Last night I dreamed (American English for dreamt) that I fell into caring for an older woman, though she was barely older than I am. I'm sixty. She lived alone with no help in a huge house. Not huge, enormous—a house the size you'd only find in a dream. It was like Buckingham Palace, maybe bigger.
Anyway, she wasn't ill or infirm and hadn't been out to hire anyone. I was, for some reason, just there anyway and I started to do things for her. The practical things were easy and took no time. I made her breakfast. She didn't care what I made. I said I was making her a "farm breakfast, just like my father used to make for me, even though he grew up in West Philadelphia." The breakfast, like my father's, was just eggs, toast, and bacon with juice and coffee.
More than the day-to-day stuff, I helped her socially, kindling an interest in books, movies, and getting outside and doing things and seeing people, which she had never really done.
When I woke up I realized that the woman, who was indistinct even for someone in a dream, was a stand-in for me.
Unrelated: I voted today, perhaps for the last time (see earlier entries). The area I live in is suburban and has just around a thousand registered voters yet a man I spoke to at the poll said more had voted by noon than had by noon in 2016. (I voted at 1:15 and was the four hundredth to do so.) He figured that was because people had more of an interest in local races. He was wrong, of course, but I politely said zip.
When you're at work or someplace else where you're trapped with
people and the person next to you says, "I had the most interesting
dream last night," you brace yourself for the most boring conversation
of the day.
Listening to someone else's dream is like finding a
page of an amateur's fiction that fell out from the middle of the tattered ring binder he carries with him
everywhere. It has no beginning, middle, or end. There is no plot and the descriptions are poor.
Now you get to hear about a dream the Complete and Total Loser had a few nights ago, one of those rare dreams that lingered for days.
Simply put, it was that a woman liked him. A great woman, the kind he sees but never meets. One of those women you keep looking at to see if she has all her limbs or is horribly scarred from a fire or eventually says something batshit crazy. But she never does, in the Loser's dream, and she was so relaxed and funny, much more so than the Loser that when he woke up it seemed impossible that his brain could have created this woman.
Interesting, that mass of goo in our skulls, isn't it?
 |
| A woman. |
A few nights ago. In the dream, the Complete and Total Loser is standing in line with his father, who is 89. The line is for obituary submissions at the Loser's city newspaper. The obituary they are submitting is the Loser's mother's.
She is, however, not dead yet in either the dream or reality. But what the Loser and his family knows, though they don't talk about it, is that 2010 will likely be the year in which she dies, even though she is not bedridden or terminally ill. In fact, she still goes out, though not often, to "have lunch with the girls," as his father puts it, get her hair done, shop. Eating is the big problem, due to a nerve cut during an operation years ago that affected her swallowing reflex.
For years the Loser has taken pride in his lack of gluttony, saying half seriously that he eats only to stay alive. It's not entirely true; he has a sweet tooth and will melt butter to pour on toast on cold nights. But it's less true for the Loser than for many, and that seems to include his mother who, now that eating has become a task instead of a pleasure, has gone from being a strapping, broad-shouldered woman of 5' 10" to a frail old woman whose doctor has told her she must get more protein or her recent heart problem will not solve itself. Perversely, she likes the attention she gets from people telling her, after decades of carrying 25 extra pounds, to eat more.
The Loser and his father, while standing in line, go over the documents they're about to hand to a clerk. This being a dream, the documents are the actual obituary. The Loser looks at it carefully. He shakes his head and says to his father, "Shit! We brought the wrong one. This one is mine."
