walking.

When I did sleep, I woke from dreams in which I was neglecting a houseful of guests. All the women I'd travelled with in Greece had come for a visit. No one had clean sheets or towels, and I'd forgotten to buy coffee, and where was the blowdryer?

And there was the thought of my mother dying. I lay in my bed, dreading the ring of the phone. She had rallied by the time I'd left the hospital, but it seemed unbelieveable that she'd awakened from her Sleeping Beauty spell. Maybe the bacteria had made it to her brain, and that was what had jolted her awake before it pulled her back under.

This morning she was awake and fully herself, though pale. She ate breakfast and lunch sitting up in a chair. This afternoon she told me I shouldn't come back in the evening. She'd be okay, she said. Having  already made two trips to the hospital today, and having spent a total of 15 hours in the ER spread over three separate trips since Thanksgiving, staying home seemed like a fabulous idea. I saw bacteria in the stack of shirts she'd worn once and piled on a chair in her room. Bacteria in the bedding and the sink and the shower. And oh my god, there's got to be a fresh nasal canula for her oxygen around here somewhere.

The sun is setting and I've done a dozen loads of laundry, finally given the floors their first post- Thanksgiving cleaning after nearly jumping out of skin at a dust bunny I thought was a rat. I might walk to bar on the marina and eavesdrop on other people's lives.

How I Awoke with a Stepladder and an Empty Vodka Bottle in My Bedroom

2:27 a.m. And my smoke alarm beeping. Every 30 seconds. Cheerp. Cheerp. The man who loves me is in my bed next to me, dug so deeply into dreamland that he doesn't even stir when I get out of bed and stand directly under the offending device. In the dark, I stare up at the ceiling wanting to be certain it's this smoke detector and not the one in the hallway or the carbon monoxide detector downstairs. It is.

There's no possibility that I will get back to sleep unless I can stop the noise, so I go downstairs to the laundry room and pull out my plastic box of batteries. There's one 9-volt battery in the box and it's in a package that's been opened. Please be a good battery, I whisper as I head for the garage to get the ladder.

This should be pretty simple, I think. Back upstairs, I position the ladder, setting my iPad, in flashlight mode, on top of the ladder. I'm a 12-foot tall woman in jeans and a black lace bra in a spotlight and the man who loves me is still sleeping. If he wakes, I think, he may die of fright. Battery out. Battery in. Cheerp.

I stand on the ladder in the dark, typing "my smoke alarm won't stop beeping" into the Google search box. There are a variety of  remedies, but first I have to ascertain if my alarm is AC or DC. I'm guessing it's hardwired since my house is newish, and that's probably required by safety code, but I can't tell by looking, so I haul the ladder into the guest room, close the door and turn on the ceiling light to look at the smoke detector in there. I'm thinking it should twist off easily if it's just a battery device. It doesn't. 

The troubleshooting instructions insist that I must cut the power to the smoke detector, take the battery out, push the reset button, turn the power back on and re-insert the battery. Shirt on. Down to the breaker box on the exterior wall of my house. Each breaker is carefully labeled. None is for upstairs. There must be another breaker box upstairs. I can't find it. Unless it's in M's room. She's sleeping, and given her insane hours and her 65-mile each way commute to her job, she will probably kill me if I awaken her at 3:00 a.m. Cheerp. I'm thinking maybe that's not so bad.

Back to Google. Maybe if I just take the battery out entirely. Nope. Cheerp. Cheerp. Back downstairs. I recall that there was an extra smoke detector in the laundry room drawer when I moved in. If I can examine the device by holding it in my hands, read the white on white Braille-like lettering, maybe I can figure this out. There's a reset button. "Push to reset. Hold to test," the tiny letters say. How long is a push vs. a hold? Should I risk actually setting off the alarm? My mom will wake up. M will wake up. I'm not so sure about the man who loves me, but I'd rather poke out my eardrums than push that button. Standing upstairs in my closet with the extra smoke detector in my hand, I practice taking the battery in and out of that one, checking to see if I could have wrongly inserted the battery in the beeping detector. No. What if I push the button on the unattached smoke detector? It's not wired in. If the alarm sounds, I can rip out its battery. It beeps. Then beeps again. Now there are two smoke detectors cheerping. Good-bye battery. Cheerp. What??? The thing is cheerping and it has no battery. I stuff it into the pajama drawer in my closet and close the door.

It's almost 4:00 a.m. Google. Be sure the battery door is completely closed after you change the battery the umpteenth website says. Back up the ladder. Coax the cover. Wiggle it. Silence.

I have some booze on a pretty tray with a couple of glasses in my bedroom. Grand Marnier. Bailey's. A nearly empty bottle of Polish bison grass vodka that is so good, I have been reluctant to drain it. Now is the time. I sit in the big white easy chair in the dark, the bottle on the window ledge next to me. It's so quiet I can hear that lovely man in my bed breathing. Is he dreaming? Wait! What was that dream I was having?That dream just before I awoke. The Someone and His Someone. There were nefarious financial dealings. Blackmail. And….something. Some secret that explained everything about my divorce…but now it might as well have gone up in smoke.

Herons call over the water in the dark. The vodka bottle is empty. Back to bed.

In the morning, the moment he wakes, the man who loves me smiles and kisses me. When he sees the box of batteries on the bathroom counter, he says, "I guess you were up in the middle of the night." Later, over coffee, he tells me he slept well. And that he dreamt of Harrison Ford.

Happy Earth Day/Where the Deer and the Antelope Play

A few mornings ago, I awoke stumbling out of a dream--caught in the vortex of my subconscious, it felt like forever before I could open my eyes. There was an enormous orange moon that turned out not to be a moon at all, but some kind of balloon-like satellite. This not-moon had fallen from the sky and came to rest on the street. The Someone was there, pointing out a small control box attached to the edge of the glowing sphere. And there were antelope. As the antelope bounded by--paying no heed to the fallen moon--their legs seemingly spring-loaded, I reminded the Someone of the backpacking trip where we'd seen a herd of them. Back in those pre-Wikipedia days, there were inexpensive guidebooks and pamphlets often purchased by hikers and day-walkers who wanted to learn the names of those wild things they might encounter on the trail. The backpacking trip I mentioned in the dream was a real life backpacking trip, and  I'll bet there's a booklet still on the shelf in the study in the house where I no longer reside, a check mark next to the picture of the animal who, it turns out, is not actually an antelope at all.

Yesterday, my mom pointed out an article which seems to have disappeared from the electronic version of my L.A. Times. I did, however, find THIS.  I was stunned to read that the pronghorn is critically endangered. Only fifty left in the wild? Today I dropped into a sort of Earth Day rabbit hole. I just couldn't wrap my head around it. While I often delighted in watching old movies with my kids and saying things like, "Look, oh my god, look, that's a typewriter," or "See that? It's a telephone with a dial! That's why we say dial tone," I don't ever want to say that I saw an entire herd of pronghorn in 1979, and that no one will ever see them in the wilderness again.

After  an hour with my iPad in the dentist's office waiting room while my mom had some work done, I'm happy to report that the peninsular pronghorn mentioned in the above link, is not the only sub-species of pronghorn on the planet Earth. The type I came across somewhere in the Sierra, seems to be managing--though my heart sunk a bit at THIS. I am not anti-hunting, but my brain did another trip back to the 70s when the Someone and I sat at the newly installed computers circa 1974 (could this be?--or am I conflating college with law school?) playing a game where the object was to properly manage the bison herd of  a by-gone era. We wiped them out. Inadvertently. Best intensions and all that, but oops! No more bison.

So, while I have no idea why I am still dreaming of the Someone occasionally, or why I dreamed of antelope, Happy Earth Day. The pronghorn is the fastest land mammal in the western hemisphere and also has the longest land mammal migratory route. Seen in the wilderness, they will take a backpacker's breath away, the white stripes across their throats streaking through the dappled light like no Nike swoosh has ever done. Your body will throb with adrenaline to be in the presence of so many wild animals at once. Your brain will grapple with their vertical springing vis a vis the swiftness at which they pass you by. Then you'll stand there stunned at what you've seen, the pronghorns long gone.

Photo Credit: michellefrancisphoto.smugmug.com

Dreams, Snakes, and Rails

We talked about dreams today. How my mom often dreams that she and her twin are lost. In real life, when they were girls, she and her sister got lost in the woods. After walking and walking they came across a pasture of cows. When the cows began to follow them, they were afraid so they ran, and the cows ran after them, and they were even more frightened, but they had the sense to stop running before they were trampled. Last night, in her dreams, my mom and her sister were lost again. They had to run, but she wasn't sure from what. My aunt ran like the wind on her prosthetic legs, my mom said. And later in the dream, she had no legs, but still she somehow ran so fast my mom could barely keep up.

Tonight at dinner, she told me about the bounty on rattlesnakes. The county paid you fifty cents for a rattle. Real money in those days, she said. You could get a giant sack filled with loaves of day old bread for a nickel back then. Fifty cents was a fortune. She and her sister stoned the snakes to death, then cut off the rattle.

And she told me how her brother would stand by the railroad tracks waiting for the freight trains. Sometimes coal fell out of the overloaded coal cars, and sometimes the men working on the train would throw down some coal just to give it to him. He would gather it up and take it home for the potbellied stove that heated their house. Later the brother became a hobo. Road the rails across the country and back again.

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?

The Dark House

There we were, the ex-husband and I. We were in a small chapel. People were milling about. There was nowhere to sit, and so we sat by each other. He slipped me some kind of note or paperwork. He panicked for a moment, thinking the papers he had given to his partner were the ones he'd meant for me. He wanted us to get back together, and it was still a secret. He had his wife and his children to think of, but we'd been sneaking around, he and I, meeting for lunch and for sex. I had my own guilt to deal with. I was going to have to break the news to the man who loves me. Tell him that I might be getting back together with my ex-husband.

And then I woke up, thank god. Feeling guilty and weird that I'd dreamed such a thing. That's what I get for watching Bergman's "Scenes from a Marriage"home alone.

I first saw the movie in the mid-70s not long after moving to L.A. I saw it with my ex-husband--who was just my boyfriend then. In my memory it was all shot in close-up in a white room, the lights blaring into the faces of the husband and wife, their tight smiles dissolving into loathing. I didn't care for it much back then. I had no idea, I suppose, how people who appeared so happy on the surface, could be swirling in so much subterranean turmoil. It was utterly fascinating this time around. I had to turn it off for a bit after the scene where Marianne calls her friend to tell him that Johann has left her. He already knows--had known for quite a while that Johann was planning it. My own humiliation came back to me, so palpable and present, that I got up from my chair and stood in the bathroom doorway wondering if in a second I'd be kneeling on the tile in front of the toilet. But I was okay. It was good to be reminded, in a way, of my debilitating un-doing. To contrast then with now. To see where the path began and where my feet are planted now.

As for Marianne and Johann and their dark night in a dark house where they lay in bed cheating on their present spouses, that's not a house I ever want to inhabit. That house burned down, and nothing will rise from its ashes.

Change Might be the Operative Word

I've had a lot of weird dreams lately. One where I bought a new car that looked like a fire engine--but only on the outside. Dust that turned into blood. An Irish setter that could talk.

Last night it was a fancy party. The women in evening gowns. The men in tuxedos. My friend El was radiant, towering over the crowd in her stilettos, her blond hair like an aura. Later in the kitchen she told me she and her husband were getting divorced. She was laughing and eating cake. As the party wound down, the husband followed me into the hallway and told me he wanted to marry me. But he changed his mind in the dark post-coital hours. It hadn't occurred to him that I was too old to bear children. The next morning he went back to El.

Somehow this rejection segued into a dream about house hunting. The houses were old and interesting. Attics converted to rumpus rooms. Bedrooms a warren of connectedness. Floors that needed leveling. Architectural detail that required shoring up. "This time I'm going to buy the house I want," I shouted at the group of nay-sayers as they murmured  their concerns. I was still wearing pearls and a party dress, everything a bit askew.

The day after tomorrow I really will go house hunting. I hope there won't be any shouting.

The Clothes on Our Backs

I've been thinking about clothes. Dreaming about dresses, shirts, skirts and pants. Shoes with mates, and without. Boots, tall and short. Sandals, socks, scarves, shawls. All of these things were in my head when I woke at 3:30 this morning. When I was a waitress, I served Surf 'n Turf all night long. Now that I've been volunteering to sort donations at The Downtown Women's Center, mountains of clothing rise taller and taller until I open my eyes to verify that I am in my bed--and not about to be buried beneath an avalanche of clothes.

When sorting through the donations received by the DWC, it's easy to figure out, sometimes, that two or three Hefty bags have come from the same person. Did that person die, I wonder--or is this just the result of a closet-cleaning extravaganza--and is there twice as much that she's kept? I have a childhood memory of an old man on our front porch calling, "Rags, rags," but maybe it's a scene from a fairy tale. One thing I know for sure, there wasn't much wear left in anything by the time it was removed from its drawer or hanger. Things didn't go to Goodwill or any other charity. They went to a cousin if they had any life at all left in them, and if not, they were cut up for doll clothes or dust rags--or perhaps given to my possibly mythical rag man.

My daughter C. is a sailor. She works on historic tall ships, moving from boat to boat with no permanent address. She travels with a sea bag and often has only one hook and a drawer or two to stow her belongings while she is at sea. Her regular clothes live on dry land at my place. A half-dozen shirts, five skirts, five dresses, three jackets, three sweaters, a coat, a couple pairs of pants, and a surprising 15 pairs of shoes which may not include her steel-toed work boots. There are a few pieces of jewelry too, some scarves, a short stack of work clothes, and the accessories of her trade--knives and a marlin spike. A tool box. There's a second tool box of make-up and grooming products. Some bulky foul weather sailing gear. But I'd wager that, with her top-notch packing skills, everything mentioned above could fit into the trunk of her car.

My clothes would not fit into my car. My rule about clothes is that they have to fit in my closet--and I finagle that a bit. I have a modern double-sliding-door closet with an organizer system, not a closet like the one in the house I grew up in, which probably would have held a third of what I currently call my wardrobe. Isn't it weird that we have so much clothing in an era when, for most of us, washing them has become so simple? I have vague memories of my grandma or my aunt or someone doing the wash on an old hand-wringer machine. It would have been great to have some extra outfits in those days because washing them and hanging them on the line to dry required actual participation.

In 1973 I worked as an au pair in Paris. Monsieur was a doctor, and Madame was a med student. They and their darling seven-month-old daughter lived in a beautiful old building a couple of blocks from Parc Monceau. They had a nice car and a summer house on the beach in Montpelier. Their flat was comfortably furnished, but they had almost no clothes. Madame wore the same outfit to her classes nearly every day--red overalls in a thin velvet-soft fabric than she accessorized in a variety of ways. A navy t-shirt, a white man-tailored shirt, scarves, a little jacket. Monsieur had a couple of suits, a half-dozen shirts. His white t-shirts, worn as underwear shirts, were so much nicer than the Fruit of the Loom I was familiar with, that, I confess,  I pilfered one when I left my job to travel with friends. I wore it for a decade or more.

When did quantity win the fist fight with quality?

And if one would have the misfortune to be buried by an avalanche of clothes--from my own closet or elsewhere, it would be possible to dig out, right?