I Had A Dream ... Once.

So Billy Crystal, Janet Napolitano, Vi the customer service manager I knew at Winn-Dixie, and I were all in the same dream … seriously, I snuck into a conference room – one of those rooms that you can reserve for a group at a restaurant, I think it was modeled on our local Royal Fork – where I met up with Billy who I'd known since fourth grade [judging from his being twenty-three years older than me, highly unlikely, but this is a dream deal with it] and it was the second day of a conference about making snack foods very uber-nutritious via growth hormones (what I thought I heard anyway).

The first day was apparently dominated by Ms. Napolitano, who was wearing Klingon regalia with golden shoulder epaulets, and HER presentation which didn't go over so well. Also I was giving him a lift to one of his jobs busing tables at the restaurant and as I drove off, in a flatbed pickup no less, I found his cell phone in the passenger seat and couldn't find mine. So a comedy of errors ensues that I don't remember the details of save that it rained in sheets and Vi was at a podium in a giant lobby that I ran out of and Winn-Dixie (a southeastern supermarket chain I worked at one week shy of five years) looked to me like a giant meat market as I ran through it.

Then I found my cell phone, which I thought I'd lost, in my pocket so no, Billy Crystal did not take it. But it was locked into a video of my daughter Sarah drawing with her finger on a cold fogged window (inside our house, the one facing our backyard, I'm guessing), backwards. The clouds seemed to seep back into the glass as Sarah drew from left to right. And I still had to get Billy's phone, one of those work phones you clip to your belt, back to him. And so the dream ended … I relate it here because I haven't remembered a dream that clearly in months that I recall, and I figure that I will read that back and it will make sense in time. Or the pooshlu will stroolgloop. (See “The City of Gold and Lead”.)

Let's see, as we're approaching the weekend – I'm jumping ahead a little because this weekend I'll have the kids as state league bowling in happening in Bismarck our state capital, and the last Thursday night bowling for her will be tomorrow night. If you read my previous installment, you'll know I got to bowl last Saturday at a birthday party for one of Sarah's classmates; I had fun but I can't picture myself joining a bowling league. I like to think I've other things that are to me more productive, that I really need to get behind. It's the middle of the second week of April, the sun is shining, and there's not only a flood warning here and around me, there's also a prediction of two inches of snow this weekend!

I can't believe at 1:04 EST today I heard “innocent” as “Emerson” … but let me cite this one book I read before I forget, Alisa Valdes' memoir “Learning To Submit”. And before you think I've gone postal, this is the author's story (ISBN 9781592407903) of her growing up feminist and getting to the root of how she was forty-two and thought she had the liberal convictions and self-reliance to handle anybody and anything. Then she meets The Cowboy – only identified as that in the text, never by name – who seems at first to be the polar opposite to her, but turns out to be exactly who she needs. Consider the subtitle: “How Feminism Stole My Womanhood, and the traditional Cowboy Who Helped Me Find It”. Can't say I agree with all of this, or that even you will. But as good writing makes you think and great writing changes the way you think, this has that potential. I know the kids have more to do themselves now.

David