FOR A POTLUCK, a coworker creates a big bowl of turtle soup. Curry-color in a big wide bowl. Just as she’s serving it, the auto racing columnist dashes toward me with his own milk-color version in a broad blue-and-white bowl. (Like my pasta bowl.) I wind up taking a spoonful first from his outdoorsy one and then from the marvelous one beside it.

 

PREPARING A LARGE FISH from a Korean market, I’m in the set-aside (set to one side?) modern kitchen of a motel restaurant and something being held for a private birthday party.

I have skills I was unaware of!

 

THE KID AND I ARE AT THE MEAT COUNTER, someplace like Janetos little downtown supermarket. We’re there for chops, but she suggests we get a chicken, too. The clerk returns from the cooler with an array of boxes, each containing a chicken. “Select one,” I tell my younger daughter.

SHOPPING FOR A PRESENT TO GIVE ME, she winds up in an antiques store, where the clerk finally sells her a Quaker Mixing Bowl from the 1800s – a slight crack, with QUAKER embossed on the side.

How delightful! Quaker style is, after all, distinctive … and part of me.

 

I’M CONTRADANCING IN WINONA. Turns out it’s Sunday morning and I’ve missed Meeting. (Fun versus the Old Folks.) Later I’m trying to help a Jewish group use the meetinghouse for their worship … a place we can share.

 

WITH A MALE COMPANION EXPLORING around the Beltway in Baltimore County. (Picks up on another dream, a year earlier.) This time I’m trying to locate a former Quaker stone meetinghouse and burial ground. A burial ground I find behind a motel is not the right one; another effort, and the road ends abruptly in a golf course.

 

IN A PARK-LIKE GLEN, MIXED FIELDS AND TREES … from a hilltop looking down toward a small stream and a black steel shed – a fieldhouse with bleachers – run into a few other people and we enter for Quaker worship … my suggestion of circling together countered by “No, others will come,” and soon both halves of the building are full – mostly young people – a solid worship.

Somehow feels like my ancestral Hodgson dreams with the New Jersey twist. Looking back, I seem to also recall a Poconos/abandoned steel mill feeling.

Exploring the park later, find lots of sleeping bags available for borrowing – REST! – so that’s where everyone came from?

Soon I’m in a white-walled plain room – under a fairgrounds grandstand or a livestock auction? At a long table, one of maybe a half-dozen, old-order Brethren or Mennonites – I’m their guest, eating very tasty sirloin tips, which my host pushes away from me before I’m finished, and everyone else pushes their dishes away – we all slip into prayer, a worship service with testimony, and while my host keeps trying to prompt me to speak, I wait and defer – even when we get down to time “for one more,” I yield to two women. “I came to listen,” I explain later.

In both, a sense of rich worship. So much so that real Meeting for Worship felt like the third one that morning.

A sense, too, of Elijah’s 8,000 remnant or the cloud of witnesses or the circle of elders in Revelation:

WE’RE NOT ALONE

goose
in the cranberry
bog

neck
tall above the green
water

 

A SMALL PARTY, MAYBE WE’RE HOSTING, and we have a small animal, bunny or kitten? but something’s wrong with it, like it bites people, yet we set it on the floor and it zips wildly through the crowd, a beeline to the wall, which it hits or bounces from, and zips back again before people are fully aware of what’s happening.

Everyone’s amazed by its speed.

 

FILLING IN FOR A FRIEND AS A WAITER. When I get my first paycheck, I’m so overwhelmed listening to the pitches of my coworkers to quit my job as a journalist, I buy a luxury foreign car. Etc. Real money.

 

Chinese restaurant
in a former strip-mall
pet store

not sure I’d really
want to eat there

next to the Post Office

A ROUND-FACED, FRECKLED, short-haired lass on a ferry in Maine, having to choose between Mr. Rich and me, decides to go with me. We leave him on the dock as we float out to the islands.

We’re somehow back in my hometown, out in landlocked Ohio.

 

A WOMAN RETURNS TO HER FORMER LOVER, who agrees to take her back. Who keeps saying the previous affair was only a friendship she’d broken off at 6 a.m. the day she was leaving for the airport?

Then, a long-shot as if in a movie reveals she’s seven months pregnant.

Just a friendship? I have no idea where we are in the moon cycle.

 

I TELL HER OF PREVIOUS ATTEMPTS to start a Quaker Meeting here. Our intention, obviously, is to do it right this time.

In another, she’s reaching out, wanting to start over.