Dear C,

I’m having the dreams again, the ones where I can’t find you, where you leave the room moments before I walk through the door, or where I end up lurking by your apartment eavesdropping on your roommates or loitering around the lobby of your office building, hoping for a glimpse. When did I get so creepy? Last night's dream was one of full pursuit: I tried to track you down after an evening of my dissolution, a night in which we didn’t talk, we didn't even see each other, but I drank and annoyed. Not you -- no, as usual you were locus unknown, hanging out somewhere in the boxy house with pristine walls where we were staying. It was my other friend who got the worst of me. I was drunk and I ignored her and somehow missed you. But I was determined not to lose you again.

I walked to your office. It was dark, stylish, like a set designer's idea of police headquarters. Shadowy. The room you worked in was large and low-ceilinged, desks out in the open, everyone busy. Your boss, a kindly man, fiftyish with grey curly hair, came over when he saw me hanging around your work station. He didn't talk about you or what you were doing that day, but went on about the work environment, the collaboration that the open room encouraged. I tried calling you, but the phone on your desk (black, sleek, modern) wouldn’t cooperate with my stubby fingers.

That wasn't the only dream you haunted last night. In the other one, my former boss, L, was giving a tour of the old school building where she worked and lived. Was she still a librarian? Did it matter? The school was small and square. Brick. It was proportioned for a different time when people were skinnier and had fewer belongings. (The 1930s?) L took me through long corridors and into strange empty wings. Two times she pushed me into an abandoned classroom while she stayed in the hallway, asking me if the trash can was full. I didn't notice the trash can -- I was too worried about ghosts. Why was the trash suddenly my responsibility?

There seemed to be no end to this school, with its linoleumed corridors and cramped rooms and stairways with cold metal handrails that left a tinny smell on my hands. Finally, we ended up on the top floor, which was another open office space. This one, lit by fluorescent tubes, was light without being airy. The staff was young, a few years out of college. Some of these people looked familiar and I realized this was where you worked when we first met. But you weren't there anymore.

I’ve been expecting these dreams, with their yearning and mystery, dreams where you are a recurring character in absentia. My subconscious is working something out (although what that might be is still a mystery to me). And I'm torn between accepting you as a symbol (of me? of my squashed desire?) and giving in to the yearning.

Hope you are well,

J



Image by zen.

Tags: dreams, escape

Act I

Something is going on with me. I’m sleeping terribly, cry at nothing. Last night at dinner my son asked for another Dress Me Monkey story: “What else would Dress Me Monkey do?” This is our cue to come up with some fantastical new tale about how the toy would spend the proceeds from treasure he never manages to steal. I said the first thing that came to my mind, that Dress Me Monkey wishes he could go back in time to the nights when he ate with his mother and father and they told Dress Me Human stories. "His parents are far away now, and Dress Me Monkey misses those days. He would like to go back for a meal or two."

The dinner had been a difficult one, with the kid complaining about his food and telling me how the refried beans on his homemade nachos looked like dirt, like something worms would eat. I'd spent a lot of the day fighting my initial crabby responses to his normal kid behavior. I was tired. My past has been coming back and poking me lately, spilling out, and meals are one of those difficult times for me. So I came up with a Dress Me Monkey story that fit my mood, inappropriate though the story might have been.

"Why did Dress Me Monkey want to have dinner with his parents again, like he was a little monkey?" the boy asked.

“Because everybody wants that,” my husband said and started to cry. The boy was concerned and snuggled up close to his dad. We explained that Daddy was crying partially because he misses his mother, who has been dead for twelve years, but that also sometimes adults miss the past, the sweet simplicity of the family table. Then it was my turn to cry, because my childhood mealtimes were mainly horrible. The emotional tenor of my those dinners depended on my mother's mood and the man she was dating. She had only three boyfriends over the course of my childhood, but each of them had their own issues, would make me stand at the table or wouldn't talk when I was there or would pull me apart, show my every flaw. When the last one, Kevin, came along I ended up eating dinner alone most of the time.

So. I want my family meals to be happy. Full of love. The food I prepare is part of that love and I try hard not to force the boy to eat things he doesn't like, which is why he eats macaroni and cheese almost every night. Last night the meal was something he has eaten before, but it didn't appeal to him and the whole situation got to me.

I know that his rejection of my food is not a rejection of me, but sometimes I still have that visceral reaction, that and "You have no idea how good you have it, little boy." And I get angry at myself for thinking such a thing. He doesn't "need" to know that. He needs to grow up secure and happy and loved, without the burdens of my childhood thrust upon him. But right now the past is spilling out of me, surprising me with its emotional abundance. It can be overwhelming.

Last night, as I was getting him to sleep, he asked about our day. This rundown of our daily activities is a bedtime ritual. Sometimes I learn more about what happened at school or we go deeper an earlier discussion. When I got to the dinner portion of my synopsis, I apologized for the weirdness of it and asked if he had any questions. "Why did you tell a sad Dress Me Monkey story?" was the first.

The real answer was because I am sad right now. I am processing something deep and fetid, airing out emotions that don’t easily surface. I’m not sure why it's happening and while I don’t like the effects – waking up in the middle of the night or too damn early, occasionally scaring my child, being cranky and sleepy all day – I think what I’m going through is necessary. What I told him was that when I was little mealtimes weren't always happy times and I was feeling sad about it during dinner. And then we moved on to why Daddy cried at the dinner table.

Act II

It happened again last night, the two a.m. alarm clock. I woke up sad, obsessed with an aborted friendship. After a good cry -- quiet, intense -- into my pillow, I went into the boy's room to read and hopefully return to sleep. (He had already migrated into our bed.) When sleep finally snuck up on me, I had a complicated dream. In it, my husband's family was visiting (though, in typical dream style, an old boyfriend of mine showed up, too, looking very much like a middle-aged Eastern Shore type, with a baseball cap, greying beard, and a beer belly). It was a surprise visit. I hadn't had a chance to clean and I was ashamed at how the house looked and angry with my husband for springing them on me.

My dream self went stomping off into the night. Our oldest cat, Zoe, fifteen years old now and a sack of bones, dotty, constantly hungry, followed me. We wandered frenetic city streets, joined the rush of humanity. In one square, mimes performed acrobatic feats and played with fire. The glow of a neon sign drew me into a murky bar. The next thing I remember, Zoe and I were walking home. A rainstorm had blasted through the city and scrubbed away the people, leaving behind damp sidewalks and oil-slick puddles that reflected the shimmer of streetlights. It was spooky, the kind of emptiness where you expect to hear an echo of footsteps behind you. Zoe, frightened by a stray cat, fell behind.

One minute I could see her, the next she was gone. I screamed her name over and over again. I used the dinnertime call: Zo-Zo-Zo-Zo-Zo. And then I opened my eyes, totally awake, feeling the responsibility, feeling the loss.

But at least I was feeling something.



Image: Asher with Nick's shadow. Zoe has asked not to be photographed for the blog. She's an old-fashioned sort who values her privacy, though her name actually is Zoe. She also agreed that this photo was the best fit for the post.

Does it seem like my past is always spilling out? Maybe here. This is different though, like I'm working through something big. I sometimes discount the effects of my childhood and often think I should be over it by now. But it's not so simple, is it?

Tags: dreams, what my son will talk about in therapy someday, think it's time to finally find a therapist again, dress-me monkey, storytelling, cats, Pets, guilt, grief, meals, the family table

You know the type of dream:  the key doesn’t fit into the lock. It crumbles into dust before you even get a chance to try it. Or the door has a series of complicated bolts and attachments and there you stand, in the rain, in the snow, on a hillock of desert sand, holding this old-fashioned key. Or a roller skate key, which at first you don’t even recognize – does anyone use those things anymore?

But I’ve never had a key dream. There is nothing to unlock. I have no inaccessible thoughts, just a stream of consciousness and overflowing bins in the mind, intermingling. The kind of dreams I have are telephone dreams:  me in a phone booth, the phone an old-fashioned dial model, and I can’t quite get my fingers to pull the dial to the comma of metal, to the kissing point. Or I’m a dark room heavy with curtains and carved furniture, waiting for the pick-up, the throw-out, the end, fingers tangled in heavy plastic. I keep on trying to connect (the key word here, no pun intended), but never quite make it.

In these dreams I’m always trying to call my mother, which is funny, because in my waking life I talk to her on the phone every day (on the cell phone, where I have her various numbers linked to single digits:  the only possible mistake my fingers will make is hitting the wrong one and dialing my husband or my father instead). As I write about it, I remember that these dreams are more of a thing of the past, a symbolism my subconscious has rejected, perhaps as being too trite and obvious. I like to think that the connection between my mother and me, the path of communication, has opened, is free of static and complication.

Technology has changed as well. Maybe I’ll start having keyboard dreams:  me sitting at the old-fashioned desk on this chair with the pillow for comfort, cozy in a circle of light against the early morning darkness, my fingers unable to find the right letters. I turn the letter “a” into a semi-colon, type symbols when I want numbers. It could be the keyboard is against me or my own mind, that my fingers, trained in typing class in ninth grade, are starting to stumble, to forget, the muscle memory fading away. So I’ll return to the pencil, scratching out my thoughts onto a piece of paper, my grip loosening, until all I can write is a series of scrawls.



Image from Vitroid.
From the prompt "Write about a key."
And just in case you want to hear the Cheap Trick song, here's a link. After watching it once, all I can think about is how unhealthy they look.

Tags: Round Robin, writing prompt, dreams, rotary dial telephones, old-fashioned keys

In my dreams, the dead are silent. I’ve never had a good conversation with a single one of them, just offer my apologies, bake the bread, pour the coffee. What is the guilt about? The dead no longer care about my transgressions. Isn’t it enough that I hold them here in my subconscious, treat them as gently as I would a freshly-laid egg?

But this dream was different. We were going to visit Kevin, who has been gone for over seven years now. As in real life, I was nervous: would I react properly to him? Would he toss the verbal slings, so subtle and cutting, if I didn’t pick up on something, if I reacted too slowly? Or would he sit there, blue eyes glowing, as my mother and I circled him like butterflies, flitting here and there in our attempts to placate?

Kevin spoke. He used the ethereal language of dreams, of those who are now ashes and light, but in that nasal New Jersey accent that I haven’t been able to replicate in my mind for years. And he was funny, so funny, because Kevin was bitingly funny. I laughed and realized how much I missed him, how much time had gone by and then I woke up, not remembering a word of his complicated meta-joke.

Time flies on and I die a little every day, lose another connection, feel the pull of a long-ago past. Yet my grandfather still shows up at the old house. I smell his cigarettes, breathe in sawdust, too-sweet coffee and turpentine. He waits in his cell of a room, a voiceless old man in a flannel robe, unshaven and glassy eyed. I rush past the sink filled with dirty dishes, walk a path of slate to get to a mailbox that hasn't been opened in years. Sometimes we take his car for a complicated drive to Christiana. Maybe we are heading to the hospital, waiting for someone to hand me a small bundle, something I've forgotten.

The dead appear without explanation or warning. Carolin greets me in a too-bright dorm basement, fixes me with intense eyes. David Anderson sits in a classroom, shoeless, staring at the algebra equation on the board. Frank the cat meows for food that I don't have. And my grandmother, the one I ache to see, is sick of my inattention and has stopped showing up at all.

Someday, no one will know that I was sixteen and angry once. They will remember an old woman deeply lined, forgetful, with clouded-over eyes, demanding and harmless. Inconsequential. As though I had been born without desire, without the power to wound.

Image: Postcard, date unknown.

Tags: grandfather, Kevin, Death, existential angst, dreams

Forgive me, fellow bloggers, for I have sinned. I did not intend to leave this blog for almost a month while I frittered away five weeks with my son. My mother visited for ten days and I did not blog. I had eight hours of babysitting one week and I did not blog. This past week -- my son's first back at school in over a month -- coincided with the visit of an old friend and I did not blog.

But during those eight hours of babysitting, I started to think about writing again, about tackling the never-ending story in some different way, fitting in time for as-yet-nonexistent freelance work, attempting to keep this blog somewhat current (all while finishing household projects). Good writing grows best in the dark (thanks, rcb!). What sees the light here in fragmentary form tends to stay that way. Or sometimes it embarrasses me later in its undeveloped melodrama and weak attempts at capturing reality.

It's tempting, really tempting, to put up little bits and pieces on the blog. There's nothing like instant feedback to keep one going, except that I don't keep going. The past -- meh. I've dug into it, and created stories out of it, have exposed enough. Now I'm looking to take the facts of my life, the weird experiences and characters as twisted and lively as wisteria in bloom, and make them fictional. I want to harness the crisscrossing metaphors of my subconscious.

Blah, blah, blah. I'm continually on the edge of something, a change, a new way of being, perpetually on the hopeful precipice. But I've come so far from the first days of this blog, typing in the dark and yearning for more.

Image: My mother and me walking in Muir Woods, August 2009. Photo by Mr. Trinkle.

Tags: dreams, blogging break, writing, Woody Allen, Muir Woods

In Baltimore, new people are moving in, are paying top dollar to remove the Formstone. Men, almost always men, come in with crowbars, pry the fake rock off the façade, tuck and repoint the newly exposed brick, repair tumbledown walls. Often the brick was already turning to dust when the first workers set up scaffolding, draped the famous white marble steps that the fastidious Polish ladies of Baltimore kept bright and clean. Entire blocks were caged in chicken wire and lathe as the men slathered cement mix on chockablock rowhouses, transforming old world brick into new world faux.

In San Francisco, they are propping houses up on jacks, underpinning foundations, retrofitting in case of earthquake. What do they find beneath the slatted wood? The houses rest on broad oak beams or heavy hips of steel propped up on concrete columns, strong, but not enough to take the shaking that is inevitable. The workers come with their heavy equipment and digging machines, extend legs deep in the ground. They marry house and foundation, bolt them together to ensure that the two don’t separate in a moment of crisis.

I dream that I am in a house, that I am the house, a faded Victorian, gingerbread rotting on the porch. My foundation is sunk and the slightest shaking will slump me into the street, or have me crying drunkenly into a neighbor’s garden, letting shards of my window glass dangle in the koi pond.

I am my mother’s house, an alley rowhouse no more than 12 feet wide and 27 feet deep, huddled with my compatriots on Finch’s Way, a one-block dead-end Baltimore street. The brick underneath my Formstone is solid and plumb. I am bright with open windows that let in Mexican music and the sounds of the crazy woman across the street cursing the traffic and the illegally parked cars. I am tolerance smelling of English tea roses and home cooking. But be careful climbing the winding staircase at my core, where the stairs narrow at the inside edge and you must climb in darkness.

One misstep will send you tumbling.

(Image: Looking at Kevin's old house on West Street, the one on the left.)

Tags: dreams, houses, metaphor, Baltimore, San Francisco, overextended metaphor, earthquakes, Formstone

Hugh Laurie as Bertie Wooster

I had a nickname name for him, a code word really, so that I could write it in my notebooks without fear of discovery. Bertie Wooster. It’s embarrassing, but 100% true: I was a 12-year-old P.G. Wodehouse fan, with a huge crush on my ash-blond, hazel-eyed classmate. Even in high school, after the thrill was gone, after Bertie had metamorphosized into a six-foot tall pothead, after I fell hard for a senior basketball player (another unrequited love), I would blush when we passed in the hall.

Crushes, I’ve had a few. They have ranged from the silly (the hot dog stand guy, summer of 1984) to intense (first husband, early days). These infatuations have been distracting, fun even. Nothing, however, has persisted like my 14-year obsession with Mr. H.

We met at work, my first week at my first real job. Mr. H. was cute and asked a coworker if I was attached. And so the internal churning began. I was attached – soon to be married, actually – but I couldn’t shake the butterflies, the deep blushes, whenever Mr. H would show up in the library. There he’d stand, feet away, hovering over the fax machine (the only one in the office); or he’d actually stop by to (gasp) ask me a question. My heart would race: it races now, as I remember those chance moments. Knowing he spent time in our neighborhood, I would survey the sidewalks evenings and weekends, on the lookout. The soundtrack for that year was a strange mix of Morphine and Holly Cole. Her version of On the Street Where You Live, with its stalkeresque undertones stirred up the ironic obsessive in me.



Today I am a happily married woman. Over the years, the crush has been mainly dormant, with a few volcanic moments. At this point, it’s academic – what meaning does this person hold for me? why do I continue to have those frustrating dreams? – but I am tired of it. And so, today, needing a new writing project to fixate on, I thought: why don’t I write a letter to Mr. H? You know, lay out my feelings in a literary sort of way, show them the harsh light of reality; get them out of my system. Maybe I send it, maybe I don’t. If I don’t, maybe I get it published. Everyone’s into reading about other peoples’ sick love obsessions! I can take this useless, ridiculous feeling and parlay it into art.

Yeah. I’ve been working on it for much of the morning, and I find that the writing process doesn’t purge the feelings: it makes them more intense.

My crush has morphed into a middle-aged thing, a yearning for escape from quotidian existence. I am ensconced in my (relatively) safe life, a housewife wannabe writer, parent to one tiring preschooler. Not much excitement here, though things are quite comfortable and loving at home. Maybe I need to take up bungee jumping or fencing, something to liven up the system.

So: Jennifer, let sleeping crushes lie. Oh, and Mr. H, if you are reading this (do you read this blog? I doubt it.), write me back, OK?

Only joking.

Tags: crushes, Columbus, school, Morphine, dreams, Bertie Wooster, Holly cole, P.G. Wodehouse

I didn’t dream about him for months.

For a long time I thought the dreams were messages from my subconscious, a sign of our untapped connection. But they were always full of anxiety, missed moments, twisting city streets, long distances traveled for dissatisfying conversations. The longing was mine alone.

In one dream, my mind created a labyrinthine mental institution for our encounters. We were both inmates, living in separate dormitories. The buildings were part of a Victorian-era hospital, dark and complex with hidden meanings, completely separate from the external world. We would meet and part, meet and part, sometimes with a glance, sometimes managing a quick kiss, always with that awful ache for what could never be. I woke up wondering: Do you care for me? Do I exist for you?

That was the hold he had on me: the pursuit of acknowledgment, the desire to be seen for who I was, while he existed as pure symbol, out of reach and impossible to know.

Last fall, when my marriage was going through a rough patch, we started e-mailing more frequently. I liked the exchange, felt my latent crush expand, fill the spaces I thought were empty. It was innocent fun – no lines were crossed. Then, without explanation, he stopped responding.

Over time the dreams went on hiatus. Until last night. I’m not going to get sucked into this game with my subconscious again.

I don’t need his acknowledgement to know I exist.

Tags: dreams, existential angst, crushes

It was just before nine p.m. on a warm June night in 1966. He was working the 3-11 shift at a paint plant in Newport when the ping of a hammer, a timid tap in a room stinking of kerosene, sparked a fire. Flash of flame, no time to escape: my grandfather and two other men were adjacent to the vat.

As the story goes, he stepped outside, lit a Pall Mall, and popped the huge blister on his stomach. "I think you better call an ambulance."

80% of his body was covered in third-degree burns. He spent nine months in the hospital, nine months at home with a full-time nurse. He suffered through over 26 skin grafts. His hearing was ruined from massive doses of powerful antibiotics. When his right foot was giving up the ghost, its blood vessels cauterized by fire, surgeons took a couple timid swipes, lopping off one toe, then a couple more. It took a third operation to amputate it just below the ankle.

Years later, a doctor told him, "I've seen skin like that on a dead man."

When I knew him, he was demanding and unhappy, a man with a limp and two hearing aids. I learned to hate his call: "Jenny, got a minute?" I was definitely not a Jenny and what if I didn't have a minute? It was the typical stupidity of youth. I wish I could go back and treat him with kindness and empathy, to understand what was destroyed in the fire.

In my dreams he's back in the old house, living off hot dogs and root beer, not yet clued in to his own death. He tries to call me, jamming his thick, arthritic fingers into the phone's dial. No luck.

Tags: grandfather, guilt, dreams, fire