Dean left for work late this morning [see tangent anecdote, below] allowing me to sleep in, which would have been wonderful if I hadn’t had this dream:
I had a new carpool with two other families, and at least one of the other moms and a whole bunch of little kids were with me in our huge white van driving to school when I saw that a fabric store was having a going out of business sale, and I begged them to stop and let me run in quickly. The setting was a fairly large and sunny city a lot like Berkeley, California, and there wasn’t much parking (so, definitely Berkeley) so they had to park about a block away and I ran in. I chose some five-inch-wide semi-transparent gold ruffled trim, a newly invented sewing notion that was a few inches across and looked like a shiny, flat, wide white Christmas tree, and a couple of cuts of fabric. I waited in line for a while before a lady who worked there rang up my items and ran my credit card, but when she finished she didn’t hand me the bag with my things in it. I asked for her to give it to me and she said she had set it under the counter for a minute, but when she looked, it wasn’t there. She said she would look in the back room. I waited a long time for her to come back. Finally I asked the women helping the other customers where my bag was. They didn’t know. I asked where the woman who’d been helping me had gone, and they went to look in the back room and couldn’t find her. I realized I didn’t have the cell phone numbers for the other moms in the carpool. School was supposed to start at 9 AM and it was now well past that. I stepped out the door and squinted down the street to see if my carpool group was still there and thought I saw a white van but wasn’t sure. I asked the shop employees if I could just get duplicates of the things I’d purchased, but they said I only could if I could show proof of purchase, and of course my receipt had been in the bag with my purchases. I threatened to call the police, but they said they didn’t care since they were going out of business anyway. I asked if I could just come get my stuff later, but again they said they wouldn’t give me anything without proof of purchase. By now I was yelling, and I demanded to search under their counter, but I couldn’t find my bag of purchases under there.
Finally, in desperation, I searched my purse one last time, and found the bag and my purchases in it.
Mortified, I left the store. The white van had indeed left and I hoped that meant the children hadn’t been too late to school. Then I remembered that I was also starting a new job that day. Two jobs, actually, and one of them was supposed to start at 9 AM, but I couldn’t remember which one, nor where either of the jobs was located. I called my mom and she commiserated with me but didn’t know where the jobs were located, either. I started wandering around downtown on foot, hoping I would remember where the job was supposed to be, and hoping my carpool group would forgive me. Walking past a building, I saw a man asleep on a bench and realized it was my brother Spencer. “Oh yeah, I forgot he’s homeless right now.” He woke up and commiserated with me a little (but also didn’t know where I was supposed to have been at 9 AM).
Finally I woke up, unemployed and friendless, and lay there for 20 minutes trying to convince myself that it was just a dream, and I’m not actually a wreck of a human being.
This is a tricky dream to interpret [sarcasm] but here are my best guesses:
1. I’ll never be able to buy the time I crave for sewing and creativity without the rest of my life falling apart.
2. I’m a wreck of a human being.
3. Spencer is self-sufficient about finding places to sleep.
4. There shall be seven years of famine.
5. I will write a best-selling, world-famous series of books, which will be made into blockbuster movies starring young actors who don’t wear shirts.
Arthur Reginald’s 1894 painting of Jacob Black confronting the Volturi
Tangent anecdote: Sunday evening my brother Andy loaned me his copy of “The Hunger Games,” and I let Dean start reading it since I was busy crocheting dishcloths and reading blogs. At 1 AM that night, seeing that Dean was halfway through the book, I persuaded him to stop reading (when he finished the chapter) and go to bed. He got up early and finished the book by about 10 AM. Monday afternoon Isaac was helping me fold laundry and I told him, “I’ll bet you anything Daddy will bring home the sequel to the Hunger Games.” Isaac laughed and agreed that that would be “just like Dad,” so we couldn’t actually place bets against each other, but we figured if Dean did bring home the book, he would owe us something.
Dean did bring home the second book (as well as another book from the BYU Bookstore we’d wanted to get for Mabel). He finished it around 10 AM today, which is why I was able to sleep in this morning, which I guess pays off the debt Isaac and I had assigned him in absentia–if only I’d had a nicer dream. We also caught Isaac reading the first book in bed around 10:30 PM last night, and this morning Ike asked me if he could take the book to school with him to read during “flex time” (free time at his Junior High) and I let him. From where he had his thumb in the book, it looked like he was pretty close to finishing it. Since I have so many chores to do and I’m pretty compulsive once I start reading a book, I’m thinking I might just take a friend’s suggestion and wait until September when the last book in the series comes out, and read all three in one go. That kind of patience baffles my husband and son. But I’ll be prepared in case there’s a book famine in September.
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