THE BELLE-ETTE AND HER HUSBAND are hosting a party at the old Cape across the street. The lovely A twins are seducing me, or seduced. I never could tell them apart.

We go to an upstairs bed, entwine in evening rain.

Out the window we view an incredible forest that had always been hidden by the houses on our street. (Oakdale and Ashland are, after all, forest names.)

A good-sized stream runs in a valley, and a waterfall back there, though this is a big-city neighborhood.

The nearest house, out beyond that (the dairy, in reality, where those falls would be – has in reality been sold and is out of business). The woods, dense as Jay Lower’s, whose land probably triggered this.

The idea of a forest in that yard now amazes.

There were only the two ash trees in front, and the towering cottonwood behind.

All roped in by a slew of utility wires.

 

A MAILBOX, LIKE MY CHILDHOOD home’s. I see a big brown envelope to me (yellow slip attached), even though the mailman hasn’t made today’s rounds yet. (What was his name, Mister …)

There’s a pink envelope waiting at the bungalow across the street. Above and behind the milk box, I find a whole bunch of mail to me.

 

CAMPING IN THE BACKYARD – no tent – when the phone rings, very muffled, as if within a potholder – when I find it and answer, there’s a warning of a coming storm. At last, in the northeast sky, I see it, the tornado – which turns and comes toward me, veering toward the neighbors’ garage – IT SCARES ME AWAKE, even as I realize it’s traveling backward, toward the southwest. (Contrary to science.)

A GRAY DAY IN A GRAY DOWNTOWN where I’m apparently accepting a new job or making a big sale, establishing a relationship with a new client, a major newspaper. There are perks, including coupons or trade-outs for dining at fancy restaurants, where I’m encouraged to venture.

That afternoon, in one, the owner leads me to a happy alcove and introduces me to Colin Powell and his wife, both in matching Hawaiian shirts. Insisting I join them at their table for martinis, they then herald another couple, greeting them warmly. When the drinks arrive, we clink glasses merrily – so skillfully, in fact, we look out to see ourselves receiving a standing ovation. The retired general and secretary of state ars quite sociable and at ease, very warm and effusive. We don’t discuss politics.

In this episode, my name’s Luther.

WE’RE UNDER STADIUM BLEACHERS, assisting with a college graduation.

The girls walk two-by-two from the dark interior out across a bridge over a stream into the stands where they’ll sit. Only half wear white gowns (with mortar boards) – the rest, red shorts, yellow skirts, white patterned blouses, etc.

As for the boys, where presumable I am?

Somebody helps a girl in wheelchair to the bridge. I accompany a blind, partly blonde girl who carries a cane but can see enough to smile at me as she enters more sunlight.

Still under the stadium, I’m handed a paperclip set of credit card slips – my name hadn’t come out on some of the carbon copies after all – some of the others, just faintly.

So this is the reason I’m not graduating? Many of these charges had nothing to do with the college.

Coffee (ground?) war, the GIRL, her older brothers, and mother are graduating.

The soft package.

THE DOOR WON’T CLOSE RIGHT and he keeps opening it to wipe me out of business.

They finally blow it open in wind and spitting rain.

Kit’s a black-and-white coffee bag with a picture of me with a gorilla on the label urban grocery.

First see her in a movie or auditorium a row or two behind me and ask her to help me with this snake like a boa, and she does, admitting later she normally would have been afraid or inhibited and thus not spoken to a stranger.

WE’RE STAYING IN A MOTEL and look out. There’s a moose. No antlers yet. Leafy, forested. But also somehow urban, and somebody has to do something. Summon help. “That’s all right,” I say. Looking right, toward a swing set, when a fire truck comes into sight – emergency workers – but they crash into the swing set, can’t clear it. (I could see the collision coming.) When the truck hits, it’s no fire engine after all, but garbage. A Dumpster goes careening across and spills. A man – cowboy? – leaps from the truck cab, maybe, and lunges for the moose. Leaps through the back legs, grabs the front left – with a whoop and a holler from this truck companions. Pulls the moose over. It falls on top of him!

“Why, he’s OK,” I say to my companion.

This sequence, from my time in the Pacific Northwest, remains eerily prescient.

 

DRIVING THROUGH ALLEGHENY FORESTS “out east,” I come into a small city. At an oblique Y intersection, I veer to the right and am struck by a large three-story apartment building with stately columns and porches on the front. Not that different, really, from one on Far Hills Avenue in my past. While this intersection initially seemed like the downtown, it’s only a prelude for a real downtown a mile or so further on.

After moving back, to eastern Ohio, I went driving one day into Pennsylvania and came into Warren via a route that eerily matched the dream. The sense of déjà vu was overwhelming.

 

I’M THE GROOM IN a Quaker wedding. The event moves outdoors, under an impressive beech tree and golden pools of sunlight. In the background is a large, old house of an unfamiliar style, part of a sedate farm. The bride’s off a bit, the center of attention, somewhat blurred but with distinctive flaxen hair stretching well-beyond her waist. I’m deliriously happy – so much so, I awakened with the cry (at least in my sleep), “But I can’t be doing this! I’m already happily married!”

Later, after my first wife had left, I was traveling from North Carolina to Philadelphia and, crossing through Delaware, came upon my first three-story federal-style house that I was aware of. A few months later, I became engaged to a woman fitting the one in the dream. She was Quaker.

 

AHA! I FIND MENTION in my journals of climbing a fire tire in Allegheny National Forest and coming out into Warren, Pa., noting, “how weird! the town seems to have three downtowns (no suburban malls) and one comes to an intersection … just like a dream I had (but I didn’t meet the ‘Quaker girl.’)”

In the decades since, I relocated to a locale where such houses are common and then in a Quaker service married a woman who easily fits the dream, though her hair is less flaxen.

IN AN ARTSY VILLAGE overlooking the Ohio River, with a sprite who morphs into my sister. We view a very funny improv, not at all physically like Jackie Kennedy but the mannerisms are on target. Leaving, we encounter snakes all over the street, frogs, a boa constrictor hanging from a tree over the road. Carnival music. Our car hits a horse, and its head hangs down over the windshield. The boa’s mouth is by my window, which is open. I keep yelling, “Close the window! Close the window!”

The horse turns out to be white inflated plastic. A white horse with red rouge cheeks and green lips. A green button on the harness above the eyes. When we see that, we laugh, realizing the whole thing was artificial, a prank.

We venture off to see the rest of the film, which is playing just two more days.

MY BALD-HEADED, VERY-STRAIGHT boss and I were smoking dope together. He was smiling. Just like Eisenhower.

I DREAMED IN A FOREIGN language. Espanol, never French, on occasion.

MARY WAS SURROUNDED by death asleep next to Sara, who was driving a hearse to pick up hitchhikers. Mary, bless her, was running from the Devil, who wouldn’t harm Sara because she’s Jewish.

AN EQUESTRIAN BESIDE ME was riding a horse. Flashing a fantastic double-edged golden sword, she vindictively slayed three standing enemies, one at a time with a clean sweep, splitting them symmetrically, as if with a razor. They fell away. The first time was funny and unexpected. The next two, a warning that awakened me.

MY BUDDY’S IN A TEN-GALLON HAT and riding an elevator at his old high school in Brooklyn as we go to watch his honey in a swim meet. We get out at the top floor and there’s a river, where all the girls but one are swimming upstream. He hops in, swims downstream to a rock with a girl sunning on it. She starts screaming, and the other girls turn to come to her rescue. He watches as his pistol sinks in the water. He swims through the rapids to his horse only to find the other girls already there, holding rifles.

 

WE’RE IN A VICTORIAN-ERA ghetto at night. She wants to go to church. We go in amid a semicircle of people and sit down with friends. I take a break, get up, step outside to meet a city transit bus, kiss a girl, go back in to sit next to him, shamefaced a bit. My chair, a folding metal chair, is sideways, out of kilter. She whispers, “Don’t move.” That’s when I realize there’s a dead body beneath me and a man in the balcony with a rifle pointed at me. The preacher in the pulpit is silent.

 

I’M TRAVELING WITH a seven-year-old blonde cousin through a suburb. She speaks fluent French. I don’t. Everybody but me speaks French. She is my translator as we journey.