I awaken to a horrible surprise, the feminine face of death.

Well, at least in the dream.

 

I’VE BEEN DIGNOSED WITH a terminal illness. Suppose what or who was on my mind was the retirement or “brand-value” issues. Somehow Ohio was in this or related sequences as someone was trying to reconnect with me or seduce me … while I kept moving on to my own lover and eventual wife and projects.

I’ll label this part Disturbing.

Touring a Roman Catholic church that’s known for its graves, the ones inside around the sanctuary and in chambers off to the side and, presumably, in the basement. The ceiling is relatively low and the dominant color a light yellow. Feels something like a Mount Auburn Cemetery and may have been surrounded by the like.

Noticing a man who’s obviously perplexed (he may have even been in clerical garb, I now sense), I approach and offer my help. He has a map that may simply have some directions, but he’s looking for such-and-such Avenue. Together we circle the inside of the building and come upon a stone wall that’s been painted black and both agree that’s where we should have found his destination. We’re both baffled.

We then join a small group in a chapel or, considering the slanted floor, lecture hall auditorium where a nun’s doing an end-of-tour kind of Q&A session. She keeps overlooking any questions hands up from either me or the man; I’m three rows back and in the center, he’s at the back about four rows behind me. Finally, I shout out my question about the black wall. “It’s the Williams family,” she answers, as if everyone should know they owned the property long before the church was erected.

We scatter to make way for some kind of ecumenical program in the sanctuary that evening.

Our Greek Orthodox priest is already there, sitting on the floor, his back to the wall, with his family.

IN SEATTLE, LATE AFTERNOON in a modernist house with a view of the twinkling bay. Think my ex- is in there somewhere, too. Or perhaps in a now-forgotten earlier sequence.

Then there’s a trailer of some sort, touting the movie along with a kind of genealogy that mentions me among others and “the books yet to be written.” I start screaming at the screen, “But the books are written! Nobody’s reading them!”

Scarface, up till now politely distant, begins taunting. I wind up overturning him in his curvy laminated wood folding chair, the kind we used to own.

A few words are exchanged, and we leave. That’s it.

 

MAYBE I WAS A REPORTER … or just working with one. Somehow, the Washington Post was involved. The subject we were following, though, was sentenced as an incorrigible offender – one of those three-strikes-you’re-out type felons – and placed in a large prison behind three big sets of gateways, each with a different password, and five smaller ones. The unspoken message was that if you failed to remember them, this person was lost in the maze – there would be no contact from you, on the outside.

 

ALL SET TO VISIT FRIENDS IN CUBA, I discover three days before departure I have forgotten to obtain my passport and visa. Had tickets and was already packed.

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