Partying with the dead--reefer and potato salad

The spread from my mom's birthday party in 2012. I think there's potato salad in one of those bowls.

 A dream: Dan's daughter came to visit. I was living in a house on a hill, not unlike the first house I ever owned in the Sliver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles. The slope down to the sidewalk was so steep that when people walked by you could only see the tops of their heads.  "Hey you're in town!" a friend of Dusty's said to her as he looked up and caught a glimpse of her through the open window. We cranked the window fully open and sat on the window seat as she introduced us, describing me as the woman who tried to keep her father alive. Tried and failed, I thought.

Later more friends came over. Friends of Dusty's, friends of Dan's. People I knew and people I didn't. They talked about a house they were buying together. You have to come see it, someone said.

But first there were guests to feed. Dusty went out to buy potatoes so we could make potato salad. I already had two bags of potatoes, but that was okay. We'd make a lot of potato salad. We piled the potatoes into a pot and put it on the stove on low and went out to look at the house. Dusty explained that when Dan was alive I wanted to buy him a house so he could stop working. (In real life, back in 2010 or so,  I thought about buying  a loft downtown near little Tokyo and figured he could live there if he wanted.) The house that Dusty and her friends were buying was not a house exactly. It was a former event venue. The bathrooms were huge with numerous stalls. The women's bathroom was painted fuchsia and silver. "Great for parties," someone said. Next we squeezed into a room piled high with furniture. "This could be our dining room table," someone said as we edged around a dark carved table big enough for a dozen or more. On top of it were two ornately carved boxes with dragons rising up from their lids. "This is where we'll keep the reefer," I said. (Really, I said that in the dream. Hahahaha.)

Back at my house, we checked on the potatoes and took them off the stove to cool. People and more people. Drinks in our hands. And there he was--Dan, sitting next to me. No one but me seemed to notice him. "You're chewing gum," he said. Your brothers must be visiting. You always chew gum when your brothers visit. (God, dreams are weird.) I reminded him that my brothers lived far away and almost never visited. 

"But they did visit recently," I said. "When our mother died." Dan's mouth opened into a silent O. 

"What!?" he said. "Oh dear you, come here so I can hold you." He wrapped his arms around me, and I tried to figure out how all of this worked. Was I supposed to let a dead loved know when another loved one joined their ranks? And how was I supposed to do that exactly? How did moving from the land of the living to the land of the dead work? Who could I ask? Meanwhile Dan held me, and the sensation of his black polar fleece jacket was so familiar that it made me sad, remembering when he wore it when he was alive. And that was a mystery too. How did he get his jacket back? It was given to me after he died and I wore it under my coat last winter in Minneapolis. I lost it on a bus because I got too hot hurrying to the bus stop and tied it around my waist beneath my wool coat. A block or so after I got off the bus I noticed it was gone. I went back to look for it but never found it. I am puzzling through all of this reality about the lost jacket in the dream, and I can't figure that out either. There are all these things I don't know--- the mysterious world of the dead and how they are notified when others die. How they get their lost clothes back. How they come back to visit. I can't figure any of it out. 

"I wish you'd come back more often," I said. "Come back to visit because I miss you." My face was wet with tears. (And indeed it was when I awoke.)

Dreams in Pink Madras

 I was at a party, and there he was. He pulled up a chair across from me, our knees nearly touching. There was a table to our right where we set our drinks. "You're back," I said. I meant back from the dead. He nodded."You look good. God, you look so good." And really, Dan had never looked better. He looked rested, and the skin on his hands and face was smooth. A life of hard work, erased. I took his face in my hands and our eyes locked.
"You know I can't stay," he said.

The dream was thin--a whisper, a shadow. The party was something about books. My friend Elizabeth was there. Our eyes met. I looked at her as if to say, don't breathe a word about this visit from the other world. She nodded.

"I love your shirt," I said to Dan, though it was nothing like I'd ever seen him wear in real life. The shirt was a pink madras plaid with a button-down collar. And he might have been wearing an earring.

That's all I remember.

***

Clothing seems to figure rather prominently into my dreams about Dan. The stylish jacket and designer sunglasses he wore when he turned up at my house with the gorgeous blond; the long red skirt, tight pants, bolero, kimono, and two hats he was wearing the time he wanted to take me to the balloon festival. Now pink madras. What does it all mean? No idea.

But I do know this: Saturday night I had friends over. We ate on the patio even though it was chilly. "Here. Wear the guest polar-fleece," I told the friend who'd only brought shorts and a t-shirt. It was Dan's jacket I offered him. One of two jackets Dan habitually wore, and I keep it in the armoire next to the front door. I ended up wearing the other jacket that night. I went upstairs to use the bathroom, and realized I was a bit cold too. When I went into my closet to find something warm, there was Dan's blue jacket. It matched my shirt perfectly so I put it on. What a beautiful jacket, everyone said when I came downstairs. So there we were, partying on the patio in Dan's jackets,warm bodies in the cold night air, connecting this world to the next.

Eyes of Fire

It's that time of year when the windows in the condo building across the way reflect the rising sun. At first glance the place looks like it's engulfed in flames, the windows like giant eyes of fire.

In Oaxaca it's two hours later, and the sun stays up til six in the evening there. The skies are nearly cloudless all through the daylight hours, and the chill in the morning air is crisp, not damp. I love being home, but my body feels soggy and tired.

I dreamed of my mother last night. She was younger--maybe the age I am now or even in her 50s. We were all gathering somewhere for a family get-together. At my brother's house, maybe, or my son's. There were plans to sightsee and go to a concert. Picking up the tickets was confusing and my car had somehow downloaded the software to be a self-driving car. It was disconcerting, sitting in the back seat while the car inched its way through city traffic without a driver. I climbed into the front seat anyway--no easy feat to make it from the back seat of a Prius into the driver's seat, but I did it, twisting my body this way and that, and then realized it really wasn't necessary.

Wherever it was that we were, the house was full of us, arriving and deciding who would sleep where, and then changing our minds. My mom decided to drive herself back to her apartment a day early. She grabbed my older daughter in a hug and told her she lived too far away. I don't know when I'll see you again, she said.

I woke too early this morning, waiting for the first sliver of daylight before I flung off the covers. I walked toward the building that was glowing, and on the grass found a playing card. Two of clubs. What is the significance of the two of clubs? I googled. It's the card of conversation. The two of clubs person is gregarious and entertaining. It's the card of communication.

The Ways We Miss the Dead

I had a dream last night too muddled to recount. In it was a young man--the friend of one of my daughters. He was shot and killed at a party when they were in high school. In my dream he was playing the guitar and I was trying to explain to a friend that he was dead and had come back only for this one special evening. No matter how I tried, I could not make her understand.

Friday night I went to the mall to buy a purse and to have three dead watches checked out to see if batteries might revive them. One of the watches was my mother's. I had a snappy red leather band put on it along with the new battery, wondering if some day I might wear this watch, its pulse beating on my wrist now instead of my mother's and somehow this might make me feel her presence in my life in a physical way. While I waited for the work to be done on the watches, I walked through the mall and found myself in Sears, walking in the very same aisle I once walked regularly with my mother to get to Miracle Ear.

The other day I told a friend how my father often spoke in tired and true old sayings and how he didn't even have to deliver the whole saying because he'd said them so often that we kids knew what came next.  Up too late? "The early bird," he'd say. A friend got in trouble for running with the wild kids? "Birds of a feather," he'd say.

On Thursday night, my regular night out to hear music at a local bar with friends, the musicians played a song we'd never heard them play, Sweet and Shiny Eyes. Bonnie Rait recorded it and I think Willie Nelson put out a version too.

Your sweet and shiny eyes are like the stars above Laredo
Like meat and potatoes to me
In my sweet dreams we are in a bar, and it's my birthday
Drinking salted Margaritas with Fernando

Young and wild, we drove five hundred miles of Texas highway
To the Mexican border as the day was coming on
We crossed the Rio Grande river and we swore we'd have things our way
When we happened to walk into Nuevo Leon

Your sweet and shiny eyes are like the stars above Laredo
Like meat and potatoes to me
In my sweet dreams we are in a bar, and it's my birthday
And we're having our picture taken with Fernando

In my sweet dreams we are in a bar, and it's my birthday
And we're having our picture taken with Fernando

The version I know best was sung to me live. The way I remember it, it was usually after dinner at my place. Dan would pull his guitar out of its case and carry it back to the table. We'd push our chairs far enough from each other so he'd have room to play.

In my sweet dreams I'm in a bar, there are people playing the guitar, and the dead are back for a visit, their eyes sweet and shiny. We know, just by being in their presence how lucky we are, and they know that they were lucky, in a way, to leave this life first because we were here to hold them, to mourn them, to keep them alive in our dreams, to tell their stories--and they can never do that for us.

Here's an essay about that by Donald Hall from the New Yorker.

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

Notes from the Afterlife, Advice from Pillville, and Lovelovelove

August 20, 2012 minutes after our arrival, the long drive from Iowa over.

Warning: this might be my longest post ever. But there's love, booze, broken stuff, danger, death, love, and....more, more, more.

I broke a glass yesterday. A heavy tumbler in a slow motion plummet to the tile. The fall, the impact, the shatter seemed to unwind in slow motion. The sound of it too.

That was after I took my mom out for a haircut and barely managed to get her from the car and into the door of the salon. It was a very short walk--a walk that most people would not even describe with the word walk. Enter, maybe, or arrive would describe the track from car to door. I didn't bring the wheelchair. One of those mistakes to which I'll never be able apply the lesson learned because I'm not taking her out again. But we made it. Thanks to the presence of a bench, I didn't have to gently slide her down my leg and sit her on the sidewalk the way C drilled me months ago after the Thanksgiving night blackout drunk face plant.

The hospice nurse came for her regular visit after we got home. My mom was napping by then, looking pretty fabulous in her new haircut. Her pulse/ox was low-ish again, and her blood pressure was really low. 80/60. Yeah. Take a deep breath everyone. My mom is on hospice. She has lung cancer. For the third time. This is the way it is. She was alert and chatty, telling us how her putty-like legs didn't hurt and how she felt just fine. We raised the head of the bed and gave her gatorade. Told her to nap. The nurse and I went into the kitchen and she talked to me while I took the blood pressure meds out of my mom's pill box. She called in a prescription for a steroid. Then we talked about Iowa.

Today is the beginning of our fourth year in Pillville. My mother has said from the beginning that she wanted to go home to Iowa to die. Every time she said it, I told her fine, let me know when so I can buy plane tickets. For months already, we've had tickets for a visit there the first week in October. Yesterday the nurse told me that if there's any chance that my mom might be re-locating to Iowa, that I need to get her there "before the widow closes." That said, my mom ate a hearty dinner last night and walked around the house just fine. She insisted on scooping out her own ice cream--her usual bedtime treat.

Last night I dreamed of Dan. He came back wearing a new jacket, a pair of tinted designer glasses, and tight jeans. He was with a zaftig blonde, whom I disliked immediately. The three of us spent the night in the same house. He slept in my bed. I felt pretty smug the next morning while she slunk around refusing to make eye contact. I was in the kitchen when I heard a certain rhythmic sound coming from the bathroom. When the two of them came out and went directly out the door, I followed them into the street. We were in a big city and a trolley came by. Dan got on. I don't know what happened to the blonde. You could at least say good-bye, I shouted. He raised his eyes to look at me. Fuck you, I said. He shrugged. The doors of the trolley closed and our eyes held as he rolled out of sight.

Dan Paik broke more than a half-dozen glasses in the five and a half years we were together. He broke them at the table, in the kitchen, in the bathroom, and once in the garage. Other than the broken glass our time together was safe and pretty damn beautiful.

Pete arrives today. He's at the airport in Chicago waiting to board his plane right now. The first day of the fourth year of living with my mom is also another sort of beginning. Pete and I became Facebook friends in March. We knew of one another through the T'ai Chi Chih community (he's been a teacher a long time) and he's also a caregiver for his father. After a friend shared a couple of my Pillville posts, he asked if he could have my email address. Over a thousand emails and hundreds of hours of Skype later, we will meet this afternoon in person when he steps off the airport shuttle.

Two dear and trusted friends are coming to eat dinner with my mom tonight. I hope my mom continues to feel well. I hope I remember to eat dinner. I hope I remember to sleep. I hope I continue to trust the universe and that this story keeps rolling along, and that hearts, heads, glasses, bones, and all breakables stay intact for as long as they are able.

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.

Life in Pillvillle, Dreams of the Dead, and Cat in the Hat

DREAM: I was young--17 or 18 years old-- and I'd been sentenced to death by the Grand Dictator of our failed nation. My father was with me in the dictator's court as the sentence was handed down. My father in the dream was my real-life father looking pretty much like this, but wearing a white shirt and tie with a beautiful teal cashmere pullover instead of the dark suit.

In real life, I never knew my father when he looked like this (and neither did my mother) since he was 55 when I was born. Anyway, in the dream, my father and I accepted that I was doomed. The dictator granted me one last day to spend with my family, and my father and I decided that we would not divulge my sentence to them since it would only spoil our last hours together. The Grand Dictator agreed that my father could accompany me to my execution and I took comfort in that. We knew that I could not escape. The secret police were watching the house. It would be bombed if I did not return to meet my fate, and if we all tried to escape, we all would be hunted down and killed. I woke up before the execution--so that was nice, I guess. I don't know what my crime was, but I was young and rebellious and the country was in shambles.

I think my father might have visited me in my dream because I yelled at my mother last night. Yep. Outright yelled. After she tried to clear the table looking like something like this.

Cat in the Hat with stuff

So my mom dropped the container of salsa which went everywhere--all over her, her I've-fallen-and can't-get-up button, the cabinets, the floor--which is not so terrible, but then she bent down to clean it up when I told her I'd get it, that she shouldn't be bending down to clean it up and of course she almost tipped over. So I yelled. Because just before dinner, maybe 30 minutes earlier, she was wiping the kitchen floor with a paper towel, (some drips of water that I'd probably splashed while washing the carrots) and I said, "Um, how about using the mop," (which is handy just a few feet from the fridge) "because, um, remember you're not really supposed to be bending over like that because you could fall again." And mind you, there were martinis involved here. And just a couple of hours before that, when we were returning from our trip to Miracle Ear, and she was Cat-in-the-Hatting it out of the car with her purse on her arm, and her cane in her hand, and kleenex too, and my empty water bottle and a shoe, and two empty ice cream dishes, and two silver fishes, and two plastic spoons and a piece of the moon, etc., (okay, the shoe, the fishes and moon are an exaggeration) I said, "Mom, please just get your stuff and let me get the rest, that way you have a free hand in case you need it." 

She doesn't remember shit. Or she has absolutely no impulse control. Or both. 

And I shouldn't yell. So I have no impulse control. Well, shit.

And just yesterday I half-jokingly told a friend who is a retired attorney that she would be my first phone call when the police come to ask about all the bruises on my dear old dead mother. I mean, this could seriously happen. I still get a chill when I remember the moment in the pediatrician's office when I was asked to step into the hallway so the doctor could question my daughter about her two black eyes and her pear-sized nose. 

And did I mention that I've had an irrational life-long fear of ending up in prison?

Well, anyhow. Thanks, Dad, for the warning. I'll try to keep mom from serious bodily harm as best I can. And I'll try to keep myself from being executed or ending up in prison. And I'll try not to yell.

Day of the Dead

After visiting my favorite dia de los muertos exhibit at The Folk Tree last week, I bought some supplies and made my own altar for Dan.

I dreamed of him a couple of nights ago. We were camping on a big fluffy air mattress tucked in between some boulders in a canyon. The sky was still blue, but we were already  in bed, watching the clouds, marveling at the blue wide-openness. A cop pulled up on his motorcycle, asking to see our permits. When I rifled through a box of stuff, he saw our clump of pot. "It's medical," I said to the cop. "Show him your scar," I said to Dan. Dan didn't pull up his shirt. He smiled and shrugged. The sky turned an even more brilliant blue.

Traveling the World(s)

Ideally, when one goes off for the weekend to stay in a swanky-ish spot, one would not be wearing pink flannel pajamas and be in bed alone. However, I survived. I even had fun. A lot of fun.

My godson's wedding was completely charming. The after-party for the older generation (plus the groom's brother as a representative of the younger generation) was delightful and involved a lot of wine, some really good goat cheese, and one of those irresistible confections from Trader Joe's involving chocolate and nuts and coconut. I have no solid recollection of what exactly we talked about, but I do remember laughing a lot. I was afraid I'd feel like shit this morning since I barely drink these days, but I woke early and hit the road. Driving does weary me though. More than drinking too much wine. I got off the road  for a while and went exploring in a beach town a couple hours north of where I live. It was full of tourists eating salt water taffy, and  fro-yo and the sidewalks looked as though they had suffered a lot of fro-yo and taffy spills. I like where I live better.

So it's lovely to be home. I took a long walk and met an acquaintance/friend for a glass of wine which turned into dinner with more friends of hers, and god, we older women are fascinating. There were five of us and the collection of life experiences was not for the faint of heart. But there we were.

I've been trying to prompt myself to dream of Dan this past week or so. A couple of nights before I left, I dreamed I was at a party and ran into an old college friend who'd heard that I had a wonderful boyfriend. Oh, he died, I told her. He's dead. Her eyes filled with tears and she seemed shocked that I'd been so blunt. I had another dream a couple of nights ago and it slipped away before I could solidify the memory of it. I remember only touching his face.

And so it goes, I move through these two worlds, communing with both the dead and the living.

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.

Talking with the Dead

Charon and Psyche crossing the River Styx

Dream:

I was on the phone--a land line--sitting on the bed in a hotel room. I was talking to a friend I hadn't seen in years, and we were making arrangements to get together. She invited me to dinner. "Oh, not that night, I said, Mr. Ex will be staying with me and I don't want to bring him along." There was some awkward conversation then wherein I explained that the ex and I hadn't gotten back together and that, in fact, we weren't even friends, but he really needed a place to stay, so I had obliged. 

"Just because he's staying with you, you don't need to bring him," she said. I was about to thank her profusely for that insight, when Dan's voice came on the line. 

"Hi, baby," he said. There was a whirring noise in the background as my friend's voice receded. I could hear Dan clearly, but for a moment I was confused, thinking I'd accidentally hit the voicemail button on my cellphone and was listening to a saved voicemail. But no, this was a land line that I was talking on. I pulled the phone away from my ear and looked at it to be sure. "I just want you to know I'm good," he said. He sounded happy, as if he was at a party, entertained by something that was going on there. "I wish I could see you though," he said. 

About this time my conscious brain sprung to life. I'm talking to him, I'm talking to him, I'm talking to him, and I have to remember. I have to remember. The dream began to dissolve then, but I think he told me one last thing---that he loved me.

Can I tell you that I conjured this? (I'm fine. I swear.) A wave of desperation had swept over me as I got ready for bed. I have to see you. I have to talk to you, I said to the emptiness. I put on the Iris Dement CD that he gave me for my birthday last year, and sat reading the lyrics while her voice filled the room. I've listened to this album so many times since receiving it, but somehow the lyrics (in the photos below) never sank in. I'd had a couple of glasses of wine, and I wasn't sure I could believe what I was reading, but I thought maybe these songs were a clue that might lead me to him, a portal of sorts. I listened to the first two songs again, then took out that CD, and put in a CD of Dan's that was a radio interview he'd done (long before I knew him) about World T'ai Chi Day. I'd already rubbed a dab of his shaving cream into my palms and the scent lingered as I lay down on his side of his bed, listening to his voice until I fell asleep.

                                                                              ****

The friend in the dream--she was at the birth of my younger daughter, and I'd seen her very frequently during that pregnancy. So now in this dream I spoke with her on the phone while I connected with the afterlife.

And Mr. Ex, what the hell was he doing there? Oh, and I forgot, just as the phone call was wrapping up, my trusty financial guy came through the door. I hung up the phone and threw myself into his arms, crying, "I talked to Dan. I talked to Dan."

What the hell?
But hey, I talked to Dan, everybody. He said he was good.

P.S. And do you know what else? My mom talks to her dead twin sister every night. It starts as she stands in the kitchen after dessert as she's finishing her final martini, staring out at the water. She starts to doze, and the next thing you know, she's there on her feet, half asleep, talking to the dead. I usually stay up an hour or so after she goes to bed. I sit on the couch in the dark, reading and writing, and I hear her voice rising out of sleep. And even before her twin died, she talked to other dead people. My dad, her other siblings. A conversation we had about that years ago and a dream she told me about a parrot led to THIS STORY. 

Life. Stranger than fiction, right?
Right. Because in my family, we talk to the dead.

Some lyrics from an Iris Dement song

More Iris Dement lyrics

The Guy with the Party Hat Cod-Piece

Dream:

He was married when I saw him last, but in the dream somehow we were together. 

The room was on an upper floor with a window that looked out over the rooftops. The bed, massive and old, was pushed alongside the window. My room, my bed. But we'd agreed to meet there. 

I bought a kimono for the occasion. Pink. Not usually my color. A muted pattern. I was trying it out to see how I'd look, tags dangling from the sleeves, when he entered. He'd ribbon-tied  a paper plate to his chest, and longer ribbons streamed from his neck, but it was the pointy party hat cod-piece that I couldn't take my eyes off of. 

This guy could be a lot of fun, I thought. Then I woke up.  

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.