Cruel summer...

Working steadily on a piece about some bad times not experienced by me...should be ready to go in a week or so...might actually edit a little this time.

Dream 5.14.09

Haven't been posting anything, as the few things written have all included names, faces and memories that would be best kept private...
This dream incriminates no one.
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Half awake for a few seconds. Too much white wine, heavy hard stomach from Cornish hen and mushroom wild rice. A lot of chatter echoes from last night’s dinner conversation. Bright sheets, the vibrations of cat against thigh had reverberated in the murky smoke of the last dream, not remembered. Slept in the bathrobe again, because would rather keep warm with fresh air from night windows. Turn over, look at phone. 6:01am. Another hour. Even though hot now, am too lazy to remove bathrobe, due to eyes drifting closed again. The last bout of sleep is when the most vivid dreams come.

Only still pictures to start with, time jumping - a minute, an hour. Manhattan under construction. In a car with a family of Jesus fearing, born agains. I am with them, but I am completely the same in this world as I know myself to be in waking life, my mood exactly as it was before I fell asleep. A father – dark hair, mustache, somewhat silent and weak in that he rarely speaks, is driving the large, clunky and spacious rental car. They are on vacation in the city. Why I am with them I don’t know, but I know it’s only for long enough to get them to their destination. The road is bumpy, somewhere in midtown, orange cones everywhere and torn up streets. The father is navigating and barely looking at the street in front of him, miraculously avoiding cars swiping and zig zagging past. He looks often to a sort of old, gray and white version of a GPS screen on the dashboard. The low graphic image also pops up on the electric road signs at certain points, as if just for the family to see. The children are in back of the car, anonymous thus far. The mother is a big woman, typical of middle America – stern and blonde, with glasses. She is dealing with the children and looking around to the city streets, judging everything whilst maintaining some sense of interest about the new surroundings.

Cut ahead – we are all at the water’s edge of the west side of Manhattan now – the construction left behind to our right, along with the silent noise / feel of chaos. We glide up stone steps with the car, then walking, then simply coasting on up on our own wheels of some kind. To the left is the wall of churches with Catholic imagery, some painted up at points like Egyptian wall paintings, as bright as the same hour they were originally painted. Too ancient for New York City, feeling more like Rome or the Vatican, but existing here in this version of things. We ascend on, with our wheels, feet, car; all modes of transport at once – stop/start, both the distance we cover and the time it takes to get up to the top, where their hotel destination is, is choppy. The father is still silent, but the children (two boys, two girls with blonde hair and a girl with dark hair) are all intermingling and climbing onto and past these grand stone structures and their likewise mismatched ornaments: among them a stone-faced white lion, a colourful hawk, and large black crucifixes with Christ hanging onto them. At one point we stop and look left into the black darkness of one of the church entryways. Solemn men in robes mingle, and a priest walks past the doorway. The mother says something like “they in their pompous Roman ways do not accept the true Christ into themselves”, encouraging her children to look, while the children (all under five years old), just gaze in wonder and without care or judgment.

Finally, at the top of the rocky stone steps is the last, very steep step leading to the entrance of the family’s very fancy New York City hotel destination. The car is gone, as only the father remains trying to haul up one mammoth suitcase on wheels. The last step is almost five feet tall and it seems impossible to get the suitcase past it. The father tries, I try, others try and it drags them down aways. At last with help it is up, as the mother and children wait impatiently. The children are playing raucously around the place. Cut to a cafeteria where the children will be eating together on a daily basis without their parents. Even though they are all around toddler ages, the siblings make fun of one of the sisters and won’t let her eat her meal with them. She sits alone, crying her eyes out about it. Her mother only gets involved to tell her that I will eat lunch with her (while pointing up at me), as the others have cast her out. I say I will and go over to her, feeling I have to help her and at the same time feeling a tremendous love for her. She looks like the dark haired girl at first as I talk to her, but then becomes one of the blonde girls, almost as young as a baby. I kneel down and tell her twice (once when she has dark hair and then again when she has blond hair) what she has to do. Even though she looks too young to even sit up, she is crying uncontrollably at me, but listening. I try to calm her by placing my hand on her back near her neck and I tell her that she needs to not care what the others say to her. That she doesn’t have to eat alone. I tell her that next time, when I’m not here, she should go over to where the other siblings eat, sit down with her tray of food and tell them “I don’t care what any of you say, I’m eating here too”. The other kids look on as I say this, as if they feel bad about their former behaviour. The mother seems to have stepped back in order to let me say this, as if it is why I have been there with them. I tell the little girl that she is the most special one out of all the children and she begins to calm down. I sense she is about to be upset that I will soon be leaving them, so I hug her very tightly and tell her I love her, feeling at that moment as if I have never loved a child as much as I love her.

Back to the hotel lobby. The mother is checking in, seeming occupied with the details of their stay, while the father is busy somewhere, playing games nearby in the recreation area. I know that the family does not sense me anymore. I hear a ringing tone and the scene fades to soft white. My eyes open – still hot, in bed, phone tucked under the pillow vibrating and ringing my head awake. Very groggy, still somewhat caught in the images of the dream, awake in my bedroom. 7:00am.