Dream 1:
I should have written this one down the minute I woke up, because all I can remember now is the end of it:
I leave the building I’m in and walk outside, where I walk down a path made of impossibly colorful rocks that are flat on one side, but when I pick one up and turn it over for a closer investigation, I find that it’s jagged and sticks down about eighteen inches into the ground. I set it back down into the path, and walk back into the building to look for the owner so that I can buy one of these beautiful rocks, but I don’t find him, so I turn and walk back outside.
* * * * *
Dream 2:
I own an antique shop in a weathered, two-story little building with dark cedar siding in a small town on the Northern California coast. There are six or eight different businesses in the building. My shop is on one side, in the front, and there is a small bookstore on the opposite side, and there is a dark but cosy little brew pub between us, right in the middle of the building. There’s a lady who sells little touristy gifts upstairs, and there are two other symbiotic–and similarly archaic–businesses up there too. This is not a high-tech building, and we’re all proud of that.
The woman from upstairs comes down and buys a replica of a small Rodin statue from me, which she breaks not long after the she buys it. Rather than come to me directly, however, she complains bitterly and endlessly to the owner of the brew pub, who takes it upon himself to expose what he thinks are my dishonest business practices. He puts up huge signs in every one of his windows that say things disparaging my store; how all I sell is ‘junk’ and how I’m a ‘crook’, and that sort of thing. I walk over many times to talk with him, but he’s never around. I walk upstairs to talk to the woman, and she’s irate. I ask her why she didn’t just come to me first, and we could have sorted it out. She cries and yells something like, ‘How could you sell things like this’ and seems incapable of carrying on a rational discussion, so I leave.
I turn and walk around the corner by the bookstore at the far side of the building, and just then, time seems to jump forward. It’s now about twenty years later, and the building looks exactly the same, except slightly more weathered. It’s been turned into a kind of museum now, with huge interpretive signs everywhere saying this is where such-and-such happened in the feud, and this is where the brew pub or the book store or the antique shop used to be. Apparently our little disagreement over the statue turned out to be a huge event in the life of the town. It’s as if the town is trying to be another Monterey, California, with all the canneries and the Steinbeck references and the interpretive signs, except that this town isn’t Monterey, and no one has ever written about it, and therefore it comes across as what it is; a third-rate, sleepy little beach town that’s trying to attract attention in any way that it can.
As I walk around the back toward a restaurant in a new wing of the building, there is a large and colorful mural in the corner, painted directly on the wall of the building, which tells the whole story, but in a trumped-up way that is both pathetic and comic, trying to portray it as a historically significant national tragedy. I smile to myself, thinking that this town needs better things to commemorate, and that I’m so glad I moved away from it when I did.
The little restaurant is surprisingly great, though. It faces out onto a courtyard that’s in the same corner of the building as the mural, which very nicely makes the restaurant a de facto part of the tourist attraction. There’s a large, high tree in the middle of the courtyard that provides shade for the entire area, so the restaurant is in about as idyllic a setting as it can possibly be, at least for this particular place. I sit outside at a little round table under the tree with a sandwich and a glass of wine, and I look up at the afternoon sun shining through the leaves on the tree. As I finish eating, I find myself hoping that this little building does well for itself in this strange town, especially now that I don’t live there anymore and don’t have to deal with it. But I can certainly come visit any time I like, and enjoy it for what it is now, and I can also leave any time I like.
