Don't tell me your dream

Art by Susannah Liguori 

1.
No one wants to hear about your dream. How vivid and compelling. How it shakes you still, that image, this morning over coffee and conversation. This conversation is over; let's talk about me. 

2. 
I had a dream of frogs in my house. I told no one, but Google says frogs mean fortune or fear. Just like everything in life.

3. 
Confession: In a book or poem, when I come upon a dream sequence I always skip ahead. 

4.
Don't tell me your dream. I'll have to feign interest and that wears us both. Well, not you. You look perky, and I just wanna go back to bed. 

5.
In the year since my mother died, I've dreamed of her just once. I woke up reassured. But I did not write the dream down and now she's gone again. 

6. 
Dreams are vague and real, foreboding and foretelling. Dreams mean nothing. And everything. 

7. 
Yesterday an old man with sad eyes told me his dream:

He and his dying wife return to the island where they honeymooned 60 years ago. They are happy, she is healthy and young. "She is just like she used to be," he says, with a strained smile and tears.  

Hushed and slow, like a prayer or a plea, he offers his vision and I accept the gift.  

8. 
Okay, I say, tell me more. 

Sunday night, reading

1.
I'm not certain of much, but this:  

There is nothing better than a busy week as it unspools into Sunday evening, in a quiet house, with a good book, and your mind, finally, finally, finds a peaceful ease.  

2.
Today's good line: 

"One thing I've learned, Father — that in life it's best to keep the then and the now and the what's-to-be as close together in your thoughts as you can. It's when you let gaps creep in, when you separate out the intervals and dwell on them, that you can't bear the sorrow."

— from The All of It, a novel by Jeannette Haien

 
3.
It's time for a literary lookback. 

I'm making stock (turkey bones on the stove) and taking stock (of good books). It's time for round up and review: What have I read? What have I loved?

I can hardly recall last week's novel, let alone of year of books. Was it a bleak year in stories? A crushing season of poems?

Please, help revive my reading memory: 

What good books did you read this year? 

Love that line!

She had that uncomfortable feeling that one has

when one has not been wholly kind or wholly true.

— Passing, a novel by Nella Larsen

Thankful Thursday: Not Trying

Because the world is heavy, and our hearts too, it's time for redirection. Please join me for Thankful Thursday, a weekly pause to express appreciation for things small and large, from the puny to the profound. 

I find the best things when not trying. This week I'm thankful for: 

• Goodwill Boutique
Yesterday I scored a new-with-tags suede coat, a Coach laptop bag, and Cole Haan wedges. Do you have a Goodwill Boutique near you? No, really, not just a Goodwill but a boutique version in which they sort donations for gently used designer brands. The prices are higher than a traditional thrift store, but the quality is better. And best of all, they sort through the pilled, spilled and spoiled clothing so I don't have to. 

• Scooby-Doo Stamps
"Charismatic canine," the United States Postal Service calls the Great Dane character from the 1970s-era cartoon series. I'm loving the fun and inspired stamps lately: Mister Rogers, Oscar de la Renta, Andrew Wyeth . . . even popsicle scratch-n-sniff stamps!

• A Timely Line

Somewhere, someone dies again and I think

there went another piece of me 

— Lisa Martin
excerpt from Sonnet for what we resolve into

The best poems are discovered by accident. You're looking for this or that and a poem peers out, calling. I'm ragged with world events (another shooting, another fire, another crisis) when I open this book — where did it come from? did I buy it? was it a gift? — and suddenly the line floods my head, my hands, my heart. 

It's Thankful Thursday, a weekly pause to express appreciation for people, places, things & more. What are you thankful for today? 

On Ordinary

A static gloom covers the day, hours of gray. 

The day is so without event, so without emotion, I know now this is what is called ordinary. I don’t know what to do with ordinary except to call it a suspension between sad and sunny. 

I’m having a do-nothing day, I announce to another (but mostly to myself), and then stumble across this:  

“The women . . . are interesting because they’re permitted to risk being boring, which feels somehow like a luxury. It’s a relief.”

_____

“Boredom is often dismissed as a lack of imagination — this not true. Boredom is a signal that we are indeed imaginative creatures, and that the existential distress of being in a state of blah is often the mind readying itself for the epiphany," writes Nick Cave. 

I’m not bored exactly, but I am not moved. Is this the blah before brilliance? It’s too much to wish because this creative stupor is a gray that has hovered for what feels like forever. Ordinary turns time inside-out, both enlarging its importance and diminishing your ability. In its lack of color and light, ordinary does absolutely nothing. 

_____

 
But what if ordinary is the lull that lets light in?

It happens so often now I don’t even notice. I’m chatting with a woman and in the course of our conversation she tells me of her husband's death. Her eyes soften and we talk slower and lower and time wells between us in a way that seals us in a moment quiet and safe.  

“Intimacy is such a hushed and heartbreaking thing that I think it happens between strangers every bit as much as it does between lifelong lovers, sometimes even more so," writes Robert Vivian in The Least Cricket of Evening. 

_____

Lately, an elderly man and I exchange hellos and talk of the weather. Each day I learn a little more. He is quiet and proud but his eyes carry heartache. He apologizes — for emotion, for sharing, I do not know — and I will mew words that say nothing that matters. Still, each day we start again with hellos and smiles. 

And this is ordinary. These moments of exchange.

I carry your heart with me (I carry it in my heart), wrote e.e. cummings.

And so we carry secrets and stories, aches and tears — all of it so human and heartbreaking, so beautifully gray and ordinary.