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

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.

It’s been more than I decade since I retired from the newsroom and its relentless deadlines, but those still haunt my sleep. Typically, I’m called back again in an emergency. In reality, that would violate my pension.

A SATURDAY NIGHT SHIFT. I’m doing something like makeup except that they drop additional tasks on me. I’m supposed to do three letters-to-the-ed pages but can’t do it. Am no longer trained for the new procedures, tech changes, passwords, etc.

In one, I run into out-and-out sabotage.

In another, I’m in charge but the deadlines have really moved up. Of course, I’m having trouble getting set up and in gear, can’t find stuff, and run behind. About 10 a.m. the rest of the staff starts showing up, wanting to know what to do. I’m trying to get one editor going on the Back Page but I can’t find a sheet of paper of any kind in the entire newsroom to show her the quick-and-easy way to get it done.

No paper at the newspaper? I awaken rattled, more than once.

USUALLY, I’M TRYING TO PAGINATE but don’t know the new computer system at all or don’t have the right passwords or other access. Maybe there aren’t even enough computer terminals or chairs. Sometimes that even takes me back to the yellow carbon-paper layout pages we used long ago. Still, the approaching deadline leads to panic and my feeling obsolete and incompetent.

OR I’M FILLING IN ON OBITS. (I want to write that as “orbits.”) But the office is different and it’s a new computer system, so I’m putting all the obituaries on one computer file to cut and paste in later, which is where the trouble kicks in around deadline. Nothing’s working right. (As a category, this is also akin to the old trying to make a flight or trip or finals test.)

On top of everything, the time card issue comes up (paper cards, not the computerized one … which would have been another nightmare) and I realize I can’t accept pay for this shift because of my pension clause. I’ve resolved to compromise and have the pay sent to charity, this case the Santa Fund.

IN OTHER VERSIONS, I haven’t been filling out timecards and thus haven’t been getting paid … since it’s direct deposit rather than a check, there’s a delay in my discovery.

That leads to frantically trying to find timecards and wondering how I’ll ever tell the company much less tell my wife and face her wrath.

In reality, my last stretch there we’d gone to electronic timecards. Now those could be a real-life nightmare!

At some kind of outdoor affair. Summertime or so. I decide to leave and start to collect my papers and such from a table (picnic table?). Look up and see Ohio and some guy a hundred feet away or so … they haven’t noticed me, so I move frantically to escape undetected. Then I see that the vehicle I’m to take, which I’d previously seen only from the open back, is a black hearse – theirs.

Instead, I take a bus – a school bus, actually. Its route is more or less through Moraine and West Carrollton, and I wind up disembarking at a small, yellow-infused festival. (Spurred by memories of the Latin American restaurant my sister took me to?)

Somehow, I’m one of four (!) judges for a beauty contest. We’re given papers with the contestants’ names and info on one side and their photos on the other. Looking at the name I’m about to select, I see below it Ohio’s – only this time, there’s no married surname behind it. I flip the paper, see her photo in a skimpy bikini, and skewer the results so she wins. Afterward, she kisses me, tells me how desperate she’s become, which is why she entered the contest.

Do we ever escape the past?