by Ben Shahn
“All I do is keep on running in my own cozy, homemade void, my own nostalgic silence. And this is a pretty wonderful thing. No matter what anybody else says.” ~ Haruki Murakami, from What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
I had a very, very strange dream last night: my spouse (not Corey in this dream, but no one I recognize) was spending an inordinate amount of time at someone else’s house. The house was in a really bad part of town, and one of its inhabitants was a young woman of, shall we say, questionable repute. I could see that this woman was manipulating my spouse, getting him to come whenever she called, but my spouse couldn’t understand why I was so upset at his actions. Both my mom and dad were in this dream. My dad went to the bank to see if he had enough money in savings to give this woman so that she would go away. He didn’t.
I was in this room in my parents’ house, and I was gathering stuff into shopping bags; the stuff belonged to my spouse. I was giving him an ultimatum. But he still didn’t see anything wrong with his actions, even when it got down to our marriage being over. At some point, I was going down one of the main streets in my mom’s neighborhood, and I passed my friend Sarah’s house, or what was her parents’ house. There was one of those storks out in the yard, you know, the kind that announces a new baby.
I couldn’t figure out who had had the baby. Someone from the porch called to me, but I kept walking as I needed to get home to pack more stuff to throw into the street. I was so frustrated because he just didn’t get it.
Next dream: There are three fire-breathing dragons, and the characters from Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings were fighting together against these dragons. The Eye of Sauron appeared, but I wasn’t worried because Harry Potter knew how to defeat him.
What did I eat last night?
Music by Poets of the Fall, “Sleep”
In the Middle
of a life that’s as complicated as everyone else’s,
struggling for balance, juggling time.
The mantle clock that was my grandfather’s
has stopped at 9:20; we haven’t had time
to get it repaired. The brass pendulum is still,
the chimes don’t ring. One day you look out the window,
green summer, the next, and the leaves have already fallen,
and a grey sky lowers the horizon. Our children almost grown,
our parents gone, it happened so fast. Each day, we must learn
again how to love, between morning’s quick coffee
and evening’s slow return. Steam from a pot of soup rises,
mixing with the yeasty smell of baking bread. Our bodies
twine, and the big black dog pushes his great head between;
his tail is a metronome, 3/4 time. We’ll never get there,
Time is always ahead of us, running down the beach, urging
us on faster, faster, but sometimes we take off our watches,
sometimes we lie in the hammock, caught between the mesh
of rope and the net of stars, suspended, tangled up
in love, running out of time.
~ Barbara Crooker
Lola's Curmudgeonly Musings 