Trying to drive up a very steep hill, something of a sparse residential area, solid, old white-frame houses … Can’t get all the way up, so back around to a well-lighted stand-alone bookstore – old-fashioned drugstore feeling.

The kid (suddenly she’s been with me all along) sees a friend and the friend’s mother, who takes us under wing – and off around another corner (now like old suburban blocks in Needham) – altogether, a good feeling, even when we don’t make it straight up the street (no argument from the youngster, who just shrugs it off humorously).

Still later, I raise my voice to my boss, who comes back with a curt – and decisive – firing. Instead of being defensive, I say simply, “OK.” Got a home, supportive family. They’ll take care of me. I can concentrate on my real work.

I have to meet a Quaker representative – AFSC or FCNL or some such – at the airport. Not actually an airport, but more the sense of waiting and greeting. A sunny, springtime morning, a little before 8 a.m. She {maybe an elderly he, the two overlap} is to make a presentation before a public-school crowd. We’re running late, which becomes a problem because I have to get a second Public Friend and am caught in transporting the two. Am supposed to get the second at 10, but the first is still at the lectern.

I greeted the first using “thee,” then realized she had no idea what was happening, so I added: “I guess it’s been a while since thee’s been addressed in Plain Speech.”

 

We’re at some kind of barbecue. A social setting, quite possibly extending from our Smoking Garden. I keep trying to put something on my plate – a sampling of this, a portion of that – but things keep spilling to the ground. Maybe I even miss my plate altogether. You’re trying to offer me something extra special you made, but even it fails to reach my mouth. But instead of being angry, you’re quite sympathetic and understanding, as if you know I’m sick or getting there.

One sequence involves covering a political convention. Miami? Savannah? Charlotte?

THE FIRST PART takes place in a large room with gauzy tea-color curtains and a slight breeze, likely a hotel ballroom. I see a friend from my high school days across the room but she does not see me and moves from the scene before I can break off the conversation I’m in.

THE SECOND SCENE is in a makeshift newsroom, lots of lively activity – Hugh McDiarmid may be running the show. I meet a young brunette (short hair), and there’s her coy, smiling reaction.

THINGS HEAT UP, but now I’m watching a young male with her (that is, somehow I’ve distanced myself). She’s ready for something wild – perhaps in a room just off the newsroom – a storage room? But the male, realizing how little he knows her, discovers he doesn’t have a condom and a wild pursuit follows … asking his coworkers, Do you have a …

THERE’S AN INTERLUDE of being out, as a team, covering the story and then trying to phone the newsroom, which is working out of borrowed space in another newspaper. (Part of the chain? Professional courtesy?) The switchboard has no idea what we’re talking about … until someone says something about … ?

A spate of dreams no doubt reflecting my {obsessed} drive to finish exterior painting projects before cold weather sets in. For example, I oversleep work, get to the office with just an hour left to edit and paginate wire pages. And then I discover they’ve moved the office, so I’m running through a building, up the stairs, opening doors, hoping to find the terminals and colleagues. (Recent Virtual Earth searches suggest the Review-Times building has been demolished and moved into the smaller addition; also, our quarters on Leonard Springs Road have been leveled, for a McMansion.)

Other dreams where I’m simply racing something, whatever …

WE’RE TOGETHER ON AN OLD FARM, one with a huge barn. We’re buying it. I say, “In New England, we build a woodshed connecting the house and barn.”

We enter and it’s a banquet hall, where she stands apart with a group of girlfriends. Sees a fire door and opens it. The alarm doesn’t go off. Instead, she’s in an anteroom, facing another door.

Told of the dream, she replies, “That’s good! I wasn’t afraid to open it.”

 

SHE’S WITH A NUMBER OF FORMER boyfriends and lovers, but knows it isn’t really them but someone else; each time, one would strip off his face like a mask. In time she identified the Lover as me, not by my face but by my HANDS.

 

AT THE MOTEL, I’M FLIRTING with two or three women. Maybe more?

As they pass each other, there’s friendship, not jealousy.

I’m supposed to run one – a newer one – to the airport, but each time I go out to the car, something else is missing from the dashboard. Speedometer, clock, etc. Stolen, stripped out overnight, while we slept. Not the hubcaps or battery, but the interior – controls – until I cannot drive anywhere.

 

I’m living in an apartment complex, at first something like the townhouses atop the hill, morphing into something more like the garden apartments with a central parking lot outside Baltimore.

We’re moving out or at least cleaning up, carrying stuff out to the dumpster.

I’m not sure who the “us” is, but soon it feels like just me, especially when body parts or something suspicious is found, say, under the front-door mat and then in strange corners within the house. Gotta clean ’em out before they start stinkin’. Into the dumpster, then, when nobody’s looking.

Early on, I’m trying to protect the chil’kins, not that I/we think she’s done anything but rather that she would be a prime suspect.

As this progresses, though, it’s my ex- who’s in question. For whatever reason, I’m still trying to help her, cover for her.

In either case, I’d be under heightened suspicion.

“I’VE NEVER BEEN TOUCHED,” meaning love.

“My sisters have. They all have husbands and family, but I’ve never been touched.”

 

TRAVELING IN A TERRAIN LIKE the orchard country of Washington state – Naches or Cowiche, especially – in the car, we come across the top of a hill and find ourselves facing a band of four tornadoes, which we manage to drive past, after great fear and trepidation.

She’s no longer a goddess, but a traveling companion. Do the tornadoes reflect engulfing, destructive, and self-destructive figures of love?

 

ON A BOAT, THE RUDDER WORKS in the opposite direction of what feels right. Often seemed to have no effect, whatsoever.

In both cases, a sense of something important remaining unfinished.

AT AN EVENING EVENT, not especially Quaker. Maybe I’m off on a book tour or readings. Whatever, I’m in an amber-lighted room with others and eventually realize she’s on the other side. We eventually approach, exchange a few words. Hesitantly, I ask if she’d be interested in a late dinner, and just as cautiously, she replies in a muted affirmative.

We go to a small, upscale, modernistic place – again, soft lighting. The service, however, is atrocious. It’s late, they have my credit card, and the food just doesn’t come. We don’t know what to do. We’re hungry. Demand the card and leave?

The waiter, apologetic, finally shows up with my card. We stay, I assume.

This was disturbing enough to wake me two hours earlier than I’d planned to get up. Was jarring enough I couldn’t go back to sleep.

 

IT STARTS OUT WITH THE KISS, I presume. And somehow leaps from the chemist to her, who now wants to travel with me on a journey. We’re at yearly meeting, after agreeing to coffee or late dinner to talk things over and perhaps catch up. Maybe she invited herself to my room after. What I remember is the intensity of her snuggling up to me, seductively tender, cooing, yielding.

 

FLASH IN THE BIG, MULTILEVEL MALL: much taller, but definitely the type: intense blue eyes, freckles, full and almost purple lips, golden-blonde hair. The constant potential around the corner, the unexpected encounter of some intense part of my past: someone I loved powerfully or served who nonetheless betrayed me.

 

HER WANTING to reunite with me.

I wasn’t having it.

Not after this long.

 

FLYING UNDER BLANKETS (sheets? or Navajo blankets?) with Photographer over mountains (starting out from Selah or Naches?) we wind up, after rocky and snowy stretches, Goat Rocks, say, over Vermont, other end of the country – a children’s camp, actually, high up a dirt road from a dream a few nights earlier …

Freeform with or wearing a harness, hands free, touch of Yakima, touch of New England.

 

I’M GOING TO BE BURIED TOMORROW so go out with my friends or family on a sunny spring day, actually, that’s where it starts, on the country highway, looking up the intense green grass toward a plateau or leveling, with tombstones white in the sun … we climb and there see three new holes dug in the earth. One would be mine the next day.

Am I being buried alive?

 

DRIVING ALONG FLAT FARMLAND, like that of northwest Ohio. Great blue sky. Humming along, with a ditch full of water to my right; may be a small river. A small town looms on the horizon, with an elevated green bridge in front of it. First, it’s an interstate highway, and then a railroad. My companion and I discuss the possibilities ahead.

Pass under it and there’s a forced right turn. Everything turns dark and interior. (Hmm. Shades of the water-cage highway weeks earlier.) I overhear a young woman telling of a dream in which she, too, had a prominent bridge. I approach her, ask if her bridge was perpendicular to the highway, as mine was. No, it was beside it. Still, we’ve bridged a conversation. She’s wearing a black cocktail dress. Smiles slyly, seductively. We begin kissing. It’s only a momentary thing, one of us says.

So here’s a dream with conversations about dreams! Again, a sense of places I’ve lived, back when.