Stephen's Thoughts

The house on the highway, Part 6 - Some things I missed

2011-06-24T23:13:00.013-07:00

These are some more memories about my grandparents' farm in north-central Missouri, the house on the highway, three miles from town.

The house had light gray slate shingles on the outside walls, with faint grooves in a wood grain pattern. One time Uncle Doc was standing near the house talking to someone. I was bored and looking at the shingles, and I saw one that had broken, at an angle, the split going from the top near one side and slanting toward that side. It was completely broken through, but it had enough nails that it was still hanging more or less normally. I finally pointed it out to Uncle Doc, who looked at it and felt the shingle with one hand, saying a sentence or two to me briefly, but soon went back to talking to the other man, while still holding the shingle and feeling it and sometimes looking at it.

Inside, the house had ceiling tiles with patterns that I sometimes formed pictures with in my mind, including a picture of an old woman. The smear or bump patterns in the plaster of the walls could sometimes be used to form pictures too. It was primarily in the 1960s that I did this.

I was told by my mother that my grandfather liked to get up early and try to light the gas stove, maybe to make some coffee, I'm not sure now. He would turn on the gas and then look for a match. When he then tried to light the stove, the accumulated gas would go off in a small explosion. The others would hear the noise and come in and find him standing there with a surprised expression on his face.

One time we were eating over at the farm again, having supper I think. It was after we had moved, probably away from Missouri and not just to town, but were visiting again. My mother was somewhere else for the moment, in town somewhere, maybe at a store. She had left us there for several hours, so we could visit. Considering that she was gone for hours, it sounds like it might have been the time when we had briefly moved back to Missouri, and had a house in town then, which would make it 1966. In my mind it feels more like the early 1960s, but I guess it could have been slightly later. Now, at supper, I had a big plate of food and was eating it rapidly, and my grandmother remarked on how fast I was eating, and said something about not wanting me to choke. I ate for a little more, but slowed down and gradually stopped, becoming afraid to eat. I think I managed to eat a little more, stuff that was more without objects, like mashed potatoes, but I think I even stopped that after a while. When my mother came back, I was still sitting there. I think some of the others, my brother and sisters, might still have been there too, but by that time they were either finished or getting close to it. My mother came in looking happy, but soon asked what was wrong, based on my reactions and sitting there looking worried and sad with a big plate of partly eaten food in front of me. My grandmother told her briefly about it, and I said something or other regarding it. I worried, too, about it being permanent, and whether I could somehow get over it. I did manage to eat food again, though I'm not sure it was that same day. Eating wasn't something I could expect to avoid for very long, and I knew I had to do it again even if I wasn't comfortable with it right now. I hoped the fear would somehow fade away, though I worried about the time that would take, picturing weeks without food, though I knew that couldn't happen, that my parents would make me eat at some point, would insist that I do it, and I would in any case have to eat. The immediacy of the fear had faded some by bedtime, though the worry remained, even as I tried to sleep. The next day it was distant enough that I could force myself to eat, and the fear had begun to seem kind of stupid, that I should be afraid of choking so much, but it was still there, nagging at me. I still worried about choking for a long time, weeks, and even longer, and ate kind of slowly and carefully, not enjoying it as much as I used to.

One time when we had gone back to the farm, it seems like it was one of the times we went back there for a month in the late summer, in the early 1960s, a dog had killed a chicken that had gotten out. It was far out in one of the fields, on the side toward town. The chicken had been chewed open, and I saw a circle of eggs in formation, buds on stalks, the buds getting bigger as the array of them progressed through the circle, approaching the size when it would be time to be laid. It was interesting to see. I didn't know it had a structure like that inside it. The farmhands were going to take the chicken away and dispose of it, because the dog might choke on it, might choke on one of the chicken bones.

Most of the windows in the house had old, cranky, sometimes brittle at the edges paper shades that rolled up, as well as large Venetian blinds, and curtains too.

One time one of the babies, one of my sisters, was rolling over and over, heading for the edge of the bed, apparently because someone had sat down and tilted the mattress, and my grandmother quickly caught her, scooping her up. Years earlier it had happened to another baby, and someone else had caught him or her. The last one it happened to was my littlest sister, one of the times we had come back there from Arizona. It seems there was also someone that tried to roll off a couch in the living room, and someone caught him or her, and there was someone who managed to roll off the couch and didn't get caught, maybe my littlest sister again. She cried after landing on the rug or carpet, but seemed alright.

One time, when I was little, I was waiting with my brother for my mother to come back. We were standing in our cribs, in our bedroom at the farm. We called for her off and on for a long time, but she didn't show up. We were supposed to stay in our cribs and not climb out, because we might get hurt. She or another adult was supposed to lift us out. She didn't show up this time, though. My brother and I talked to each other a bit and sometimes tried calling for her again. He finally got disgusted and said he wasn't going to wait anymore, and started to climb out. I begged him not to, and said that we were supposed to stay in the cribs, but he said it was too long and he wasn't going to wait anymore, talking disgustingly about her leaving us in the cribs and not coming. She finally showed up, sometime after my brother had left the room. She looked really surprised and somewhat dismayed.

A family lived nearby on the other side of the road, a little closer to town, and we sometimes went over there and visited. The adults would talk, sometimes going inside, and my brother and I would usually stay outside and play with the kids there. Sometimes an adult or two would join in. One time we were playing baseball and a window got broken, I think from a ball I hit. The adults came pouring out of the house to see what happened, and the game broke up after that.

When my brother and I were very little, we had little red winter coats with strange interlocking metal buckles that my mother would have to fasten for us. The buckles were basically loops with a flat end with corners, then short sides, and then the metal would go into the cloth strap. They somehow hooked into each other, turning until one fit inside the other, then it would be pulled tight. I had trouble figuring it out, and it seemed to go together the wrong way and stick out or not stay together at all.

When I was little, maybe around four or five or so, I had a shirt with colored Autumn leaves sown into it, made out of thread. That was my favorite shirt, the shirt with the colored leaves. I would sometimes wear it for a short time years later, when I was much too big for it. My mother finally cautioned me not to put it on anymore, that I might tear it. We could keep it and look at it, she said, but I shouldn't wear it. I also had a second one with sown-in-thread Autumn leaves, that I was given several years after the first. It was significantly larger, and I also sometimes tried to wear that even after I had gotten too big for it, but also eventually gave up on it. The second shirt was nice, but it was not as good looking as the first, and the first was always my favorite anyway.

When my little brother was very little, he got trapped in the bathroom at the farm one time. It had some kind of slide latch and he was too small to use it, he could barely reach it. He didn't usually try to lock it, but this time he did. He couldn't unlock it though, and he was trapped in there. My mother was at the door, and my grandmother. They were listening, trying to hear him, and they were trying to tell him how to open it, my mother doing most of the talking I think. I asked what was happening and my mother told me. I tried to help too, telling him what to do in a loud voice. We were at it for a long time. He finally somehow got it open, the door just suddenly opened and he was there. He later claimed that he could always get out, which didn't make sense to me. He gave a reason of some kind for not opening the door, but I don't remember it. The door also had an old-time style key hole, made for an old-fashioned key, the kind with a long rod with a metal flap on the end, but we never used it, and I don't think we even had a key for that door. Other doors also used that type of key, but I think the front door might have had a more modern lock. The one toward the highway might have had a more modern lock too, but I think it also had an inside slide latch.

By the time my brother was born, when I was a year and five months old, I had already felt like I had lived a long time, and done many things, and played a lot with my mother. It felt like I had only come into a proper awareness of things a few months before, though, that before that things were dimmer, and much simpler, and while I had a lot of fun then, it was more like living in the moment, now I felt very grown up. The few months figure seems an odd thing for a very little kid to be thinking, but somehow that's how I formed the image in my mind, of a block of time that I thought of as months, going back into the previous fall, perhaps to around the beginning of fall. I didn't really think of the seasons too much, I just pictured how things were those times of the year, and thought mainly in terms of months, and the approximate time of year the transition occurred, a few months before the end of the year, and my brother being born not long after the end of the year, relatively close in time to it. Winter was pictured as a time of darkness, and cold outside, but the transition was before that, at a time when it was cooler than before, sometimes cold, and the light dimmer, but it could still be pleasant, the weather could still be nice. One of the times I was thinking about this was the time when my brother, when he was just a baby, had thrown his baby brush out of the crib and broken the handle off it. I was worrying about it, and my mother finally said that he didn't care, that he was just a baby. I said that I knew that, but when he got older, and could care, he wouldn't have a baby brush. I was also thinking at the time, doesn't she know I know this, I'm old now and I can understand these things, I'm not a baby anymore, and I went back through it in my mind, back to the time the transition occurred and what things were like before that.

My mother used to talk of how she had told me that I had to give up the baby bottles so my brother could use them, and about how nice I was to do it, and I think even how brave. I remember the discussions about it, but just a little. I also remember being saddened that I had to give them up, but understanding that I had to, that my little brother needed them now, and I was getting grown up enough that I didn't really need them anymore, which was her argument. My brother was still using them when we moved into the house in town, which would definitely put our move there, I would think, as no later than 1956, probably spring, summer or fall, which would put me as either nearly three or just barely three. She finally got him to stop using the bottle by cutting too big a hole in the nipple, and it ran out on him when he tried to use it. She said he looked very surprised.

One time after my sister was born, in 1960, we were at the farm and I was out in the front yard one evening, far from the house. My father was out there with me, smoking a cigarette. He was unusually thoughtful, and said that girls were different and had to be treated gently and protected, something like that. He told me to remember it, and asked me if I would remember it five years from now. I said yes. He pressed me on it, turning toward me and asking if I would, looking hopeful. I said yes, hoping that I would remember. It seemed a long time away, but I was going to have to try to do it, to try really hard to be sure and remember. It seemed like a lot of pressure to put on a little kid. (The weather was pleasant, so that would place it several months after she was born, maybe even over half a year.)

One time, in the 1950s or early 60s, we found a baby mouse and kept it in the bathtub for a while, but it only lived about a day. It was very cute.

One time in the early 1960s, we, or more probably I, made some small holes in one of the big trees that ran beside the farm house, by swinging a garden tool into the trunk. Charley, the old farmhand, was upset and yelled at us, saying the sap would run out and the tree would die. He was a very little old man then, and we were bigger and a lot heavier than he was, or at least I was a lot bigger. He was very skinny, though, and we were tall for our ages, and overweight. It seemed a little odd for it to be that way, for him to seem so small, though of course we were just children and he was an adult, so he had the authority, and of course I liked him and didn't want to upset him. It bothered me that he thought that the tree would die, though, even if I couldn't see how what I had done could really do it. I later mentioned what had happened to my mother, and she said the tree wouldn't die, he was just old and worried about things, that sometimes old people did that.

Sometimes, on rare occasions, a young woman, a cousin, drove up and parked at the edge of the driveway by the farm house. She was friendly, but spent most of her time with the adults.

One time my aunt, my mother's younger sister, gave me a big metal airplane with wings that were separate from it, they were in one piece and had to be put up into a big metal slot in the bottom and secured by a metal tab or two that had to be swiveled into place. In later years it got so loose that the wings kept slipping out, and it became hard to get it to stay together, but I still liked it. She had gotten the plane when she had been in a different city, maybe St. Louis.

One of the toys I had was a sheet metal waiter, perhaps 8-10 inches tall, dressed in fancy clothes and carrying a tray held far in front of him, with a cloth draped over his arm, with him leaning out, in mid stride. He had little wheels on his feet that made noise when turned, and I think gave off sparks, unless I am thinking of a different toy. He wasn't able to stand on his own though, though it seemed he might have been intended to. There was also a toy that was a little metal tank that had a flat metal Superman under it. That tank also had little wheels, and if you pushed the tank ahead Superman was supposed to rise up under it and lift the tank, his hands and maybe head were attached to it with a simple hinge. It sometimes needed a little help to work though, and didn't always lift up all the way. We had lots of metal toys, including a big top that made a humming sound when spun. It was spun by pumping a twisted metal rod that went through the top of it. We also had a lot of simple toys made out of wood. Later, toward the end of the 1950s, we started to get more and more toys made out of plastic. They seemed odd things. Some of them were little simple planes with little propellers snapped onto the wings. The ends of the propellers were flexible enough to bend some, and sometimes I even took them off and put them back on. It seemed a very strange material.

I had a piggy bank that I was carrying one time. I took it from the living room area into one of the bedrooms. I was bent over, my hands on the sides and underneath it, the piggy bank hanging down quite a ways. It was large and heavy and hard to hold onto. I had been talking to my mother and brother back in the living room, and as I was slowly walking through the bedroom, still talking, and my brother perhaps having come with me, suddenly the piggy bank slipped out of my grasp and fell on the floor, and completely shattered, a lot of it turning to powder. I felt very bad about it and felt very guilty, that I was too old and shouldn't have had that happen, that I had failed, though I was still in actuality pretty little.

My brother and I each had little red scooters made out of heavy sheet metal. We would stand on them and push them along with one foot. It was a lot of fun. One time one of them was left out in the gravel driveway and someone drove over it. My mother told us about it and scolded us a bit. It was bent up pretty badly. My father tried to straighten it out some, but it was still pretty bent. It was harder to use that way, not as much fun. The tiny straight handlebars were even bent to one side. There was no way to know whose it actually was. I think we both ended up using the remaining one more often and using the bent one only when the other was not available, and then not for very long. We still have it, though.

We had a big rocker that my father's brother had made for us. It had plywood sides cut to look like a duck, or perhaps a swan, and a wood seat between them, within kind of a box-shaped seating area. It was painted white, and because of the curved shape of the bottom of the sides, it could be rocked back and forth when sat in. It also had some detail of the face and feathers painted in. It was only big enough for one person at a time, and I think may have been made specifically as a present for me, perhaps at a time when my brother may have been too little for it. I think it was generally kept outdoors, in the yard.

The house on the highway, Part 1
The house on the highway, Part 2
The house on the highway, Part 3
The house on the highway, Part 4
The house on the highway, Part 5

"Until we meet again"

2011-05-07T22:07:00.004-07:00

On Wednesday, December 9, 2009, after the dream about being James Bond and being given a picture of a rose to give to my mother, I went down to the living room to check on her, a little after 11 AM. I found her wrapped up in a blanket, sitting on the couch, sleeping. When I asked if she was alright, she woke up and said yes, and said she had a song going through her mind, that she heard the song on the TV as part of a collection for a commercial or infomercial. I was astounded as I had heard songs in the dream, the last one of which had still been going on in my head. She really liked the song on TV until she remembered that she had heard it when she was in school, that it was sung by a singing group that sung several songs there. It was the last song, and they were really good, and the audience had clapped and she or someone had spoken to them, telling them how good they were and maybe asking them to stay longer, but they had to go on, they had other places to visit. Later she was saying that maybe this was the last one, she thought, and they were going home, to another state, maybe Ohio.

The next day the teacher came, really solemn, and told them the bus had been hit by a train, and the man and the woman had been killed, several people had been killed. My mother turned the TV off after she remembered that, where she had heard the song from, it made her too sad to think of it. She sung several verses of it for me, but couldn't think of the last one. A little later she remembered it and sung it and it went something like this (I forgot the middle part), "May your days be filled with bright tomorrows ... until we meet again."

Dream - James Bond and the picture of the rose

2011-05-07T21:56:00.005-07:00

On Wednesday, December 9, 2009, sometime in the morning, I dreamed I went to a mall somewhere, in Arizona, probably the Mesa-Tempe area. It was Sunday and in the afternoon, maybe getting late in the afternoon. I think I went to a second one then. I had to get back soon for supper, I think we were having some kind of family get-together.

I had made my way along the mall from one end to the other. It was a large mall. I started on the second story and it had a downhill slope most of the way. Partway along I switched to the bottom story, maybe two thirds or more along. There were several turns. I think I started out soon turning left, then after a little while turning right, then left again for a little longer and then right and then left and then right for a longer time, and then left for a long but shorter time, and then left again for a fairly long time, something like that. I was looking at various things as I went, usually from outside the stores, though I think I went into a few places and through or by a few that were out in the mall. I was nearly to the end now, in the section where the end was. I had been hoping to get something to eat. I had passed a little place selling soft ice cream. I thought of getting some, but wasn't sure I wanted ice cream. There were a lot of people around. It was getting late now, late in the afternoon on Sunday.

An announcement said the mall was going to close soon. People started hurrying, some to leave and some to finish up what they were doing. I was near a little tiny snack place out in the mall aisle, but it wasn't a place I really wanted to get the food from. I turned around and was going past it or through the edge of it. A family was there and some other people. A little kid ran into me from behind and was against me for a moment, then went around me. I wondered if it was something to try and take my wallet, but felt my back pocket and found my wallet was still there.

I had thought to maybe do some shopping for Christmas, but I didn't buy anything, just looked. We didn't have too much money right now to buy stuff with, and I had to be careful in choosing what I bought. I walked back through the mall.

After a while I turned right, and started walking through the longest section, going up hill a little as I walked. I was hoping to come across the ice cream store and maybe buy something. The mall was closing and a lot of stores were dark, maybe most of them, others were pulling down their security cage fronts. I didn't see the ice cream store, but a lot of the stores were dark and it was hard to tell. I wondered if I had been on the upper level when I went through this area, it seemed that I might have but I couldn't remember for sure. The store was probably on the upper level, I thought, maybe at the elevator back at the corner. I stayed on the lower one, though. I didn't know for sure and time was running out anyway, and it might be closed by the time I got up there.

I went through the section and turned right, and went along a relatively short, narrower section without stores. On the right was a long dirt section with a wall beyond it. It had a slight upward slant. The dirt had cactus skeletons and dry desert plants and a low open wooden fence along it, or maybe just posts and wire. I think it had a few cattle skulls somewhere, along with a few bones. One or two of the skulls may have been on the posts, and maybe a couple of cowboy hats. There may also have been a small wagon wheel or two, painted white. It seemed to be something related to Halloween, I thought, though it was past now, and they still had it up, at least for now. It also seemed to have some other tie-in, something that the mall was doing, perhaps related to some activity or event.

I went in it and walked through it for a while. Partway through, I looked back the way I came. It seemed that the bad guy or guys might be back there, that they might have come back, and might be aware of me and trying to sneak up on me. I couldn't see anything for sure, though I thought I could see a few of the townsfolk.

I got to the end and left the dirt area, and went across to where the aisle turned left and divided, with part going on in an upward slant and part beside it to the right on an upper level, perhaps six to eight feet up, going parallel to it. On the left was a section that was open, down to a lower level far below.

I climbed up to the upper walkway. It was in black wood with a black wood railing, with wooden shops along it, like an Old West town. I seemed to be a kind of James Bond character, though later on I was actually James Bond. I went along carefully, watching out for things. Shortly, the aisles turned left again for a while. The Old West section ended here. Then I got on to a longer section that turned right. It went through an area that was mostly just walls, then turned right again, and went along a large area. On the left were some shops, and on the right a railing with a big open area to a lower story. It was much brighter here. I went along the aisle, going upward, until it turned right, and then went that way. It was broader along here, spreading out into a large area. Things were mostly white.

My mother was with me at some point. It seems like she had driven a car there, maybe a station wagon, to the large room/area there that I was in. It was parked somewhere there, a ways back. I met up with her, and we continued walking, hurrying along. I moved faster, and got ahead of her, though she seemed much younger than she does now, maybe even in her thirties. I was worried, I think, about the bad guy catching up.

I came to some small open rooms near the railing. A man came up the steep slope of ground beyond the railing, coming up from the sunken lake that was in the big open section. He was soaked, and met up with two or three of his friends in one of the small rooms. I was worried about him, that he might be a threat, that he might threaten us. He was upset about his girl friend leaving and wasn't rational. He was nervously talking about doing something, that it didn't matter any more. He produced a small chainsaw. The blade was probably only about fifteen inches long, and was black. He turned it on in a threatening manner, waving it around a little, some in my general direction. I worried that he was going to attack us and try to kill us. My mother wasn't in the room, but wasn't very far away. He turned it on and off a few times, waving it a little and looking up at me sometimes, looking upset and worried. His friends, who had seemed supportive at first, looked more worried as time went on. The blade didn't look or act like a normal chainsaw blade, it seems it was a rough, lumpy, abrasive strip with a thin rubber coating, and it didn't spin, it just went back and forth a little along the middle part.

I reached out suddenly and grabbed the blade with the fingers of one hand. I'm not sure whether it was originally on when I grabbed it, but it was turned on at some point for a while while I was holding it. He was looking at me worriedly. I let go, worried that I was going to get cut. After a moment where I thought about what to do, I started struggling with him over it. He wouldn't let go of it. It got pointed up high in the air for a while, and then pointed way down. I think my mother had arrived at some point, and was standing a few feet back, looking worried and concerned, her mouth open. I was worried that his buddies would go to his defense, but they stayed out of it, even though one was literally on each side of him, and an additional one to his right beyond the first one.

I got the saw on the side of his right shoe, which was made of some kind of odd rubber, looking like a poor casting, with raised blotches and extra rubber at some of the seams sticking out in thin ridges. He mocked what I was doing, saying it didn't matter and wouldn't hurt him. The saw got away from his foot and I brought it back down again and got it under his foot, which was now raised up in the air by it, either from the saw pushing at it or him trying to move his foot away from it some or both. I kept up the pressure. It took a long time for the saw to cut through the rubber. He continued to talk to me, looking more sad and worried now, still saying it didn't matter, and saying something about something else, maybe the lake. I looked back down at what I was doing and saw with astonishment that his shoes had changed to rubber swim fins, and that the saw was making progress, cutting up to about halfway through his foot as I watched. I hadn't intended to hurt him that much, just enough to cut him some and hurt him enough that he would be concerned about it and not walking around trying to hurt people.

I withdrew the saw and he put the foot down. He was still sadly saying that it didn't matter. Watery blood was coming out some on the sides of the flipper and spreading a little on the floor under and around his foot. I was worried again that his friends might try to defend him, but they were just looking at him, staring at his face, looking sad and worried. I left them there, suggesting that they get medical assistance, that they needed to get someone. I think someone made a move to call someone or leave to get someone or something like that.

I went to the end of the room, which ended in a very small wharf sticking out, not much more then a heavy wooden sidewalk along part of the edge, sticking out sideways over the ocean. It seemed darker in that direction, like it was twilight or close to it. A few fishermen or sailors sat on or along it, not many, maybe three or four. There were some ships out there somewhere, far out there, and the men were waiting somewhat peacefully and wistfully for them to come back. It felt peaceful there, but I didn't feel it was safe. I couldn't afford to sit down and rest and wait. I felt that the enemy was coming, and I had to take action.

I went back the way I had come, but staying closer to the other side of the area. Along the side, there were sometimes small rooms and areas, sometimes with small side branches continuing at an upward slant to other things. I went by them, without going into them. As I went along, I changed to actually become James Bond, dressed in dark, tight-fitting knit clothes. Sometimes I was more like Sean Connery and sometimes more like Roger Moore. I was trying to pretend I was someone else, just a person there, maybe a tourist.

As I got back to the corner and got on the aisle I took to get there, I looked back and saw that a man was in a part of the wide area near the corner to the aisle, by a narrow counter out by itself, who was finishing up putting on a light gray, padded Batman-like costume with a dark cape and cowl. He was with some other people, some of whom may have been helping him. It seemed like it might have been some part of the activities available there.

I went along back down the aisle, going downhill, and came to the corner that turned left, but went right instead onto an offshoot of the aisle, going into an enclosed section. I met a short woman there, thin and in her thirties or forties. I talked to her briefly about something. She happily answered me, with a kind of smug expression. She seemed to be on my side, and the smug expression was about the information she was giving me, something about other people.

I went on forward and came to a broad opening to a large store. The opening closed off before I could get to it though, by something coming down over it, a wall coming down like a large garage door might. It had square panels like large push buttons maybe a foot or so across covering most of it, set in two or three sections. They had strange symbols on them, and almost all of them were softly lit.

As I came up to it, I saw a small panel under them near the right side. I had to press in a code to enter. I was uncertain what code would be proper. I needed to get inside, though. I thought the bad guy, the head person, might be in there. I needed to get in even if they were closing. It was awkward to enter things on it. It didn't actually have buttons, just a little plate, like dark brass, maybe six to eight inches across with small dark numbers and other things, of various sizes, relatively close-spaced. When I poked on them with my finger something happened, something lit up in an order of some kind up on the door/wall in front of me, and I saw somewhere there a lighted small display of what I pushed, but the place I was pushing didn't go down or do anything. I thought I was just going to enter 007, my code name, and they might let me in because they recognized it, if they did recognize it, but I thought they might because of their possible association with the enemy, that they might do it as a courtesy, and kind of to see what I might want, what I might be doing.

I was having a hard time with it, and was somehow pressing the wrong or too many buttons, and after a pause almost all of the lighted squares went dark. I tried again, and maybe a third time. The result didn't look much at all like 007, being maybe 5 characters, and you'd never know I was trying to type in 007 by looking at it. After a pause the wall came up, though.

There were various people inside, clerks and employees I guess. A woman surrounded by dark counters, with maybe a few other people in there with her, looked at me amusedly and asked in a slow voice, "007?" I looked at small lighted letters on a device on the counter that showed what I typed in, and I didn't see how she derived it from that. Maybe she used the combination of all the times I tried, maybe analyzed by a computer. I nodded. I think she might have said something about the bad guy expecting me, and indicated further on in the store. It seemed to be something owned by him, as part of his empire.

I walked on into the store, relatively slowly, looking at things, stopping frequently. The lighting was subdued. I saw a woman quickly putting some small ceramic figures up on a cart to store for the night. They were probably around six to twelve inches high, and I think of movie and TV characters. The cart, a large square white metal thing with maybe two or three levels, was handled by some other women. Then I saw some life-size manikins, who were movie and TV characters and looked real, who were singing and putting themselves in short compact rows. A Buddy Ebsen figure dressed like the Beverly Hillbillies' Uncle Jed was singing and dancing a little, back and forth from the compact lines to a place a few feet away, where another short line was, where other characters were who were waiting for their turn to join up with the others. It was very pleasant and enjoyable to watch.

After a while I moved on past it, going to the left a ways and then forward. I went by other things, going uphill. Sometimes, too, I ran across widely separated steeper ramp-like areas running across it two or three feet long. I came to an area where jewels were sold on square dark islands in the floor, perhaps six feet across, and I came to a large area where paintings or pictures were set up on an array of easels, and an area where a lot of chairs had been set up, folding chairs, and a lot of people were around, standing and talking and getting into them, special insiders who had been invited to an after-hours showing of some kind, some performance or movie or something. I walked on, still going upward. I came to a broad array of small dark islands again, generally each one with a woman behind it or doing something with the items there. The earlier place had a few women, too.

Near the end of the store, I was given something that the enemy had said to give me for my mother. At first I thought it was jewelry, but then I realized it was a small picture, maybe around eight to ten inches high and six inches wide, on a rigid backing, pale with a large, slightly raised rose done in a silvery sparkly color with a slight bit of rose color in places. There were occasional sparkles of different colors on it and the background, and the picture had a small raised border near the edge. I looked at it and thanked them profusely. I moved on, then. I was getting close to the end of the store area now.

Finally, at the end, there was an open area, set off from the rest with a railing I believe. The open entranceway was to the left, and there was a door to the right. Beyond the area, at the wall, were windows showing the outside and the parking lot. It was still light outside. The enemy was in the open area, within the railing, sitting at a desk. He was an moderately old man, and looked like the Gecko's boss on the Geico insurance commercials. He was busy at something on his desk and talking to people who sometimes came in through the door. He was friendly to me, increasingly so as we talked, with him doing most of the talking. He seemed to regard us as long-time rivals, but friendly rivals. He got happier and more enthusiastic about things, and said I could go out the door, indicating it, and I think getting up even. I might have thanked him for the picture at some point, but I'm not sure. I went off to the open door and back into the mall, to the broad area I had been in earlier.

All through the walk up here through the large store I had been hearing voices singing, one song after another, pleasant songs, generally old songs, like from the first half of the 1900s, sounding like a small choir singing, a mixture of men and women, probably mostly women. The voices had a bright, slightly echoie quality. The final one was "I've got my gal, who could ask for anything more," ending as or shortly after I went out the door back into the mall. It seemed late afternoon, but there were still quite a few people there. I was going to take the picture to my mother, who was still perhaps two-thirds of the way somewhere across the broad area, as the scene started to fade and I woke up.

The following part, featuring some activities with the Batman-like character, may have occurred before the store part, probably did in light of the dream seeming to end after the store part and the song being heavily in my mind as I woke up, and remained in it as I went to check on my mother. After originally meeting the Batman-like character, I might have gone back to the broad area before going to the store, although the scenes don't have an obvious exit from them to it, and just seem to end there. There's also the possibility that the first scenes and the remake were separated by other dream activities, possibly even with the first part before the store and the second part after:

I was joined somewhere in the aisle area by the Batman-like figure, who was much taller and clumsier, and much larger overall, but who also seemed to be me. After a few short misadventures in and near the aisle we made our way back onto the wide area. The Batman-like figure seemed to be to provide comic relief. Perhaps a third or a quarter of the way into the aisle area, we stopped at a place with a white counter and some people in line along it, and got hats. The Batman figure picked up an enormous long hat that was four or five feet long and stuck out far to the back and front, tapering to points, almost like wearing a small canoe. The James Bond figure picked up a more normal one, maybe something like a Robin Hood hat.

We then went over to the other side of the wide area, going across its width rather than its length, to a slightly higher area, a little ways through a small aisle that opened up a bit to a moderately wide area with lots of partial rooms separated by low walls, finally becoming more of a general large area near the other edge, where the mall ended. We stopped a little ways in and stood in front of a counter with some other people. Some hats were sitting in little stacks there, and someone behind the counter, a somewhat grumpy short man with light colored hair, probably gray-white, was giving them out, probably selling them. Either now or later the Batman-like figure got an extremely large, long pointed hat made of soft camouflage material that was just half a hat, with the right side just having long thin straps connecting the ends and holding it on. He wasn't wearing the cowl by that time, and looked uncertain about the whole thing.

Then after a while it redid itself, and it was several years later, like a remake or a sequel, and as the Batman-like figure, I was heavier and didn't fit in the clothes as well, and was a little doubtful about the whole thing. It seemed to be mid to late afternoon. The hat I picked up at the first place was still huge, a lot bigger than before even, but seemed to be made of a kind of extremely loose weave soft straw or reeds. I put it on and continued standing there by the counter, sighing softly about it, waiting for something, maybe for the James Bond figure to come back. I think we then went across to the other place to remake the scene there.

There was some more in the dream with the Batman figure, with him getting the second hat, and him having to wait a little while for it because of the other people there, waiting for theirs. I believe the second hat was smaller than in the previous version, perhaps quite a bit. There may have been some more with the Batman figure after that, and there may have been some more in the original version, with him and the James Bond figure traveling in and near the broad area, perhaps sometimes separately, and some activities there. However, I can't say now what it was, as I either neglected to write it down or didn't remember it at the time. The actual portion written down back then ended with the previous paragraph, with six trailing spaces and then, in brackets, the words "I've got my gal, who could ask for anything more," indicating the song was apparently going through my mind in the dream.

Note from Wednesday, September 27, 2011: The additional story from the dream, above, ended with a gap of six spaces and then part of the song in brackets. This seems to indicate that I had some more to write, but never got around to it. I can't add anything now. It's possible I meant to indicate that the song was going through my mind, but there must have been something more.

Note from Thursday, September 28, 2011: It seems that I actually had a battle with the enemy, near the end of the Old West section, when he came along a taller balcony that was pointed toward it, but it's not recorded here. He looked relatively young then, maybe in his late thirties or somewhere in his forties, and was wearing dark stretchy clothes, and was acting crazy, almost Joker-like. Perhaps it was something in another dream, though, and not this one.

See also the post "Until we meet again", which records what happened, in real life, after I went to check on my mother.

Dreams and visions of my mother

2011-05-07T13:51:00.012-07:00

My mother went into the hospital on Thursday, November 4, 2010, and died late on Monday, November 8, 2010.

Before that time, sometimes months before, I had had premonitions of her death. I had been having dreams for a long time, years, reflecting my concerns about her declining health. These could be attributed to what I could plainly see, without having to call them predictive. Some dreams though, including one a few days before her death, are harder to explain.

There was a time after her death, a week or so, when I had much fewer dreams than normal, and the ones I had of her sometimes seemed more like visions, particularly since I wasn't always asleep when they happened. I also had feelings of her being there at times. Most of the time, though, I felt an emptiness, and numbness, that was very profound. It didn't help either, that my own health at the time was not very good.

In the second week, I seemed to be having more dreams, some with my mother, though she tended to play minor parts. It wasn't until after the second week that I began to have a lot more dreams, including ones in which my mother played major parts. These dreams frequently referred to her death, though she was apparently alive in them, or at least acted so. Sometimes she appeared younger, and sometimes not, and sometimes she didn't look so good, like the dream was showing her actual body, dead but animated. Sometimes my grandmother, her mother, also appeared in the dreams. I had had many dreams about my grandmother in the past, but she rarely talked in them. Now, she talked a lot.

Below are a list of the visions, dreams, premonitions, etc., though I can't claim to have included all of them. The dreams still continue, too, though now she usually appears as a more normal figure in them, without references to her death. Most of the dreams and other items have been shortened quite a bit here, to better fit within the long list.

A few months before my mother died, perhaps early September, though I think it might have been late August, I was thinking about what I might get her for Christmas, when the feeling came, that it didn't matter, that when the time came it wouldn't be something that mattered. It was a feeling that the question itself wouldn't have any meaning. There was a bit of an empty feeling with it. I tried to reject it, push it away, because it implied that my mother wouldn't be there.

At around 6:30 AM on Labor Day, Monday, September 6, 2010, I walked down to the living room to check on my mother. I found her sitting on the floor near the hallway, facing away from me. She had tried to step around the partly folded towel she had put down weeks ago for the cat to lay on, and tripped and fell. Her left wrist was injured, and had a bump on the upper part of it on the side toward her body. It was fairly good sized, perhaps a third of the way across.

Earlier, I had been on the computer, and listening to the radio. Perhaps a little less than ten minutes or so before, the Internet connection had been lost. I thought that my mother might have for some reason wanted to call Sharon, and picked up the phone, causing the connection to be lost. I thought I should go down and tell her that it was alright to call, if she didn't already know, since the connection was lost and I wasn't on the phone any more. However, I went ahead and read some of what I had been reading I think, maybe all of it, and then continued listening to the radio, because I wanted to hear what they were saying. I started to get increasingly nervous though, wondering if perhaps she had fallen. When the radio came to a break, I went down to check on her.

When I saw her there, sitting on the floor, her back to me, I said something to her, and she turned around and showed me her wrist, I thought to myself, "Oh, Mommy, what have you done?" I said something to her, talking softly, but trying to be upbeat.

However, I had a bad feeling about this, and thought of my grandmother falling and breaking her wrist a few days before she died. My mother had fallen before a few times, and severely hurt, maybe breaking, one wrist or the other, but she had always recovered. Now, for some reason, it felt different, like this was it, this was the one that would do it. I had already had a bad feeling about her putting the towel down for the cat, back when she did it, but there was nothing that could have been done. Any attempt to take it away or argue with her about it would not have worked out well, and I understood that she was trying to do something nice for the cat, that she loved.

It was almost like something now, though, of retrieving a distant, half-remembered memory, of what the fall and injured wrist meant. I was disturbed by this and tried not to think too much about it, tried to believe that everything would work out alright, like before. (I have this account recorded in a file, and while going through the file I happened to add some to this entry on Monday, Labor Day, September 5, 2011. It was a strange coincidence, Labor Days a year apart, though they didn't occur on the same day.)

Before the fall, things had felt a little odd that weekend. I worked on getting my email in better shape, reading some of it and moving some to folders for a possible later time. Looking back, it almost felt like I was marking time, waiting for something. By Sunday I had gotten a feeling that something was going to happen Sunday. I had no idea what, or if it would involve us at all. It turned out, of course, that it happened early on Monday, but exact dates can be hard to come by with these feelings.

Saturday afternoon, the Saturday before the fall on Monday, I had a long dream that seems closely associated with what happened. In the dream I had reached up to a light high on the wall outside where I worked, intending to demonstrate to the management people that it needing fixing, pulling at the two cords hanging from it, like before, hoping to make it act up like before when I did that. Before, it had started making popping and sputtering noises and glowing red and hotter around the base, and crumbs of red glowing concrete block were going off it and a larger glowing triangular chunk two or three inches across was flying off. Now it didn't do much, though, making only a little noise. But then the face of an end of a concrete block came off, glowing on the bottom and halfway along its length, and fell toward me. I was wearing long, heavy, black neoprene rubber radiator shop gloves for some reason, and raised my left hand up to fend the glowing piece off, and it hit the side of my hand, and my arm, and it seemed to hit my side too, and I fell down, and it was even partly laying on me for a few seconds. Everyone gathered around me, and they got it away from me and were standing around me bent over looking down at me. An ambulance was called and I was taken to the hospital.

This matches what happened in real life fairly closely, though it happened to my mother instead of me, and although I was burned while she was injured in a different way, we both fell, and both our left hands were hurt, and our left forearms, hers from where it had gotten hurt around a week ago, and both our sides were injured, hers from something that happened a week or so ago, and it was her right side whereas it was my left side in the dream. We both went to the hospital too, though my sister took her, instead of an ambulance.

It also had the feature of me waiting too long, in the dream waiting a few seconds while trying to get something I was working on finished, before going to see someone who was leaving and then finding him already gone. In real life I was reading what was on the computer and listening to the radio before checking on her. I also had had the feeling that she might have fallen, and an increasing sense of urgency, in the minutes before finally checking on her.

The dream also had the interesting feature of metal things being concealed inside stuff, to both spy on us and for other reasons, and when I tried to put the hands of a woman in a carriage under a scanner, that would see through what she was carrying, she resisted but when I finally managed to do it, I saw that her hands and at least half or so of her forearms had black metal in them instead of bones, that someone had for some reason replaced at least that much of her bones with metal. This could be seen as highlighting the part of my mother's body that she came to have a problem with in the fall, and might also be a reference to the hidden splint that they put on her, as well as to the x-rays she undoubtedly had at the hospital.

I also had an incident that Saturday night, where a bulb in the ceiling fan over the kitchen table made a popping sound behind me and burned out. The fan has two chains hanging down from it, for the fan and the lights, matching the two cords for the light in the dream, the light that also made popping sounds. The dream happened Saturday afternoon, before the bulb burned out that night.

I had a long dream Saturday, October 30, 2010, in the 3:00-3:30 AM area, a little over a week before she died, in which my mother came to my bedroom, looking a little younger. She lay down beside me and didn't say anything. Something seemed wrong, she seemed bothered by something. I looked at her face in the dim light. Her face looked a little puffy and her eyes were mostly rolled back at different angles, with dark red inside the lids and some around the eyes, on the edges of the eyeballs, and she had a bit of a grimace. I asked what was wrong and tried to comfort her. When I looked at her again, her eyes had changed to completely dark, a glistening dark with a reddish tint, almost completely a black color though. She talked a little bit I think, and finally got up and stood in front of the curtain, looking toward it. Her face was more normal now. She seemed upset about something though, maybe even with me some, though her face was mostly expressionless.

The dream has many things that matched what happened in real life. When she died, the light in the hospital room was relatively dim. She was laying in bed, and her face was swelled some. She had also had some problems with her eyes when she went to the hospital, with an infection, though they had apparently fixed that before she died. The darkness of her eyes in the dream, though, and their pointing up, seems to portend more than that. As for going over to the curtain in the dream, well, "curtains" is sometimes used as a euphemism for death.

On Tuesday, November 2, 2010, Election Day, my sister took my mother to vote. I went at a later time, then picked up my mother at my sister's house. I offered to take her to Burger King and get some supper to take home. I told her we had to stop off at the house briefly. As I drove toward the house, she reminded me about going to Burger King. I said again that I was just stopping for a little while at the house, then we would go. She said she wanted to make sure I wasn't trying to get out of giving her her treat. I took her to the bank, to get some money out. I told her on the way where we were, what we were going toward and going by. After the bank, I drove toward the Burger King, again telling her about where we where, while we talked about things. After the Burger King I drove toward home, and we continued as before, talking, with me telling her where we were, and where we were going.

As we went, I came to feel more and more that things were ending, that this would somehow be the last time things would be this way. It reminded me of when I had taken my grandmother home, decades ago, after celebrating her ninetieth birthday. I had kept looking at her and thinking that things were about to change, that this would be the last time things would be this way. The next day, in the morning, my grandmother fell and injured her back, and was taken to the hospital, and spent a long time getting well enough to go home. Then, at home, after getting better for a while, my grandmother fell and broke her wrist, and died two or three days later. It felt now like it had felt then, when I was taking my grandmother home.

Though I did not know it at the time, my mother had less than a week to live.

Late Friday, November 5, 2010, at night, the day after my mother went to the hospital, I was at home, and got a strange feeling of peace, that it was over. I tried to resist that, didn't want to accept it, got very upset about it, telling her, mostly in my mind, to stay, to hang in there, not to go away, to come back, over and over.

I had not been feeling well. My ankle had bled all over the floor, just before they came and took her to the hospital. I got a call from my youngest sister, though, to come down to the hospital, and I did, and I talked to my mother for a long time, and she laughed a lot. I am very glad I went. I was very shaky on the way home though, and an hour after I got back my ankle started bleeding all over the floor again.

On Monday night, November 8, 2010, I got a call from my oldest sister, saying that my mother was expected to die, and that I should go to the hospital, and then, while I was getting ready to go, my brother called and said her organs were failing and they were going to shut her off. This came as a surprise. She had seemed to be doing well while I was there Friday. I had not gone back, afraid that my ankle would start bleeding again, but I talked to my youngest sister on the phone Saturday, and she said that she was doing really well and was expected to be moved out of Intensive Care on Sunday. When I called my sister on Sunday, though, she said that my mother hadn't been having a good day. Now, on Monday night, I hurried down to the hospital, and got to spend some time with her, though she wasn't conscious. A lot of family members were there too, though I was given a couple of times to be alone with her. She died that night, a few hours after I arrived.

On Wednesday, November 10, 2010, probably around 4:00 AM, give or take an hour or two, I felt a presence in the house, and also heard something. It didn't feel like it was in the room. It seemed to be in the front part of the house initially, then at the far end of the hallway, then at this end of the hallway, a few feet from the computer room, where I was. The little dogs didn't seem bothered by it. I had been sleeping at the computer with the radio on, but wasn't asleep at the time, or didn't seem to be.

On Wednesday, November 10, 2010, probably around 2:00 to 4:00 AM, as I was sitting by the computer, with the radio on, trying to sleep, I drifted and went into a halfway dream state. I hadn't slept for a long time. I had been writing a book for National Novel Writing Month, and I went into a version of the character I was writing about, who now looked more like me, and my mother was with me, in place of his mother. She was much younger, maybe in her early forties. It was dark, and we were separated by a few feet, going down a street, bent over some, moving sneakily but fairly quickly. She was a little ahead, but not much. We sometimes talked to each other in low tones. I think it was mostly a residential area, but with perhaps a few businesses. It was filled with old buildings, with I guess you would call a cobblestone street. It repeated itself a time or two. We were on an adventure, going stealthily into an area where we might find someone I think, in one of the buildings further on. It was brief, but enjoyable.

On Friday, November 12, 2010, around 3:00-6:30 AM, more or less, I was sleeping at the computer with the radio on. I dreamed that my mother, looking very young, in her twenties, and with a very small waist, kept coming up to me, rushing up to me, as I sat there by the computer. She was in heavy black and white, like the old pictures of her, except that it was heavier, with a dark outline around her. She seemed very dynamic, walking swiftly up to me, bent forward slightly, her arms bent, but moving back and forth some as she walked, coming toward me with an intent look, like she was on a mission, her face smiling a little, but also looking intent. It happened over and over, one right after the other. It seemed more like a vision, instead of a dream, and matched the physical situation I was in, sitting there in the chair, my head down, my eyes closed.

At my mother's funeral, on Friday, November 12, 2010, I went down the aisle and looked at her in her coffin. As I looked at her, for a moment, for an instant, another version of her seemed to recede several feet away from me, away from the body in the coffin, through the side and the open lid of the coffin, a version of her that was alive and several years younger, partly sitting up, looking toward me with her mouth open slightly, a slight smile on her face, almost of slightly uncertain expectation. She was looking toward me, seeming very comfortable herself, but looking a little unsure of my reaction, of what my reaction to her might be. I drew back, blinking and shaking my head I think, turning away from her. I looked back a few times, but the vision was gone now. It seemed astoundingly real, though, in the brief instant of its happening.

I thought about it many times in the days and weeks and months that followed. It seemed very real at the time it happened, but very brief. I wondered about it, and wondered whether it was real or just a trick of the mind, but at the moment it happened I was greatly affected by it, and had to leave the area of the coffin for a while.

On Wednesday, November 17, 2010, around 3:00-6:00 AM, I dreamed I was driving from mid-to-northern Arizona, back home. Some other people were with me. It was daytime. I was on a divided highway partly cut through hills. Roadwork was going on. My mother was with us, looking younger, maybe in her late forties. She was alive and alert, but somewhat shrunken down, her hips and especially her legs, with her legs shorter and tiny feet. We were taking her back for her funeral, but were experiencing delays due to the road work. I think my grandmother might have been with us.

Apparently on Thursday, November 18, 2010 in a sleep period ending at 9:30 AM, I dreamed my mother fixed sandwiches for me, Jimmy Dean type stuff. I got six Chapsticks, and reminded her to put them on the sandwiches....

Apparently on Thursday, November 18, 2010, in a sleep period ending at 12:30 PM, I dreamed that my mother was trying to fix something that she was calling shrimp or something like that, that she had bought at the store. We had had it before sometimes, in my history as it was in the dream. It wasn't really shrimp, but looked like a little person, maybe three feet tall, with wispy trailing strips like antennas, coming from the sides of the forehead and maybe shoulders or sides. I was talking to her about it, and started saying that it looked like a person, how much it looked like a person. She was saying not to say that. I kept on doing it. I was finally saying that it was a person, that it was really a fairy, or maybe more likely a pixie, or maybe an elf....

On Monday, November 22, 2010, around 5:30-9:30 AM, I had an extremely real-feeling dream in which my mother came back, suddenly appeared laying on the rug in a hotel room, as I was talking to my little sister. My mother looked a little irritated, and perhaps a little confused. I was somewhat surprised to see her, and a little confused myself. I told my sister she was here, then went to her and lifted her to her feet, tilting her up. She felt perfectly solid, perfectly real, perfectly three-dimensional. It didn't feel like a dream at all, it felt like she was really there. She seemed around sixty. She was wearing clothes that she used to wear, an old faded blue-purple blouse with flower designs on it and a dark skirt. I was glad to see her, but a little confused because I thought we had just buried her, how could she be back?

We talked about various small things, going into the room beyond the fireplace. She seemed to be getting younger, closer to fifty. My sister went with us, also talking to us. We talked some about the get-together party that had occurred, and maybe about how they would be surprised to find that she was back. I said, in responding to something, "and the autopsy they did and the cut up pieces that they buried."

My mother looked at me briefly, looking a little disturbed, and then said, "Yeah." (In real life no autopsy occurred.)

She seemed to be a little younger, under fifty now. She talked about going on an airplane to another state, one a few states over, to the east. My sister was going to take her to the airport. It seemed she had to leave pretty soon.

She went into the bathroom and changed into overalls, like a farmer might wear. In real life she would never wear such things, but it was probably a reference to the farm where she grew up.

My mother and sister talked for a while, and continued talking, and I said, suddenly feeling that I should give a warning, though it seemed a bit like a party pooper, that "You never know how long these things will last, it might be two hours, or an hour," while privately hoping that my warnings were groundless, that she would be here much longer, days or months or indefinitely, as the dream quickly faded into being awake, and she was gone.

The dream occurred on the 47th anniversary of the day John F. Kennedy was shot.

I was extremely cold at times in the couple of weeks after my mother's death. Especially earlier, closer to the time of her death, and in the days afterward, concentrated more in the first week, where I had on a coat and a blanket and couldn't get warm no matter what. I was shaking with the cold, even one time in the late afternoon, sitting by the TV. The heat wasn't on back then, which I'm sure didn't help, but it seemed more than that, as I felt colder than I should, given the actual temperature (this IS the Valley of the Sun). Around a week and a half after her death, I put the plate back in the ductwork in the attic, which blocked off the cold air and helped noticeably, but I shouldn't have been that cold, especially in the late afternoon, especially since I could feel the warmth, the heat, all wrapped up like that, but it still couldn't help.

Ghosts are frequently associated with cold spots. Art Bell, the radio talk show host, had experiences with being cold after his wife, Ramona, died. He has since remarried, but after his earlier wife died he was getting cold a lot, and one time he was even sitting in the shower with the hot water on and still couldn't get warm.

Sometimes in the days and weeks after my mother died, as I wandered around the living room, it seemed that I could reach out my arms and hug her, hug a space in the air where she was. Sometimes I wondered about it, and thought to test it, and tried to turn and hug another area, but it didn't feel that she was there, it felt empty, and that she was in the other place.

On Friday, November 26, 2010, around 4:00-6:00 AM (the day after Thanksgiving), I had a long dream, in which I was very tired, and driving. Then at home, I saw my mother again, and she sometimes seemed connected to what was happening to her body in the grave. We walked around to the back of the house, talking. The cat that she liked was alive again too, and she took it into the house with her, through a door that didn't exist in real life....

On Saturday, November 27, 2010, around 6:30-9:30 AM, I had a dream in which I ate some strange food, then went to my grandmother's house in Arizona, then went walking and found her. Then my mother came, and we went walking toward our house, with me carrying my grandmother, but I somehow got lost and we went through a block with lots of rooms that seemed to be a medical place. Then somehow I was in a race in the 1970 Cadillac. Then I went home and found that my mother and grandmother and youngest sister were there with some kids, but there were two sets of mothers and grandmothers, almost identical, but with one set looking worse than the other.

On Saturday, November 27, 2010, maybe in the 10:00-10:30 AM area, I was in the computer room, drifting but not asleep. I had a half-vision of my mother and grandmother off to the left side of me, a few feet away, in the room, coming toward me some, but I don't think they ever got closer than a couple of feet. They were standing there looking at me, apparently talking about me sometimes, concerned about me, though I didn't hear what they said and I'm not sure I actually saw them speak, though it seems I did a little.

On Friday, December 10, 2010, around 10:30-11:40 AM, I dreamed that I was in what seemed to be a living room, perhaps in my house. My mother was in there, laying on the couch, partly toward me. I was standing on the floor by the couch, leaning over to her, and shadowy figures were moving around nearby, but most of the area was a gray fog. The housekeeper was there, cleaning the house, though I heard her more then saw her. I could only see her a little bit, a dark figure in the fog. She spoke a little though, briefly, sounding distant. I asked my mother why the housekeeper was there cleaning the house, and she said something like, "Oh, she just was," and seemed happy about it, in a distracted way....

On Wednesday, December 15, 2010, around 10:00 AM-2:00 PM, I dreamed that I was in my bedroom. My oldest sister was a few feet away. We were talking, and she had a big smile on her face. I heard the tinkling of the bells my mother used to call me with, small ceramic bells with a handle on top. I heard them twice, a few seconds apart, faint but clear and sharp in tone, nearby, like maybe in the hallway just outside the room, and my mother was there, coming in through the open door, looking maybe around fifty, maybe less, in her faded violet-purple flowered blouse and a dark skirt I think. She was just partly seen, partly faded out, almost like an impression she was there, but I still felt like she was solid, at least the part that was visible, less so the parts that weren't. I was looking at her to the side, to the right, without turning my head much, and she came in, a presence or partial presence, partly seen, but definitely there.

On Wednesday, December 15, 2010, around 10:00 AM-2:00 PM, I dreamed I was with my mother at an old school, looking for books in a room full of old books, then a storm came....

On Friday, January 14, 2011, around 5:30-7:00 AM, I dreamed that I was thinking that my mother was dead, was remembering and thinking that it was too bad, that she wasn't here to tell something to I think, then thinking suddenly that it was found to be a mistake, and that she was alive, and I was glad that it had been a mistake and she was alive again.

On Friday, January 14, 2011, around 7:30-9:15 PM, I dreamed my mother and my brother and I, and one or two other family members, probably my sisters, went to a place outside of town somewhere. It seemed like a very small town, a settlement. We stopped at a place with a Old West appearance, a store with a large flat lot in front, unpaved, scattered with fine light brown gravel. It was daytime. Everyone seemed much younger. The girls were still children, and sometimes my brother seemed to be around ten or twelve, though sometimes he seemed to be older, in his teens. I'm not sure what we were driving. It seems we might have originally been in more than one car.

We were in the store for a while. I don't remember exactly what it was, but I think it was kind of a restaurant/tourist store/convenience mart type of thing. I think my father might have been there too, or in the area, or had been there, or was coming there. I'm not sure I actually saw him.

It was getting time to leave, and we got in the car and drove off, with my mother driving. She was talking, and I was talking sometimes too. The girls were also talking, mostly carrying on their own conversations, sometimes only one-way. I turned back as we drove out of the lot, away from the somewhat tall sidewalk that ran along the front of the building, with the tall, thin, square wooden pillars that lined it, and thought I saw my brother back there, looking toward us, seemingly around ten years old. I didn't see him in the car, looking toward the back seat on the driver's side. After a few seconds I said to my mother that I thought we left him back there. She questioned what I was saying, repeating it, then said to me, reassuringly, that he was here, and I turned and looked at the back seat on the passenger side and he was there.

We drove for quite a while, though it didn't seem too long in the dream. It was late at night, and we were driving in the mountains, on a road that might have been unpaved, though it was flat and in good condition. We were in the 1973 Oldsmobile Custom Cruiser station wagon now, blue with a white top. We stopped at some stores on the left, a series of perhaps three or more stores connected to each other, almost like a small mall. My mother went in, and the girls went into the store but not very far, going in and looking at the stuff in the bins and on display and then coming back out, going back and forth. My youngest sister was talking and giggling. My mother came back and we started off in the car again, with my mother driving like before.

My mother drove slowly forward in the dark, away from the stores. A few other buildings were scattered back a little ways from the road, but not too many. The road mostly went through a cutaway section of the mountains here. Directly ahead of us were two or more huge speed bumps that had been put in. I remembered going here long ago. The speed bumps were like large half-cylinders made of dirt, laying across the road, smooth and perfectly shaped. At first there just seemed to be two of them, separated by perhaps twenty feet or so. They were big enough that it looked difficult to get over them. My mother slowed to a crawl, slowly going over it and down the other side. I thought the car might scrape but it didn't. Initially they seemed to be perhaps 15 or so inches high, but they got higher as we approached them. As we went toward the second one, which had been the same size as the first one earlier, was now quite a bit taller, perhaps two or three feet. We managed to get over it. It was so large it was like going over a small hill, with the car somehow able to clear it, with maybe only a minimal amount of scraping.

We headed toward another one then, slightly farther apart than the other two. It was huge, maybe four or five feet high. Ahead, another car was coming, moving faster then we were, though still not very fast, maybe less then 20 miles an hour. I thought it would get a surprise when it got to the bumps if it didn't slow down more, and thought it might have to slow abruptly as it got to them. It might be local, though, and familiar with them, and somehow knew what it was doing.

I didn't see how we could get over this bump, though, it was so huge, and began cringing and partly turning away, even sometimes briefly closing my eyes. I was talking about it, worrying about it. My mother was talking back to me, reassuringly, slowly and tired sounding, her head tilted back some as she slowly drove toward it. We started to go up it, the front of the car tilting up in the air. We headed toward the top of it, and I could see over it, and it looked like we were going to make it after all.

Is that a bug in your glass?

2011-04-01T22:39:00.004-07:00

Late at night, on the night of March 31-April 1, 2011, I was thinking about how on April Fools Day I used to try to trick my mother into thinking a bug or fly had gotten into her glass of water, or more probably iced tea. I would get her looking in it and worrying about it, then tell her "April Fools!"

On the afternoon of April 1, 2011, I reached for my glass of water to get a drink, and saw a tiny winged bug inside, on the side of the glass a little above the water. My mother passed away last November, but I wonder if she was trying to send me a message.

Dream - My mother and the cat that came back

2011-03-22T13:46:00.005-07:00

The first week after my mother died, I didn't have many dreams. Of those that I had, not many were about her, and those seemed more like visions, particularly since I wasn't always asleep. In the second week I started to have more dreams, and more dreams with her in them, then after that I began to have a lot of dreams about her.

I had a long dream early in the morning on Friday, November 26, 2010, the day after Thanksgiving, over two weeks after her death. In a small part of that much larger dream, my mother and I walked around the house to the back, talking. The house was partly like it was in real life, and partly different.

At the back of the house, a few feet around the southwest corner, were a few concrete steps going up the side of the house with a small railing beside them, with a door at the top a couple of feet up. The steps and the door don't exist in real life.

As she went up the steps, a sleek, clean, black and white cat, evidently the one that had just died, but looking so healthy it was hard to identify, came up to her from the yard somewhere. She took it into her arms, talking to it, and went inside holding it, through the door that doesn't exist.

The cat that came back

2011-03-15T23:25:00.003-07:00

We used to have a black and white cat called Popper. It belonged to my sister, and used to stay in her room, though we also let it go outside. One day it disappeared, and we didn't see it for a long time, a lot of years.

It came back one day, though, when it was old. It was skinny and wanted to be fed a lot, but it always stayed skinny. My sister was living somewhere else now, a house nearby. My mother brought the cat into our house and kept it there. Even on those few occasions when it got out, it was happy to come back in. My mother really liked it now, and talked about how it had come back after all these years. The cat would sit on the couch beside her, and sometimes climb into her lap, especially when it wanted more food. She would stroke it and talk to it, and say, "Isn't this a beautiful cat, Stephen? Isn't he beautiful?"

Eventually it came to be that I was the one that usually fed it. We had various flavors of Friskies cat food for it, and I would get a can and walk through the living room to where it had its dish. The cat was frequently on the couch or my mother's lap, but sometimes it was wandering around meowing. I made sure it saw that I had the can of cat food. When it realized that, its eyes would get big and lock onto it, and it would soon start moving toward me as I went toward the food dish.

As the months passed, it began to eat less at a time, and then start wanting food a little later, seeming to forget that it still had a lot left. I would get a can and put a little more down, and the cat would eat some more for a while before wandering off.

We also have two little dogs, an old Pekingese and a young chihuahua mix, which stay in the kitchen, kept there by gates, when they're not out in the back yard. Sometimes the cat would go in the kitchen when they were in the back yard, and drink their water, and lay where they laid, apparently its way of saying that this, too, belongs to me. If the dogs got back in, it would quickly run to one of the gates and leap up on it, then over it.

One time I was fixing food for the dogs, before I let them back in. We feed them both dry and canned food, and I was putting down some canned beef Mighty Dog into one of the dishes, when the cat went over and started eating it. It ate and ate, really happy, and I couldn't convince it to stop. I finally let the dogs in, which caused the cat to leave the kitchen, and I gave the dogs a little cat food to make up for what was eaten. I figured it evened things out.

Thursday, November 4, 2010, my mother went into the hospital for what turned out to be the last time. Though she improved for a couple of days, her health then rapidly declined, and she died late on Monday, November 8, 2010.

I tried to explain to Popper that she died and wouldn't be back, and said I was sorry, and that she loved him. He seemed to understand somehow. He stayed away from the couch, though, and as far as I know never got back on it. He spent a lot of time in other rooms mostly, hiding, though sometimes he hid in areas of the living room. He still liked to get in the kitchen where the dogs were kept, sometimes drinking their water. One time the chihuahua mix got back in while the cat was still drinking the water, and the dog stared at the cat in disbelief, going from one side to the other, sometimes barking. Popper ignored the dog, and kept on drinking.

Popper ate much less though, and eventually stopped eating altogether, even when I held an open can of cat food in front of him. He got skinnier and skinnier. Sometimes I could hear him cry out, though usually he was quiet. When I talked to him, he would turn his head toward me and look at me. He seemed to have a permanent expression of amusement on his face, but that may have been in part because he was so skinny now, drawing his face into a smile.

One day he lay down with the upper half of his body across a towel that my mother had briefly used to warm her legs with, shortly before she went into the hospital. It had gotten on the floor and I hadn't really felt like picking it up yet. Popper stayed there for hours. One time I accidentally bumped him, and he lifted his head and looked at me, frowning a bit, looking worried. Then he lay back down, gradually resuming his expression of amusement.

He didn't move after that. As the day progressed, I suspected that he had at some point died, drifted slowly off into death. Late in the afternoon I talked to my sister on the phone. She came over and looked at him, and when she touched him she found he was cold, and when she lifted him a bit he was already stiff. It was Friday, November 19, 2010, a little over two weeks since my mother had gone into the hospital, and eleven days after she died.

My sister wrapped him up in the towel and took him away, to be cremated. At the door she paused and we talked for a while. She started crying and talked about how there had been so much death, and she hoped this was the end of it. Besides my mother and the cat, an old Boston terrier had died earlier that year. The chihuahua had been a replacement for it.

There's still a dish on the floor with some Cat Chow in it. Popper ate mostly canned food, in a separate dish that was just a paper plate, but sometimes ate some dry food, particularly if we were slow with the canned food. Whatever canned food was left there, the chihuahua ate at least part of it when it got out into the living room, and if any remained I gave it to the cats outside.

The chihuahua still sometimes gets into the living room, still looking for the canned cat food. It's not there now, but the dish of Cat Chow still is. It's off a ways from where the canned food was, and the dog apparently hasn't noticed it. The food is old and dusty now, and someday I'll throw it out, but I can't bring myself to do it yet.

What I said at my mother's funeral

2011-03-01T13:50:00.006-07:00

My mother passed away late on Monday, November 8, 2010, at the age of 79. Her funeral was on Friday, November 12, 2010.

My brother gave the eulogy. A day or two before I had been asked if I wanted to say anything, too. Some other people were also going to talk, and I could say something if I wanted to. I said no. I was really tired and feeling kind of shaky, and didn't feel like I could. And although I didn't know it at the time, I was only a few weeks away from going in the hospital myself. Over the course of the day I thought about it, though, and decided that I really had to say something. I felt it was my duty, that I was the only one who could say the things I was thinking about. I had to do it. I went ahead and wrote it down in a rough draft on the computer, then printed it out. I went over it some more on the way to the funeral and while I was there, making a few minor changes, just in my head, not writing anything down.

When it came time for the speeches, my brother went up and talked, then a few other relatives, then I volunteered to be next. I went up and got on the platform, and stood at the dais and adjusted the very ineffective microphone to point up toward me. I looked out at the crowd, scanning my eyes over them. I recognized a lot of people, but most of them were strangers. It didn't bother me that I had to speak before all of them, though there was a time when it would have. Now I just felt that I had to give the speech as best I could, and try to speak loudly enough so that everyone heard me. It was a fairly long speech, but I think I succeeded for the most part in what I was trying to do. Several more people spoke after me, not all of them relatives. I couldn't hear most of what was said, because of the poor microphone and my hearing problem. Evidently the other people were having a lot more success in hearing than I was, as evidenced by their reactions. I know I was heard, at least for the most part, because of reactions to what I was saying during the speech, and because of things that were said to me afterward, in one case about a specific thing I said, and in another case word was relayed to me that someone had said that I should be a professional writer.

This is what I said, recreated from the written notes and adding in the changes, as best as I can remember them:

Hi, I'm Stephen. I'm her first child.

A long time ago, in Moberly, Missouri, back when I was little, probably five or six, I was laying in bed, with my mother leaning over and talking to me. It was sometime during the day. We were talking about various things at first, but the discussion went to me growing up, getting older, and then getting married and leaving her. I protested, saying I would never leave her. She said that I may not think that now, but I would feel different when I got older. I still insisted I would never leave her.

I did end up spending some time in Nevada, but I came home often, usually every two weeks, and I also spent a lot of time on the phone with her. When I was home, she used to show me tapes of the Guiding Light soap opera, catch me up on it as much as she could, the ones that I had time to see. Sometimes I got to spend some extra time home with her, and see it directly, and watch the O.J. Simpson trial, too.

At that long ago time in Moberly, when I was little, in what was probably the same conversation, it had moved on, and came to a different topic. She said that people grow old and die, everyone does, even she would get old and die some day.

"No," I said, objecting to it.

"It would be a long time," she assured me. "It wouldn't happen for a long time."

I still objected, even as she left me then, looking saddened. I knew, of course, that she was right, that everyone grows old and dies, but I didn't want to accept it happening to her

In my life, I have had some things happen in groups of ten years, or a little more. The time I owned the radiator shop was around eleven years. The time I spent in Nevada was around ten and a half. The time since I came home from Nevada, until now, when she died, has been about twelve years. I would gladly add on another ten, and another ten after that, move it ahead indefinitely. It never seems to be enough.

We talked about the ten year thing sometimes. One time perhaps a few years ago, perhaps less, she said she didn't have that long to wait, for me to start doing something else.

One time, perhaps a week or week and a half before she went into the hospital, she was talking about something she had specified to be given to someone after she was gone. I said we had plenty of time to talk about that later. She said "No, we don't." After all those years, I was still objecting.

Now, though, the thing I objected to so long ago, and still objected to, and dreaded all those years, has finally happened. That unimaginable and unacceptable time, and we must go into the future without her.

She had a lot of health problems this year, but was still trying to get better.

One time, a few weeks ago, she found enough strength to fix some scrambled eggs. She made me a scrambled egg sandwich, and handed it out to me over the doggie gate in the kitchen. After I ate it, she asked me, happily and expectantly, if I liked it. I assured her that I did. And I in fact did.

She also gave some of the eggs to the two little dogs, something she used to do a lot.

She tried to be especially cheerful in the couple of weeks or so near the end. She said she knew how much I was doing for her, and how much Sharon was doing for her and, talking to me, thanked us individually. Sharon wasn't there at the time. I'm sure my mother expected me to convey the message, which I did.

She tried to be happy with what I brought her to eat, though when she didn't like it she said so, often saying it tasted funny or she didn't know why it tasted like that, while still saying it in a nice way. Her tastes seemed to be affected somewhat by her illness. But when she did like the food she made a special effort to smile, and thank me, and say how much she enjoyed it.

We had some enjoyable talks over the years, including recently, but not enough of them. Looking back, not nearly enough.

Several years ago she was trying to put together another book to give to people, like the last one about her early life. This one was going to include a lot of copies of pictures of relatives from the old days, and copies of newspaper articles and copies of parts of old books that had information about relatives in them, and I'm sure a lot of other stuff.

It was a big project, finding everything and making the copies. I helped her out sometimes, but she was doing most of it herself.

She was also trying to draw a large layout of the buildings on the old farm, as part of the project. She spent a lot of time working on it, trying to remember how many buildings there were, and what they were used for and where they were. She was never quite able to remember everything, though she remembered most of it.

Then health problems intervened, and time passed. She said one time that she no longer remembered how the buildings were, and was mad about it, that too much time had passed and she had forgotten.

She never got the project finished. Too many health problems got in the way, and it became too much for her to do.

It eventually came to be that she also forgot the stories of her life, that she had written for the earlier book. She said she knew she had written them, but didn't remember it anymore, and though she enjoyed reading them, it was like reading about someone else.

However, in time, the memories came back, and when I would talk about them she would know what I was talking about, and remembered them.

Even a few days before she went in the hospital she remembered them.

And when I visited her in the hospital, I talked about them a lot with her, and she would remember them, at least the ones from the old farm. She sometimes had some trouble with some memories from after that.

The ones from the old farm, though, she seemed to remember very well, even supplying some details.

When I reminded her about her feet hanging through the ceiling, when she was little, she said that they had told her not to do it, but she went up there and was looking at it between the boards, and was wondering what it would feel like to have her feet hanging through.

I reminded her of the horse taking her around and around the building, and she remembered that.

I reminded her about playing hide and seek, and not being able to find someone, eventually supplying the detail, I think, that a person was up in a tree. After I repeated it a few times, she turned toward me, like she had been lost in thought about something else, and said "Oh that was Bea! We couldn't find her, then we heard laughing, and we looked around and I finally saw her up in the tree. Bea was a rascal."

I reminded her about the two story log cabin. that she wanted to get into, and she said, "And I still do!"

She laughed a lot that night, talking with me.

I remember when I was very little, and we lived at the second farm, I used to sit on the floor and put puzzles together, and she would sit there too and help me.

She used to talk about that over the years, even recently, about how I would sit there with a puzzle piece and move it this way and that, and finally get it in. She said the puzzles had so many pieces, and I was so little, and I was so smart.

She used to play with me with other things, too.

There was a big metal top that had to be pumped with a twisted metal rod that came out the top, to make it spin. It made a strange humming sound when it spun.

There was a small wooden mailbox, with holes of different shapes in it, for wood pieces of different shapes to go through.

And a squarish board with little holes all over it, and little pegs to go in them and create pictures.

And a tiny wooden workbench with things to pound into it.

And various kinds of blocks.

And many other things.

And she used to sit there and play with me when she had time, both at the farm and when we later moved to Moberly.

I enjoyed it very much.

Later, when I was in school, she sometimes helped me out with my school work. She was also a den mother at school for a while. She also made Easter egg hunts for us, and treasure hunts. She would leave little strips of paper with clues on them, leading to the next strip of paper and finally to the prize.

She did so many nice things for me over the years.

One time, I'm not sure how old I was, perhaps around twelve, things had gotten more tense lately in the house. People were cross with each other. We were talking, and I had to go somewhere, probably to school. As I left, she gave me something, probably my lunch. She was standing in the doorway, and we were still talking, in half-arguing kinds of voices, though we weren't really arguing, and as I turned away then to leave, several feet away from her now, she said "You could at least say thank you."

I paused, and realized that she was right. I had used to do it, had used to thank people, but had somehow gotten away from it. I turned back toward her and said, "Thank you." And after that, I made a particular effort to be sure and thank her for things. She became happier, and brightened up a lot, and thanked me too when I did something for her.

I can't thank her enough for all she has done, and for being there with me. I will miss her very much.

Maudie M. Morgan, 1931-2010

The house on the highway, Part 1

2011-02-28T23:27:00.023-07:00

The house on the highway was in north-central Missouri, three miles from town, or more precisely three miles from a place on the edge of town called Reed's Corner. The house was a farm house, but it was not the farm my mother grew up on. That farm was much farther out, away from things. It was a large farm for that time and area, and was doing well. The coal company, though, wanted to buy all the farms in that area, and wouldn't unless they sold their farm, since it was the biggest. My grandparents, and my grandfather's brother, felt they had to sell it, because the other farmers really wanted to sell their farms. They had begun to be worried, anyway, about being out there. The farm was too far out in the country, too isolated, too hard to get to. My mother's father was much older than her mother, and there was a concern that there would come a time when her mother would be all alone. They moved to this farm, the house on the highway, in 1952, but it was not my grandfather's first choice.

This farm had a better location, but it had a lot of work that needed to be done. The land was worn out, and needed a lot of fertilizer. The fences needed repairing. Even the barn needed repairing, because the owner had taken boards from it to repair the house. My grandfather was already in his late seventies. My mother thought it had a much better location, though, than the place he preferred, and she convinced him to buy it.

His older brother, my Great-Uncle Doc, refused to partner with him in buying it, though they had co-owned the previous farm. Even so, Uncle Doc joined him there, staying at the house with the rest of the family.

The house was set back from the road quite a ways. The road had broad deep ditches on each side, with long slopes covered with green grass. As the land rose back up from the ditch, it gradually came to a hedge running around the somewhat raised yard of the house.

The part of the house that faced the road was actually the back of the house. A gravel road left the highway and ran beside the hedge, gradually curving around, to eventually go up a gentle slope leading up to the garage, at the far side of the house. Beside the garage, on the town side, three or four concrete steps led up to the door. Beyond the door was a long hallway, leading eventually on the town side to the kitchen, and beyond that, on the other side, to some small rooms, behind the garage, where Uncle Doc stayed. At the far end of the hall was a window, looking out toward the yard and the highway. The kitchen was a tall step up from the hallway, but I don't think Uncle Doc's rooms were like that.

The hall had some things hanging on the wall, including a swordfish sword with a handle cut in it, just a slot you could put your fingers through. It was a gift from some friends of the family who had gone deep-sea fishing. When I was little, I said that it looked like it was made out of wood, that it had wood grain. They insisted it was from a swordfish, and I had to believe them, but I couldn't figure it out. In recent years, looking at it, I can see where it sort of has kind of a grain-like look in places, but it's not something that would ever be mistaken for wood.

The hall had some other things on the walls too, and I think that was where the picture of President Harry Truman, wearing Masonic clothes at a Lodge meeting, was kept.

Another feature of the hallway, though not always there, was a large galvanized metal tub, a few feet from the door to the outside. It was the slop bucket, and food scraps and some leftovers were thrown in there, for the hogs.

The kitchen had its own door, and in the winter, patterns of frost appeared on the window in it. They would melt when food was being cooked, and then reform.

The kitchen had a door to the basement. Wooden stairs led down, and the air there had a strange, damp, kind of moldy smell. A small grinding stone with a hand crank was mounted on the railing of the stairs. A lot of stuff was down there in the basement. A modern (for the times) washer was down there, but some appliances from the old farm were also there, including wash tubs and a double roller to feed clothes through to squeeze the water out. There was also a big, simple wooden table that had small stacks of newspapers and some magazines on it. They were getting a bit mildewed, because of all the moisture in the air. There were many other things down there too, including, I believe, an actual icebox, that had to have ice put in it for it to keep things cold. It wasn't used anymore, of course, since we had a refrigerator up in the kitchen.

One time down in the basement I saw an old comic book on one of the stacks on the table. It had a cover with Elmer Fudd sitting on a motorcycle frowning, while Bugs Bunny. playing a service station attendant, wiped Elmer's goggles. I may have taken it back up with me. In any case, it did end up in the main part of the house, eventually in with a stack of magazines, on some shelves behind a narrow, wood-framed glass door, probably in what I later learned was called Uncle Doc's bookcase. Only part of it was really a bookcase. It also had a big fold-down section to the right of the door, with cubby holes and tiny drawers inside, and above that a flat surface with a mirror at the back of it. Underneath the fold-down section was a door that swung out, with more shelf space inside it. The comic book, oddly, seemed to disappear from it one year, and then reappear the next. This was in the 1960s, at a time when we lived somewhere else, and visited once a year. My grandmother was beaming when I pointed out that the comic book was back. I think she probably had something to do with it.

Along with the refrigerator, the kitchen had a modern gas stove, and a kitchen table with a gray patterned plastic top with metal around the edges. The pattern was of different sizes and shades of gray blobs and streaks, on a lighter background. However, over the years, I noticed that that table changed, the pattern being sort of the same but somewhat different, and at least one of the tables had a brownish tint to the gray. There was also sometimes a second table, out in the room behind the kitchen, or close to it.

The kitchen also had various cabinets and cupboards, of course, and a cupboard that had shelves behind glass doors, that had dishes and glasses in it. Some of the glasses had pictures of flying geese on them, just colored outlines of the geese and the scenery, the lines raised up on the glass. We sometimes used them, and my mother used to talk to me about them, and slowly sing a song, mostly talking, that went something like "my heart goes where the wild goose goes, my heart knows what the wild goose knows."

The kitchen sink was next to the door to the hallway, on the left side of it. It was a big square sink, and when I was little I sometimes was given a bath in it, which was a lot of fun. When I was a little older, I had at least one bath in it with my little brother, which was also a lot of fun. We laughed and splashed in the water.

The room behind the kitchen held more kitchen things, including a flour bin and a long metal surface to work on, with metal cabinets and drawers at the back of it, and probably under it. This was all placed on the wall that it shared with the kitchen. This room was given a specific name, that I don't remember now, but was essentially the far end of a long room, with occasional partial divisions, that ran all along that side of the house, the side that faced the highway. The long room was given the name of the sun porch, because sunlight came in through the windows there.

Going along the sun porch, past a partial wall to the left, my grandmother had some little shelves where small things were on display, little ceramic figures and things generally, I think. There was also a cabinet or two, with glass doors and shelves behind them, with more things on the shelves. One of the things was a fancy white plate with a black and white picture of my mother, probably taken when she was around 20, more or less. I think she said it was something they got in St. Louis. It's possible one of the cabinets was in the kitchen, with glasses and plates in it. I'm pretty sure that there was something like that in there.

Further along the sun porch was an organ. It had big rectangular cloth-covered wooden pedals under it, that had to be pumped to push air through it, and lots of little knobs in a row, that they called stops, each with a name on it. They could be pulled out to change the sound. It used to have some kind of ornate railing on the very top of it, my mother said, but when she was young she didn't like it and convinced them to get rid of it. She said that she regretted it, because she thought not having it lowered its value.

The organ had a special upholstered stool that was supposed to be used with it, but we frequently used a little narrow wooden table instead, as a kind of bench seat. In later years the table was almost aways used, as the stool had problems staying together (the seat wanted to come off) and was in any case not as easy to use as the table.

Past the organ was an opening to the rest of the house, to a living room. On the other side was a door to the outside, toward the yard and the highway. Past the door the sun porch continued for a bit, with I think a small couch and maybe a sofa there, and maybe a small table with a drawer, that a lamp sat on, and perhaps some low small shelves, that books or magazines might be put on.

The living room had an old fashioned couch, that my grandmother sometimes recovered with new fabric. The fabric was always fancy, with a texture of rich swirls. Sometimes it was a shade of gray, and sometimes a more purplish color was used. Big brass tacks went along the front of the arms, holding the material in place.

The living room had various other chairs, most or all upholstered, and she sometimes reupholstered some of them, too. In probably the late 1950s the living room gained a picture of a deer, in panels on both sides of a light bulb. It sat on a lamp table, and the light inside it could be turned on to illuminate the picture of the deer from within.

A television set was in one corner, the corner toward town and away from the highway. I was told I liked to pull the knobs off it when I was very little, and they had to put something in front of it to block it from me. I have some memories of doing it, mostly just of reaching toward them.

Among other lamps in the room was a very wobbly floor lamp. It had a long sheet metal pole that fitted into a round sheet metal base, but it was always wanting to tilt one way or the other, the base not securing the pole very well. I think the lamp was kind of a tan color.

On the floor of the living room was a very low dense carpet, mostly gray but with some kind of pattern. In one area it had a small rectangular darker gray rug on top of it, with a rabbit with rounded glass eyes. Decades later, my mother talked about a small blanket with a rabbit on it that my grandmother was given by my grandfather, back before they were married, and she would put it on her legs to keep them warm, when they were out riding in what was apparently a horse-drawn carriage. We decided that the rug on the floor must have been it. The blanket had originally been black, but it could have faded with the years.

The floor had oval rag rugs in places, too. My grandmother made them out of pieces of different colored cloth, frequently red and black, frequently patterned, that were rolled up and sown to each other, then wound up into the rug shape and then sewn across them.

On the end of the living room was what they called a picture window, because it was just a sheet of glass with no divisions, like a picture in a frame. It faced toward town. In the early and mid 1960s, when my mother went to town to buy groceries or do other shopping, I would sit on the floor with my brother and, when she was a little older, my sister, and we would pay attention to the cars that sometimes went by in the night, hearing them as they approached, and seeing their headlights, and wondering if they were our mother coming back. Eventually, one of them would turn out to be her car, and it would slow down and pull off the highway, hidden for a while as the gravel road dipped down, then would eventually go past on the other side of the hedge, just the top part of it visible.

In the daytime, the picture window looked out on the broad side yard, with its green grass, and a flowering plant in some kind of big bucket in the middle of the yard, and then more grass and finally the hedge. A time or two I saw a gray rabbit out there in the grass, huddled down in it, with the wind sending waves through the grass.

On the other side of the living room, on the side toward the front of the house, away from the highway, were I believe two little rooms. One was a sewing room, where my grandmother kept a lot of sewing materials and a Singer sewing machine, along with partially finished projects. She used to do a lot of sewing, and made quilts and clothes and couch pillows and other things.

I don't remember a lot about the other room, which was right on the corner. I think it might have been used for storage. It might have been the place where they kept the old clocks. They had a lot of old antique clocks, some of them fairly large. Or it's possible the clocks might have been in the sun porch, or perhaps some of them.

On the other side of the sewing room was an opening that led to a bedroom, through another opening right on the corner there. On the other side of the opening to the bedroom was the furnace, used to heat the house. It was a large thing, and sat at an angle across the corner of the room there. I sometimes played behind it when I was little.

One time I left my Jack-in-the-box there, and it melted its head. The box it was in was metal, but the head was plastic, and it got too hot. I worried and worried about it, so I've been told, though I only remember a little of it. Finally, one of the men said to go to town and get that child another one. It was secretly substituted for the old one, and when the head popped out I looked surprised, maybe even startled, then left it and started doing something else.

I only remember a little about the whole thing, mainly about being warned not to go back there and the Jack-in-the-box getting damaged, and feeling sad about it. It probably happened sometime in the mid to late 1950s. The concern about going back there was maybe a little about getting burned or somehow getting hurt by the gas, but was probably mainly about the electric cord going from the furnace to the wall. My mother worried that I might get shocked in some way, either through a problem with the cord or by playing too near where it plugged into the wall, that I might touch it in the wrong place and get shocked. There was some validity about this, besides the general concern a parent might have about kids poking something into the wall outlets. The cord was old and it had a place where the cloth outer cover was very frayed, broken through actually.

The room between the living room and the kitchen was the dining room, though we normally ate in the kitchen. The dining room shared the carpet of the living room, but the kitchen had linoleum. The room behind the kitchen may have had linoleum too, but if so at some point along the long room it changed, perhaps to wood slats. I'm not sure now. I'm pretty sure the hallway that went from the kitchen to the front of the house had a wood floor, though.

The dining room had a massive wood table that we used to play under. It had huge wooden legs, with heavy curved ornate pieces of wood connecting them near the bottom. The table had a tablecloth, with one or more doilies on it, and some decorative things set on it. Some of the chairs in the living room had doilies on them, too. Some of the doilies were real lace, but some were one piece flexible plastic. We used to take the plastic ones and put them under a paper, and then draw on top of them with crayons, making designs on the paper in different colors, the hard edges of the lace pattern catching the crayons as we went back and forth with them, causing the pattern of the doily to show through.

A short hallway led away from the living room toward the front, ending in a bathroom. On each side of the bathroom was a bedroom, with doors in the hallway to them. Another bedroom was reached through a short narrow hallway from the kitchen. The bedroom may have also had a door in the side, to another bedroom, but I'm not sure now. The short narrow hallway to the kitchen had shelves on each side, and a red curtain of heavy cloth. My mother said I used to go through it head first when I was little, going into the kitchen in the morning, and everyone would stop what they were doing and talk to me, saying things like "Who's that?" I only remember a little of it, mainly of pushing through the curtain with my head, and happily and expectantly going into the kitchen, my head peeking out as the cloth parted and fell away, and the other people being there, sitting around the table, their heads partly turning toward me, as they paused in their conversation and said things to me.

I played with my little brother a lot, when he was old enough for me to do so. I remember one day in particular, where we played and laughed all over the house, and in places outside it, going everywhere it seemed. At the end of the day we lay together on the floor, looking out the door toward the yard and the highway. We were there for a long time, watching and talking as the day gradually faded into night. In my mind I later called it the bestest day, not because I would actually have talked like that, but because it seemed to fit the theme of being young and happy. Years later I saw a picture of the two of us laying on the floor in front of the open door. I was astounded, because my brother looked so young. He was just a baby in diapers, with little crooked legs sticking out. I asked my mother if it could have been possibly that time, and she quietly nodded and said yes, smiling. I wondered if she could have been right, there might have been other times. Still, it all seemed to fit somehow.

Sometimes in the evenings the family sat outside the house, in the yard that faced the highway. The door had a drop down to the ground, but not as nearly as much as on the other side of the house. There may have been a small concrete area there in the yard, next to the house, but I'm not sure. In any case, chairs were brought out, I think there was already a picnic table there, and the adults talked while my brother and I played. Sometimes a lot of fireflies were out there, and they tended to congregate around a large cone-shaped evergreen tree, near the house on the end with the kitchen.

Sometimes we were out on the other side of the house instead. I remember one night, probably around 1960, or even later, when the sky was mostly overcast and heat lightning kept flashing in the clouds in the distance.

My father was in the Air Force for most of the 1950s. He joined to prevent being drafted. If he enlisted, he could choose what branch of the service to join, but not if he was drafted. He particularly didn't want to be in the Army, and maybe end up a foot soldier. He had to be in the Air Force had a longer period of time, though, four years on active duty and four years on reserve. It started out before I was born. He was stationed in different places, and they were in Texas for a while, then they ended up in St. Louis I think, at a time when I was a baby. My mother finally went back to the farm with me, to the house on the highway. My father visited every couple of weeks or so, for a weekend. I remember seeing him one time when I was out in the yard. He had parked by the front of the house, the side away from the highway, at the edge of the gravel road, and was walking across the yard at an angle, heading for the front door, wearing his uniform, a big grin on his face. I was playing near the house, not far from the corner, and he didn't seem to see me.

Continued in Part 2.

The house on the highway, Part 1
The house on the highway, Part 2
The house on the highway, Part 3
The house on the highway, Part 4
The house on the highway, Part 5

The house on the highway, Part 2

2011-02-28T23:25:00.022-07:00

The hedge only went partway around the house. It went between the house and the broad ditch by the highway, but I'm not sure if it went toward the house on the side away from the highway. It did come beside the house on the side toward town, where the gravel driveway ran from the road on the other side of it. I think the hedge curved part of the way around, following the driveway, but then ended. leaving most of the front open. Some more things were there where the hedge would have been had it continued. At least one very large wooden wagon wheel was embedded in the dirt, and painted white. There was also at least one pole there, a tall one from my perspective, though probably only five or six feet high. It had a rain gauge on the top, that Uncle Doc had put there. Most of the area after the hedge ended was open, though. In the area where the drive sloped up toward the house, my grandmother sometimes planted vegetables beside the drive, in single rows going along it. They were things like different types of lettuce, and green onions, and maybe radishes and cabbages and other things.

At the other end of the gravel driveway, back at the highway, was the mailbox, on a post. I used to look at it from the house and wonder if the mail had come yet. I think it had a little metal flag that was supposed to be raised if we had mail, but I'm not sure I paid any attention to it (or perhaps it was just supposed to be used by us, to indicate mail that we had put in to be picked up by the postman). The mailbox was in any case far away from the house and difficult to see details on. It was a long walk out there to it, to get the mail or to see if there was any.

Inside the yard in the front was a very large, very long cylinder, with rounded ends. It ran parallel to the house, out in the middle of the yard. It was huge. It contained the gas that was used for the stove and for heating. It was probably ten or twelve feet long and three or four feet high. It was covered with some kind of gray silvery paint that rubbed off on us when we touched it. My brother and I used to try to get on top of it, but it was so tall it was difficult, and we kept jumping at it, trying to get to where we were laying across it, but most times we ended up slowly sliding back down. My mother didn't like us doing it, because it came off on us and our clothes, and because she was afraid that we would somehow cause it to catch fire or explode.

The front yard had a few bushes in it I think, and some places where my grandmother had put flowers. She had a bucket out in the side yard, between the hedge and the house, that had flowers with white petals and a yellow center trumpet that stuck way out. More flowers were in something at the corner of the side yard and the front, in maybe a metal tub or perhaps part of a wooden barrel. They had small bright blossoms. More flowers were I think around the corner of the side yard and the back yard, and under the picture window, by the side of the house. I think there may have been some more in places along the front of the house too, either flowers or occasional bushes of some type. My grandmother used to show me the flowers, going from one to another, and telling me what types they were.

The yard also had a large willow tree in it I believe, somewhere in the side or front yard, perhaps to the side of the front yard.

On the other side of the house, on the side of the garage, was a large honeysuckle bush, with large, trumpet shaped orange flowers. I think it came with the house, though, and was not something she planted.

On the side of the house away from town, on the side with the garage, perhaps ten feet or so away from the house, the yard abruptly began a long sharp downward slope. Near the bottom of the slope was a line of large, widely spaced trees. Not far past the slope, where the land leveled off, was a barbed wire fence. Beyond the fence were some of the fields, or perhaps pastures. The slope gradually disappeared in the direction away from the highway, as the land in front of the house and the land beyond the slope became the same level.

The barbed wire fence ran between the yard and the fields, on the side away from town. It turned the corner and ran along in front of where the chickens were, continuing on, perhaps changing to a fence of horizontal slats for a while, I'm not sure. Even if it didn't turn to wood, though, it eventually got to a place where a very wide wooden gate was, maybe ten feet or so wide. It closed off the wide dirt path that led out to the barn far in the pasture. There may also have been a smaller gate near it, I'm not sure. I used to like to swing on the big gate, but I was told not to, that it would make it sag.

One time, maybe in the early 1960s, I scratched one of my forearms on the barbed wire, a scratch that ran almost entirely around the arm. I worried about it, fearing that if I had scratched it all the way around the skin might slide off. I finally mentioned it to my mother, who while being sympathetic about the scratch, pooh-poohed the idea that my skin might slide off.

In the front yard on the side away from town, the adults at some point built a sandbox for us. It was of thin boards in a square, perhaps 6-10 inches high, with short thin boards over the corners to sit on. It had a lot of sand in it, and tulips partway around it. My brother and I used to play in it a lot, but later on the cats used it as a bathroom. We still played in it some, but not as much.

At the corner of the fence where the chickens were, where the fences crossed, directly across from them at an angle, with the long side of it toward the house, was a garden. It was fenced off from the rest on all sides, and had a little building at the corner where the fences joined, where some tools and things were kept. The garden had rows of different kinds of vegetables.

One time I went with my grandfather while he hoed the garden. He talked to me while he worked. He moved very slowly, as he went along the plants. After a while he sat down in the dirt, leaning to one side and rubbing his leg. I thought it was strange for him to sit down in the dirt like that, and stared at him, wondering about it. He cheerfully said that he had a charley horse in his leg. I had to ask him to repeat it, though I heard most of it. It didn't make any sense to me. I told my mother about it later, and asked what it meant. She said it meant that he had a cramp in his leg.

Another time, years earlier I think, it was winter and he had come back into the kitchen after being outside. He was trying to warm himself up, before going out again. He was wearing three pairs of socks and he was still cold. He stood there, moving slightly from one foot to the other I think, wearing a heavy coat, probably with his arms wrapped around him. I was there solemnly looking up at him from a few feet away, while he talked to my mother and grandmother, who were busy with something and sometimes were in other rooms. Sometimes he looked back at me.

He used to let me ride on his knee in the living room sometimes, while he sat there talking with other people. He would bounce me up and down a little, and say he was taking me down Old Morley, a street in town.

I remember one time I was out in the yard, and it was late in the day. I looked out toward the fields, in the direction of town, and saw him in a field, or perhaps between fields or on the edge of them, far away, a dark figure in silhouette, sideways to me, slowly walking. He was headed further out into the fields, but may have been going toward the path between fields, that led back toward home.

My grandfather had a somewhat square face, with high cheekbones, and his body was a bit heavy, but strong looking. He almost always wore overalls, along with some type of shirt. His name was Ernest Rice. I called him Grandpa.

I was, in part, named after him, with his first name becoming my middle name.

My grandfather's brother, Uncle Doc, I have only a few memories of interacting with. He was a small, slim man, who was quiet and generally cheerful, at least when he talked to me. He spent more time talking with adults, though.

He lived in a series of small rooms behind the garage, that were reached through a door at the far end of the long hallway. I think the rooms were basically the width of the sun porch, which ran along the rest of the house. He had some small furniture, dressers and shelves, along the wall on the left, and on the right was a closet, covered by curtains I think. Beyond that were one or two deep narrow bookcases, four or five feet high, made of very stiff gray unfinished wood. They were homemade. The wood had a very rough appearance, and I think was taken from old crates. Then the next room was the bedroom, very small, with the bed on the right. Beyond that was a bathroom.

He was called Doc because his parents had named him after the doctor that delivered him. He usually signed his name J.D. Rice, though.

The farm had a lot of people that worked there, at least sometimes, but there was one person who had his own house. He was a little old man named Charley Roe, and he had been with them at the other farm, too. His house was very small, and was not far from the fence that separated the yard from the chicken houses. Outside, in the front, it had a small rectangular area in front of it, that a short concrete walk went through to the door. The small rectangular area had very dark dirt and was damp, and was covered with low moss, like a carpet. He also had a tall barrel near the door that had dirt in it, and larger moss, that looked like an odd tangle of short fleshy growths with little flowers.

Inside, the house was basically divided into two rooms I think. The first one had an iron stove with four iron lids where the burners would be, and I think some kind of oven low on it, but it also had a big door on the front where wood or coal had to be put in. I'm not sure if he had any other source of heat, though it's possible he may have. The room had other furniture in it, a small table and one or more chairs, and probably some small shelves on the wall, perhaps even some cupboards, I'm not sure. I don't remember anymore whether he had his bed in there or in the other room. My mother didn't want us to go in the other room, she said that it was more private. I only got some glances at it. It seemed to have a lot of stuff stored in there.

The chicken yard had a large building where the baby chickens, that we called baby chicks, were kept at certain times of the year. The building was near the corner of the fences, a little way on the other side of the fences from the yard. It had a large room at the front, and another one that seemed to be mostly where some things were stored. When the building had baby chicks in it, they covered almost the whole floor of the first room. They were tiny fluffy things, and were constantly cheeping. If any of them got hurt, got pecked and got any blood on it, it had to be taken away from the others or they would kill it. It was because they instinctively pecked at small dots.

Across a dirt area, in the direction of town, was a chicken house where the adult chickens were. It was much smaller, and was made of boards that had gaps in them, so some air and light got in. Even so, it was fairly dim inside. My grandmother took us in there sometimes while she gathered the eggs. The inside had shelves along the walls where the chickens had their nests, with tiny wooden walls making separate areas on the shelves. She tried to explain to us how to gather the eggs. Apparently you had to just reach in there under the chicken, while trying not to upset it, because it might peck, while being careful not to break the eggs. I was too scared of the chickens to be any good at it, though, and I'm not sure if I ever gathered any of the eggs. I remember I tried to slowly put my hand under a chicken a few times, but the chicken would be jerkily moving its head around and back and forth, clucking and sometimes squawking, and I would get scared and pull my hand back. My grandmother would just reach right in though, even feel around under it to make sure she got any eggs that might be there.

The chicken yard frequently had a lot of chickens out in it, pecking at the dirt, looking for food. My grandmother would go in there with a basket or bowl of corn kernels, and would take handfuls out as she walked along, and throw it out in a bit of a sweeping motion, spreading it on the dirt.

It was interesting to watch the chickens, but I was a little afraid of them. Sometimes some of them would start to come toward me, which was scary. Sometimes one would even fly for a little bit, close to the ground, which was a lot scarier, and sometimes one of them would even manage to make it to the top of a fence post, and sometimes a few would get out of the chicken yard.

One time when I was little I was taken out to the barn and shown it. The opening to the barn was on the side away from the house. My grandfather was there, a little ways into the barn, and a lot of other people were in it, with things like shovels or pitchforks. I was told that it was being cleaned, and not to come in, I might step in something. I stood there while my mother talked to my grandfather for a while. The barn was very dim inside, made more so by my being out in the sun, but even after standing there for several minutes it didn't seem to improve. I could barely see anything. Just the dim shapes of the men and their tools, and what looked like a lot of straw on the ground. The rest was just vagueness, dark shapes in the dimness. After we had moved on a little, off to the side some, I told my mother that it was too dark in there, and I couldn't see anything. She was surprised, and said she hadn't had any trouble seeing.

Beside the barn, on the side away from town, on the ground by itself, was a small circular wooden cover, very old looking. I was told it was a cover for an old well that wasn't used anymore, and it was emphasized that I was not to step on it, because they didn't know how strong it was and it might give way and I would fall into the well and get killed. I stared at it while my mother talked to my grandfather some more. He was out beside the barn with us, and a few other people were around too, doing things. This might have been during the same visit to the barn, or it might have been during a different one.

Toward Charley's house was a strange old tree, that curved off into two massive trunks at a point perhaps a couple of feet above the ground. The bark was very dark on it, and thick. Something had happened to the trunk on the side toward the house, when I was very little I think, and it had to be cut off. It still stuck out quite a ways, perhaps three feet or so. The trunk on the other side, toward Charley's house, had several big branches, with a lower one with a porch swing on it. My brother and I used to sit in it sometimes, and sometimes my grandmother sat in it too. I remember her sitting there with big baskets of food that she was working on. She showed us how to shell peas and let us help her, and she also let us help her snap green beans. My mother may have joined in sometimes, too, and I think a time or two she worked on the vegetables without my grandmother.

Sometime in the early to mid 1960s the branch that held the swing split, while we were in the swing. It sagged quite a bit, and the branch still sagged some even when we got up. We didn't use the swing too much after that. Though the branch still held it up, it sagged so much and was so flexible now that it was too worrisome to sit in the swing for long, and especially to actually swing in it.

A few very small buildings, huts basically, were in the area on the other side of the gravel driveway, between it and the fence. One was a meat or smoke house, though I may be getting this wrong, and they may have been two different buildings. The dog house was also in this area, a fair distance from the house.

One or more other building were out in the pasture, about barn-sized, but not as far out as the barn. They were somewhat barn-like in appearance, with rough wooden exteriors. I think one or more old cars were there, some perhaps inside and some outside, and I think the tractors were kept there, too. A long machine was there, outside the buildings, that took kernels off corn cobs. I was shown how it worked. It took the corn cobs in very quickly, with a large grinding noise, putting the hard, separated kernels in some sort of bin and shooting the cobs out the other end. It was kind of scary and intimidating to see it work. Various other tools and equipment were also there. This may have also been the area where the large circular grinding stone was kept. If so, the buildings were fairly close to the fence, not far from the chicken houses.

The farm had three ponds. Two were normal in shape, more or less round, but one was small and shallow, and very elongated on the side toward town, finally petering out in a series of very long, very large connected puddles. This pond was near the fence that ran by the chicken area, on the other side of the fence from the farmhouse, and was so long it almost went all the way to the long gate.

Another pond was nearby, on the other side of the dirt road to the pasture, and on the house side of the fence, but enclosed in its own fence, with its own gate. Uncle Doc had built a small dock out of bricks on the shore near the gate, that went out into the water a little ways. In the 1960s, we fished in it sometimes, particularly one year in the mid '60s where I caught a lot. My grandmother cooked them for me, preparing them and breading and frying them in a pan, but I was reluctant to actually eat them, and I'm not sure I ate any.

The pond also had frogs in it. Many times in the 1960s, I would lay in bed, waiting for sleep, listening to them croak.

There was also what was apparently a well at the end of the first pond, within its own fence. There seemed to be a platform with some equipment there, maybe a pump. I'm not sure if it was actually the well we got water from, though I don't know of any others that might have been used. It should be noted that although it was right next to the pond, it did not get its water from the pond, although I used to think so. It had a shaft that went into the earth (though I never saw it, and to the best of my knowledge never actually went into the enclosure).

The well-water had an odd flavor. It was noticeable, but it didn't used to bother me too much. One time in the 1960s, though, it tasted so bad I could hardly bring myself to drink it. Even when made into iced tea it tasted bad. It was its regular taste, but amplified enormously. My mother was concerned about how it tasted to me and the trouble I had drinking it, but didn't seem to notice anything wrong with it herself. She said it was just the well-water, and after the iced tea tasted bad didn't have any other solutions.

The last pond was out in the pasture, probably over halfway to the barn. it was roughly circular, maybe even slightly square. It was a little ways off from the dirt road, but not too much, on the side away from town. The side of the pond toward the road was level with the ground, but the other side had a broad raised flat mound running along it, to hold the water in, because the ground fell away some on that side. Charley went into it sometimes, though I only saw him once or twice. The fish tended to want to bite some when he did. My father went in one time, gradually walking further out into the water, the water eventually getting up around his waist. He said a few times that something was biting him, and finally walked back out of it. I had been hoping to get to go in too, while at the same time being a little afraid of it, because the bottom would be uneven and it had actual live things in it, which might try to bite or eat me, and because it didn't really look very clean. I definitely wasn't going to go in it if something was actually biting, though I still felt some longing to do so.

One time I also saw a group of horses out there in a dirt area by the pond, on the end toward the barn, taking a dirt bath by laying down and rolling back and forth over the dirt, then twisting their bodies and getting back to their feet. I had gone out there with my brother and mother and maybe grandmother. We were taking a walk out to the pasture, which was basically almost everything out there, and just happened to come across them. Most of them were either finishing up or almost finished, and as we got closer they galloped away.

There were also some horses way out in the pasture, on the side toward town, in their own large fenced area. One of them was Old Tony, that my mother knew from when she was a girl. He would come up to the fence when he saw us coming, and my mother would pet and talk to him, and we pulled up some grass and fed it to him. It was a little scary to have him take the bunch of grass from my hand and eat it, because he was so big and his mouth was so powerful.

The farm had sheep and cattle too, and cows and few bulls. I would sometimes see some of them, usually from a distance. The sheep tended to be in compact herds, at least when I saw them. The others tended to be more separated.

There was a large salt lick for the animals, out in the pasture. I was told they liked to lick it. I never tried to do it myself. My mother even cautioned against it, saying the horses and cattle and other animals would have licked it and it was all dirty. I could see how that would be the case, but still I was curious, and a little saddened that I couldn't taste it to see what it was like. I even asked about the back side of it, that didn't appear to have had much usage, but she didn't want me to lick that either. I didn't really want to anyway, because I didn't really trust it; I could never know whether a place had been licked or not, even if it appeared to have not been worn away any. It was just a forlorn hope.

On rare occasions I sometimes saw a very tasty looking red clover, out among the grass and the regular clover. It was vaguely strawberry shaped, point upward, and looked something like the pulp of an orange, but red colored, and dry, more feathery in nature. I had a very strong urge to eat it, but I never did. Besides the concern about it not being washed, I didn't know how safe it would be, and wondered if might be poisonous to people, even if cattle ate it.

Continued in Part 3.

The house on the highway, Part 1
The house on the highway, Part 2
The house on the highway, Part 3
The house on the highway, Part 4
The house on the highway, Part 5

The house on the highway, Part 3

2011-02-28T23:23:00.019-07:00

One time when I was very little, and we were in the living room-dining room area of the house, my brother and I were given beagle puppies as gifts. Mine came right at me, putting its front paws up on me and trying desperately to lick me, while I drew my face back. My mother was a few feet in front of me, leaning down and grinning. I could see the other dog going after my brother, and him looking uncertain. He was pretty little, still wearing a diaper. He was pulling himself to his feet, leaning on something for support. He was turned away from the dog but his head was partly turned back, looking more toward me and our mother than at the dog. My mother later said the dog kept trying to lick his wet diaper. They decided that we were really too young for the dogs, and after a while they were kept in a dog house on the other side of the gravel driveway, off to the side quite a bit, in the direction of town.

Sometime in the 1960s, my parents got a small horse for us, and we took it to the farm in the car. It stood there, on the floor in front of the back seat. We tried to talk to it and keep it calm, if I remember correctly. My father tried to teach my brother and me to ride, but it was a slow process, eventually abandoned. We had to take turns, too, with just one of us being on the horse at a time. I remember one time, out in the pasture, at night, my brother was sitting on the horse and my father was talking to him and trying to hold the horse steady. I was standing a ways off behind them, watching, feeling kind of bored since I had nothing to do at the moment. I had already been on the horse for a while myself, I think, but now I had nothing to do but wait. All of a sudden the horse took off running, and my father was standing there, holding my brother in the air by the back of his pants. It was a strange sight, surprising and amusing, especially when talked about later. I marvelled some, too, that my father was strong enough to do that, to hold my brother out there like that with one hand, like my brother was a toy. I'm not sure what became of the horse, or whether we eventually got it back or not. That may have been the last attempt at riding it.

My grandparents had a very large metal barrel out near the fence, on the town side of the path to the chicken house, on our side of the fence, in a mostly barren area, where they burned trash. I watched them do it sometimes. The adults would stand around and talk to each other, and keep an eye on it. One time there was a large plastic tub, wider than it was tall, that used to contain ice cream. It was a cloudy plastic, partly transparent, and may have been a half gallon, though it seems bigger than that, perhaps even a gallon. I kept an eye on it, being intensely curious about what would happen. It wasn't made of anything normal, like wood or paper, and I couldn't imagine what would happen to it. Would it even burn? I watched the fire get closer to it, and burn things behind it and then beside it, but still nothing was happening to it. It just stayed as it was. Then, all of a sudden, it it seemed to collapse in on itself, going in from the sides, folding over into a much smaller thing, full of rounded folds and wrinkles, then collapsing still more and turning darker, finally catching fire. I had no idea it would act like that, but now I knew. It was fascinating. I remarked on it to my mother, I think, and maybe to one of the men, too.

Another time, years later, the fire was left unattended. The adults, which would have included my mother and father and grandmother, and maybe Charley, went back to the house. I was still out in the area with my brother, though, playing. It may have been the early to mid 1960s. The fire got out of the barrel, drifting up and out on one or more burning pieces, and started burning the sparse grass. I discussed it with my brother. The fire was slowly making its way toward the building where sometimes baby chicks were kept. I didn't know if the fire would end there, when it ran out of grass, or might possibly catch the building on fire. I was nervously arguing that maybe it was alright, that maybe they intended for it to happen and didn't care, that nothing bad was going to happen, but my brother thought differently, and kept saying that we should tell someone. I think we had stomped on part of it, that had been going the other direction, putting a lot of it on that side out. I didn't want to believe that the adults would have created a situation where something bad might happen, and that it would be left to us, the kids, to save the day. I finally went back to the house and nervously told them, that the fire had gotten out of the barrel, drifted out on the wind, and was burning the grass and was heading for the chicken house. They were very surprised, and I had to repeat it a time or two. Then we all went back out to the area. My brother was still stamping at it, and maybe hitting it with something. The fire had died down some as it approached the chicken house, but was still slowly heading for it. They quickly went to work and put it out.

A bread truck used to come by sometimes, perhaps every week or so, and my grandmother would look at what he had, while the driver talked to her. He brought in a display of the items in a bunch of shelves on something on wheels. It didn't seem like a cart, it was more of a display case. One time I saw that he had a strange cake. I was fascinated by it, I had never had anything like it. I was told it was a coconut cake. The cake was finally bought, by either my grandmother or mother, and I was served a piece. I was too worried by the strangeness of it to eat much of the icing, though.

We sometimes had ice cream too, that my mother bought at the store. Back in those days we generally just had one flavor, chocolate I think. One day my mother brought home a different flavor, vanilla I think. I was baffled and very suspicious of it. My mother kept insisting it was ice cream, just a different flavor. It didn't look like ice cream to me. I finally tried it though, and it was very good. It's possible I could have the flavors reversed, but I don't think so.

The house had a party line phone, which meant that the phone number was shared with several neighbors, and each neighbor had a distinctive ring. When the phone would ring, the adults would listen to see if it was for this house. I was told what our ring was, but I never learned it, it seemed too hard, and I was too afraid of getting it wrong. It was possible to listen in to a neighbor's call if you picked up the phone, but you weren't supposed to, and I never did. It was also possible to pick up the phone to call someone, and find it already in use. In that case you had to hang up and try again later, or ask the people using it to hang up so you could make a call.

We were told to stay away from the phone during a storm. They knew of someone whose phone was hit by lightning and it blew it off the wall.

It rained, and stormed, in Missouri a lot. I was told that if the farmers didn't get rain for two weeks, they considered it a drought. Sometimes it stormed very bad, with lots of thunder and lightning. The thunder was very loud, with tremendous sharp crashes that would shake the house. We sometimes also worried about tornadoes.

One time in the mid 1960s my brother and I tried to grow a plant from a potato chunk. My grandmother helped us set it up. After a few days it was doing very well, and eventually had a nice sized plant. We decided to try to color the leaves and stems then. We had heard that putting ink or maybe food colors, or something like that, in the water would cause it to be taken up by the plant and make the plant partly that color. Unfortunately we used the wrong thing, and put water colors or maybe even some tempera paint in the water. Evidently it was too thick and clogged the plant's veins, and it wilted and died, even though I tried putting different water in it at one point.

My brother and I sometimes played hide and seek. Sometimes we played outside, among the bushes in the area toward the fence that had the chickens on the other side. A lot of times we played inside, though, hiding in different areas of the house. We were still doing it when our sister was old enough to play with us, in the mid 1960s. One time I hid in the small, square closet of the bedroom that was near the kitchen (the closet was on the side toward the kitchen, too), and pulled clothes and towels and washcloths out of the shelves and drawers there until they completely covered me and lay in a jumbled mess all around me. They looked in a few times, not seeing me. They looked all over the house for me, and finally came back to the closet, and stood there looking in at the mess, talking with each other. My brother finally said that he couldn't imagine anyone being under that. They finally moved off, still discussing me and where I might be. I could hear my mother sometimes talking too. My brother said they couldn't find me. He didn't know where I went, but I didn't seem to be in the house. I finally got out and went to them, and explained where I had been.

Sometimes they took me out walking in the fields, in the paths that ran by them, and I saw the plants growing. Some of the plants were things like turnips or radishes, and my grandfather or another person would temporarily move some of the dirt away to see how they were doing. Sometimes a lot of men were quickly working at harvesting them, going along the rows, pulling turnips out of the ground, maybe sometimes potatoes too. One time they let me do it for a while, and I found it was very hard to pull the turnips out. I was very little, but I felt I should be strong enough, but it felt very hard to do, and I was much slower than the men at it. The men were so fast it was shocking, almost scary. I didn't do it for very long. I felt I should be strong enough, even though I knew I was just a little kid, and it bothered me that they could do it so easily, and it was so hard for me.

One time, when I was walking out in the fields with my father, we walked for a long time, and we came to an area where we were going through heavy mud, because it had rained earlier. I guess the ground in the other areas was stiffer, and maybe in some places had some grass, so it wasn't too bad to walk through. Here, though, I left big footprints, and the mud clung to my shoes, probably rubber galoshes, and then more mud clung over that, while the mud on the ground sucked at my feet when I tried to lift them out. It got harder and harder. I was very little, and it was very tiring, and I fell further and further behind. My father kept on walking, while talking to me some. Finally he stopped and turned around, quite a ways ahead of me, and looked back at me where I stood glued to the ground. He said something about the mud being heavy, wasn't it, and walked back to me. I think he may have picked me up and carried me for a while after that.

One time my grandmother made a picnic, and she took us in the pasture, down the dirt road and then to the left of the barn. We came to a tree with branches that spread out particularly in one direction, the direction away from town, and roots that spread out that way, too. My grandmother put a sheet on the ground and we had the picnic there, under the branches. A little ways off I could see an animal path, a narrow irregular trail worn through the grass, that I think the sheep had made, that led off in the direction away from town. It felt very pleasant out there.

In the mid 1960s, when we stayed there at the farm again, I used to take long walks on the uneven dirt road that led out to the barn. Sometimes it was very cold, with the wind blowing strongly in my face, so cold and hard it hurt my skin. One time I turned around and tried walking backwards for a little while, a few feet, but it was awkward and I was still cold, so I gave it up and started walking normally again. There wasn't a lot to do on the farm, and the walk helped to keep me occupied for a while.

In the walk, I tended to go out to the barn, sometimes around it maybe, then head away from town, going past the tree where we had had the picnic, near the animal path, sometimes maybe even along it for a while, going out far, to where a barbed wire fence finally crossed the area, then going along the fence back in the direction of the highway.

I finally found at the corner of the fence, where a section of land rose just before the corner and then dipped down on a small slope, a place there on the slope where some moss was growing. I had read that moss grew on the north side of a slope, and had been looking for an example of it. I guessed that the slope must face north, since it had moss on it, though I had no independent verification for it. On the raised area I also one time found something else I had been looking for. I had read about a type of fungus that looked something like a small irregular dark rock, even kind of spongy looking, and finally saw such a thing there. If it was stepped on, a cloud of spores was supposed to be released. I stared at it for a while. If it was the fungus, I wasn't sure it was a good idea to release the spores. I also didn't want to badly damage it or kill it, just to check to see what it was.

I finally went ahead and stepped on it. I had to know if it was the fungus, and not something else. It squashed almost flat, like stepping on a sponge, and a dark cloud came from it. I quickly moved away, trying not to breathe, unsure of whether the spores were harmful. The book hadn't said anything about whether they were or not. The fungus seemed to mostly restore its shape when I took my foot off, so maybe I hadn't damaged it too bad. I left the area quickly, though, and worried about the spores for a long time afterward.

One time in the mid 1960s, in the winter when the pond had ice on it, my brother and I walked around it looking at it, and walked on the ice, keeping fairly close to the edge, where it was shallow and where we could presumably get out if the ice broke. The ice really was not thick enough. It had lots of cracks, basically where it was actually split but still jammed together, and it creaked and moved and even shifted some while we walked over it, all around the pond, within a few feet of the shore. It was slippery, too, and one or both of us fell down on it. I'm pretty sure that I did, but I'm not sure that he did. Our mother had strongly warned us not to get on the ice, that it might break and we might fall in and get killed. I was talking about it when I got back, including walking on the ice near the edge of it. She looked at me horrified, and was warning us again, and saying you didn't go on the ice did you? Even though I had just said that we did, she didn't seem to want to believe it, too horrified at the thought. This was the first pond, because it was in the area where the house was, whereas the rest of the ponds were not.

Sometimes in the summer the adults would set off firecrackers, sometimes putting them under cans and then running away. A few times they were also put in holes in the old stump that was at the side of the tree that had the swing. The explosions would blow off pieces of wood, usually not very much, though. My brother and I got to set off some of the firecrackers ourselves when we were older, in the 1960s.

Sometimes they had other types of fireworks, too, including things on little sticks that shot up into the sky. We also had sparklers, that we could wave around making patterns in the air, and little things that when lit slowly grew into little worm-like things that twisted and moved, and cherry bombs that we could make explode by throwing them hard at the ground.

When my brother and I first rode bicycles, we used training wheels. Eventually, when we were older, we tried to learn to ride without them. Our father helped us sometimes, holding the bicycle and then pushing it along to get it going. When it was going at a fair rate of speed it was easy to keep it upright, but when it was going slower it was more difficult, and I found it almost impossible to actually start it going. He had removed the top bar from the frame, making it easier to get on it, but I still found it very difficult to ride unassisted.

We sometimes used the slope beside the farm house to practice. The bicycle would get rolling fast fairly quickly, so the awkward early part didn't last long. However the rest was also a bit awkward, as we were going over lumpy grass and slightly uneven ground, and were going pretty fast pretty quickly. It was difficult to control it under those conditions, and I had to keep looking at the ground to avoid the worst areas, then had to stop before hitting the wire fence, or without hitting it too hard. Stopping meant putting my legs down and walking it to a stop.

One time, I was paying too much attention to the ground, and ran into one of the trees, hitting the handlebar and my knuckles on it, which hurt. I had seen it at the last minute, but was unable to avoid it. The grassy slope was too uncertain for me to feel safe making sharp turns on, and I wasn't sure I could do it and still maintain my balance.

The line of trees there, widely separated, were of at least two types, maybe more. I don't know what types they were, though I remember being told what some of them were. One time I found a rotten acorn on the slope, so I guess at least one of them was an oak. At least two of them, I think, had odd twisted little pods for seeds, which corkscrewed through the air as they fell, landing farther from the tree than they otherwise would have done.

One time, when there was a lot of snow on the ground, we made a huge snow fort, with the help of the adults, including my father. We used Uncle Doc's crutches from the garage for supports. He used them when he was recovering from the stroke he got back when he was 70, but he hadn't needed them for a long time. We were finishing it up when it got to be time to go in for supper. We talked about how we could go out and play in it the next day, and what we might do. Somehow we didn't, though, and spent most of the day inside. I'm not sure we ever did anything with it again, though it weighed on my mind.

We also had a small log fort that was out in one of the pastures, on the side toward town. It was built one summer in the early 1960s, again with help from the adults, including I think farm hands in this case. Unlike the snow fort, the log fort was very low. The next year when we went back, we were told not to go in it, that it might have snakes. Sometimes when I was in that pasture, I looked wistfully at it, from a distance, at it out there in the grass, partly overgrown by it. I could sometimes see a farmhand riding a machine harvesting, or at least cutting down, whatever was growing in the pasture, but of course he couldn't do it where the logs were, so the grass there didn't get cut.

A neighbor on the town side was a woman farmer. Her name was Pauline. Sometimes when we were out walking in the fields, she would come over and talk to who was with us, generally my mother and/or grandmother; sometimes someone else was there too, or instead, and sometimes she talked a little to my brother and me. She was somewhat heavyset and always wore overalls, and always seemed cheerful. Later, when we were back in Arizona, she sent us a book about art, showing things famous artists had done (my brother and I were interested in art). She also sent us a very large decorated stein, with a forest scene.

Sometimes my grandmother would make doughnuts, and we would help her. She would make the dough and then roll it out, sprinkling flour on it to keep it from sticking. She would use drinking glasses to cut the doughnuts out with, and then clean ketchup bottles to cut the holes out with (ketchup bottles were made of glass in those days). She would show us how to do it and we would then try it. The ends of the glasses and ketchup bottles had to be spun in the flour on the table, or the dough would start sticking to them and not want to come out. This was particularly awkward with the ketchup bottles, as the doughnut hole was much harder to get out if it got stuck, particularly if three or more were in there. Then she would fry the doughnuts in a frying pan, with lots of white Crisco. They were very good.

She also made candy sometimes, with Hershey's Cocoa. After cooking, it was poured onto plates which had been heavily greased with margarine, and then it had to cool. It was very soft when still warm, but got harder as it cooled, finally getting very hard, especially after a day or two. It was very good, and I wanted to keep on eating it. It was hard to stop.

She also made pies, sometimes round ones and sometimes long rectangular cobblers. Cherry was the most frequent flavor, but she also sometimes did apple and I think even peach.

She liked to make doorstops, too, both round and rectangular. I think she used metal coffee cans or other food containers for the round ones, filling them with something for the weight, and sewing cloth around them. The rectangular ones I think were large wood blocks, pieces that had been cut from fence-post size wood, that she had covered with cloth.

In the 1960s she also made some yarns dolls for us, showing us how to do it. She would get a big bunch of yarn, cut a lot of strands to a particular length, around 12-14 inches, then fold it over. She would then tie off the top part for the head, then tie off strands for the arms, waist, and legs.

She also made toy horses for us to ride, with old stuffed socks for the heads and broomsticks for the body.

My grandmother had some ferns that she kept in the house. My mother talked about how when she was little she liked to slide her fingers along the stems, popping the leaves off. She showed us and we tried it. It was fun, with kind of an odd feeling when they just popped right off. I felt kind of guilty doing it, since it must have been damaging the plants. We did several strands, but then we were told to stop, because if we did too much it might kill the plants. I eventually went back, though, and popped the leaves off all the stems. I felt bad doing it, but it just seemed so fascinating that it was hard to stop. Afterward, my mother was saying, "Why did you do that? I told you not to. They're going to die now." I was hoping that maybe the ferns might grow some more leaves, but she said they wouldn't, that they would die. I still hoped that somehow they would live. I remember the ferns being there in the pots afterwards, for days, with just the green stems, but I don't remember them getting more leaves.

Much, much later, in Arizona, I bought several plants for my grandmother's yard, and over time filled up her house with artificial plants, most of them silk flowers, given to her for Christmas and Mother's Day and her birthday. They were everywhere, in an explosion of color. A person who saw them remarked that someone must love her very much.

Her name was Lola Pearl Rice, and she sometimes said that she was an Albert, and talked about her family, and them moving to Missouri from Iowa.

I called her Mom, instead of Grandma, because Mom is what my mother called her. My mother tried and tried to get me to stop, giving me one arguement after another, but I refused, insisting that she called her Mom, so that was what I was going to call her. My mother said that she called her that because she was her mother, but she was my grandmother. She said that I didn't call her father Daddy. Of course I didn't, Daddy was my father. Mom, however, was Mom. She could not convince me otherwise.

My grandmother was Mom, but my mother was Mommy, so there was no confusion in the names. And so it remained that way, forever.

One time, after she had moved to Arizona, near us, she told me that the neighborhood children called her Grandma Rice. So she did eventually get called Grandma after all, even if not by her grandchildren.

In the 1960s, when we would stay there at the farm for a month at the end of the summer, and then when we moved back for a while in the mid 1960s, I spent a lot of time reading books that I found there. I read some fairy tale books and children's stories, and also some old books my mother had had when she was young, including school books, and some Nancy Drew and Kay Tracey books. I liked Kay Tracey a lot more than Nancy Drew. My favorite Kay Tracey book was "Beneath the Crimson Brier Bush."

My mother showed us some of her old dolls, too. One was a fairly large one, that closed its eyes when laid down. When its eyes were open, though, they had a disturbing feature. My mother already knew about it, and was smiling and telling us to look at the eyes. The eyes seemed to be looking at you no matter where you were, like they were following you around. They didn't actually move, it was an illusion caused by how they were made. The colored part was somewhat sparkling and was dished, with clear plastic or glass over it. It was kind of creepy to feel like the doll was watching you.

She also had some old teddy bears, that were very stiff, and had movable arms and legs, like regular dolls.

There were a lot of little figures of various kinds in the square closet of the bedroom by the kitchen, a lot of them very old. There were more of them back on the upper shelves of the short hallway with the red curtain. Some of them may have been ceramic elves, but most of them were other things, some of them Oriental, and even some native girls. Some seemed related to movies or cartoons. One figure was a very odd Donald Duck. It had the traditional sailor cap and coat, but it had a small head with a long narrow bill. The head sat on a too-long skinny neck, with a big round stomach under it.

I never played with the little figures. We were cautioned not to, we were just to look at them. They seemed very strange to me, anyway. Most of them didn't look like toys, and those that might have been, looked like they were so old they weren't really toys anymore, just keepsakes.

We had a lot of toys of our own, though. When I was little, I used to play a lot with jigsaw puzzles. They were wooden with large pieces, and I would put them together over and over again. One of them had a big rabbit in the lower portion of it. Another one was of the United States, back when it had 48 states, and there were other puzzles. I had several. I kept them in a box, I think. When I got older, I was given puzzles with more pieces, but I still did the old ones, too. My mother used to help me, and we would talk about the puzzles and what was in them.

I had lots of other toys too, including wooden blocks, Lincoln Logs, white plastic Block City Blocks, stuffed toys, various metal or wood toys, a large metal top that hummed when pumped with its twisted metal rod, and many other things. Later on I was given a large stuffed panda bear that I called Joe Bear. My brother was given a similar one, but a different color. We also had large stuffed dog toys with the legs out to the sides, that we liked to sit and lay on. We had lots of coloring books too, and I would spend a lot of time coloring them, sometimes with my mother helping me.

My mother would read to us a lot, at bedtime and other times. We had a lot of children's books, Little Golden Books, Tell-A-Tale books, and others. Sometimes my mother would play a game with us when she would say, "I am the giant, great and still, who sits upon the pillow hill." She later said that she did it when she was tired.

Continued in Part 4.

The house on the highway, Part 1
The house on the highway, Part 2
The house on the highway, Part 3
The house on the highway, Part 4
The house on the highway, Part 5

The house on the highway, Part 4

2011-02-28T23:21:00.006-07:00

At some point we moved to town, to a house on Morley. My father had it moved there from a different location, and a lot of work had to be done on it afterward. I remember we visited there one time while they were working on the kitchen, which was very small, just a set-off part of a much larger room, with a counter and cupboards and appliances. A man was on his knees in the kitchen laying pinkish brownish floor tiles, spreading out a sweep of grooved dark glue lines and then setting the tiles in it, working very fast.

One time on the farm my mother came to me and showed me some of my wooden puzzles. She said the workmen had gotten paint on them when they were working. She said it was an accident, though I also got the impression that they weren't overly concerned about it. She said there was nothing she could do to get it off. The paint was basically in globs, sometimes broad, over parts of the puzzles, like some had been slopped out and fell on them, though they also had some spatters and drips. I was saddened by it, but I realized that there was nothing I could do. I continued to play with them, though I was always bothered by it.

When we finally moved in, I went right to the cupboards in the kitchen, under the counter, and opened the doors to see if there was food in there. I had been very worried that there wouldn't be, or wouldn't be very much. I was very surprised to find that they were full of cans. I mentioned it to my mother, who had come up behind me and to the side. She said something like, "Yes, we have food," seeming to be gently amused by my concerns.

Years later, there was some confusion in my mind about how old I was when we moved in. For a long time I thought I was 4, but it eventually came to me that that couldn't be right, that too many years had passed there. It seems likely that I was 2, based both on my sense of a passage of a lot of years there and on how old my brother was at the time. When we moved there, I'm pretty sure he was still crawling. My mother disagreed, but I remember my father made a barrier across the stairs so that my brother couldn't go down them. It was just a board, something I could step over, but he couldn't because he was still crawling.

Another factor in this is that my father was on active duty in the Air Force until his discharge in June of 1956. If we moved then or shortly before, I still would have been 2 years old, though only a few months from 3. If we moved in late summer or early fall, I would have been 3. However, my brother would have been approaching a year and a half or even a little older, and should have been able to walk by that time. Maybe he did walk and just crawled on occasion. If I remember correctly, the board was down a little ways from the top of the stairs. My brother might have crawled when attempting to go down the stairs, and then been unable to get past the board. I remember being up there, though, and trying to herd him away from the stairs, while he gleefully tried to reach them, and I see him in my mind as crawling then. My mother was downstairs and told me to keep an eye on him, and keep him away from the stairs. However, I can also see him standing, holding onto something to his right for support, maybe the post by the stairs. It's hard to say if the memory is as early as the other one, though.

If we moved there a year earlier, or almost a year earlier, he would have definitely been crawling, and I would have been approaching 2 years old or maybe a little after 2. It wouldn't match my mother's memory of him being able to walk, though. The most likely explanation, I guess, is that my brother could walk, but sometimes crawled when presented with something difficult, such as the stairs. That would put my age at almost 3 or just barely 3.

A complication in this is that I also had to keep my brother, and years later my sister, away from the opening to the long hallway back on the farm. Sometimes the door was left open in the kitchen, and the drop-off to the hallway was a big step down, and they didn't want them crawling over it and falling down into the hallway. I would try to distract them and play with them, ultimately pushing them back, while they kept gleefully trying to crawl over to it. This sounds very much like what was happening with the stairs at the house in town, and it's possible I could have confused the images, but I don't think so.

We still went back to the farm often, to visit the people there, and usually had Sunday dinner there. I remember one time, maybe a two or three years after we had moved, going out in the rain to get into the car to go there.

On September 5, 1959, around 2:30 AM, my grandfather died, at the age of 85. I don't remember anything about it, just what I was told. My mother said he had been sick for a while, and the night he died the dogs kept trying to get into the house. She said that after he died, he kept coming back for a long time. She gave an exact number of days, but I don't remember what it was anymore. It might have been close to two weeks, maybe even close to three, or it could have been something like 12 days. She said she could hear his footsteps coming down the hall, and then he would stop and talk to her mother. She couldn't see him, but her mother could. And though she loved her father, she was afraid of him now, because he was a ghost, and she hid in her room. Each night she could hear his footsteps, though. She said that he talked to her mother for a long time each night, maybe for hours, I'm not sure. He finally said that he had to stop, though, that he couldn't come anymore, that he was only allowed that amount of time. He didn't come after that.

On July 9, 1960, around 9:00 PM, Uncle Doc died, at the age of 90. We had just been at the hospital visiting him. We had been there for quite a while. They were expecting him to get better, so I was told, and it was late at night, and we were finally going to leave now. He didn't want my mother to go, though, she told me later. Before we left, she asked if I wanted to see him. She cautioned me that he had a lot of tubes going into him, and not to be scared by it. She took me in to see him, but the light was so dim it was hard to really tell much, though she didn't seem to be having any trouble herself. I could see a small figure on the bed, under the sheets with the head and maybe arms showing, with some vague equipment around him, including a few tubes, but it was hard to tell where they went or even if they went to him. I couldn't even make out enough of his face to recognize him. I said something about not being able to see very well, but she acted surprised at it. I think I said something to him at her prompting, though I don't remember what now. I'm not sure he said anything back, maybe a muffled groan, but maybe not even that. I was a little scared, apprehensive, about being there in the room with him, maybe because it seemed so odd. Normally I got along well with him, but here I couldn't even recognize him.

We went home then, a long drive, because the hospital was in another town. My brother and I evidently slept part of the way. My mother said that she was talking to my father as he drove back, and that somewhere along the way she said to him, "Oh, there's a cloud that looks like Uncle Doc." Or, perhaps, "That's funny. There's a cloud that looks like Uncle Doc." Something like that. My father said that it meant that he had died. At least that's the best I can remember it, from what she said. When she got home the phone was ringing, and when she answered it she was told that he had died. I went to his funeral, but I still couldn't recognize him. I don't remember anything about my grandfather's funeral, and my mother said that my brother and I didn't go to it, she felt we were too young.

Sometime after the school year ended in 1960, we moved away. I didn't want to leave, but I understood we had to. My father had bronchitis, and his lungs couldn't take the cold and the dampness anymore. He was gone for a while, looking for a place for us to live. He finally came back one night, while I was sitting at a small table working on something, perhaps a puzzle or a game, or maybe even a drawing or coloring in a coloring book. My mother had gotten a phone call earlier and was expecting him. I stayed at the table, working, while my mother went to the door. I was glad he came back but I wanted to finish what I was doing first, before I went and talked to him. She opened the door, and I could feel the cool night air come in. She stood there, talking to him for a while, while I continued working. I hoped to get done while he was still at the door, but after a bit he came to me and stood there, on the other side of the table from me. After a pause he said, "Well. Aren't you glad to see me?" I continued to look down at what I was doing, and said yes, but I wanted to finish this first. I continued working, feeling somewhat guilty, and eventually got it finished and then went and stood near where they were talking, my father standing while my mother worked at something, a few feet away. He occasionally turned his head and looked at me, and eventually I did get to say something to him, briefly.

Initially we went to a house in California, and spent the summer there, or what was left of it. I remember that the salesman pointed out that the house, on the back yard side, had an outside door to the bathroom, so kids didn't have to run through the house tracking dirt on the floor to get to it. I also remember that I was greatly dismayed when I walked out into the back yard in my bare feet, with the dry stiff grass poking them like little spikes. The grass out here was certainly different, not soft at all. There was some kind a decorative pool out in the back yard too, something built with a low circular wall of gray bricks or blocks, with a gray concrete bottom. I'm not sure it actually contained water, though we may have filled it sometimes. For years it felt like we only stayed there for two weeks, though I was corrected decades later, even by my younger brother, that it was all summer. It seems likely that we moved sometime after Uncle Doc died, though, so we may have just stayed there for a month or so.

Before school started, for second grade, we moved to Las Cruces, New Mexico, eventually to two houses there, but we moved again before the end of the school year. I finished second grade in Phoenix, and we ended up moving to a second house there, too, and then eventually to Scottsdale, right before third grade started.

We usually went back to Missouri, to the house on the highway, for a month late in the summer. We would drive out there, generally in two cars I think, and then my father would drive back to Arizona. Before school started he would drive back to Missouri to get us, and then we would all go back to Arizona. It was a very long trip, around 1400 miles one way, if I remember correctly. I think we generally took three days to do it.

One summer we didn't go back. The previous summer Charley was upset, and told my mother that he wasn't going to see her again. She tried to reassure him that he would, but he still didn't think so. The year after the summer we didn't go back, on February 2, 1965, he died, at the age of 80. We went back for the funeral. My mother cried a lot at it. He didn't look the same to me as he lay there. He just looked like a little old man, in a generic sense, and not like the one I knew. I knew it was him, though, and I was sad, with tears in my eyes sometimes. It somehow felt like he wasn't really there, though, that it wasn't really him, even if it was his body.

I tried to comfort my mother, but she spent a lot of time crying, and there didn't seem to be anything I could really do. Time stretched on. Sometimes people talked to each other, and sometimes more people came in. Most of the people looked old, though not all. It seemed to be taking a very long time, with nothing really happening, but I was still just a kid. They were probably waiting for everyone to arrive, before they started giving the speeches, although they may have had a scheduled time for it. The small room was filled fairly well, a lot of people came to the funeral. My mother later said that he would have been proud to know so many people came.

We moved back to Missouri in late 1965, and stayed with my grandmother in the house on the highway. We thought my father's lungs had healed enough, but it eventually turned out not to be so.

We stayed there at the farm for several months, though we eventually moved to a place in town, an old two story house with a lot of problems, in a residential neighborhood, with streets paved with bricks. In the winter, there was sometimes snow on the ground, and my brother and I sometimes went sledding down a steep snow covered street, along with to some extent my sister, though she was still pretty little. In warmer weather, I planted some marigolds in the remains of an old stump, that was on our front lawn, out near the road. I recently saw where my mother wrote that I had planted moss there. I don't remember it, but perhaps I planted some with the marigolds, some of the large moss like Charley had had in the barrel.

The trees in the neighborhood had lots of squirrels in them, up on the branches chattering and eating, and sometimes running in little spurts on the lawns. Occasionally one would get hit by a car, and its remains would stay there on the bricks of the roads for a while.

It was evident during the winter that my father was not going to be able to stay there, but we didn't move away until the middle of the summer. I remember on the last day, being back at the farm again, as we were getting things ready to leave. The weather had a somewhat threatening feel, as if it might storm again. There were a lot of clouds, broad, somewhat banded I think, and below them small, low, gray flat-bottomed clouds raced along, going in the direction away from town, looking astoundingly three-dimensional, almost solid. The air felt a little damp, though not as damp as sometimes, and alive, though not as alive as it had sometimes been. The aliveness would disappear in Arizona, along with the dampness, along with the 3-D clouds, and along with the explosion of greenery that was everywhere. My mother hated Arizona, but it felt more like home to me now.

Continued in Part 5.

The house on the highway, Part 1
The house on the highway, Part 2
The house on the highway, Part 3
The house on the highway, Part 4
The house on the highway, Part 5

The house on the highway, Part 5

2011-02-28T23:19:00.007-07:00

My grandmother came out to Arizona around 1967, eventually buying the house we lived in at the time. We moved to a different house in the same neighborhood, then moved again to another one, still not very far away from my grandmother.

In 1972, we took a trip back to Missouri to the town we used to live in, driving there in a new Chevrolet van, green with a white top, that replaced our 1964 Chevrolet station wagon. Unfortunately it was not as car-like as hoped, and my mother hated it. We stayed in Missouri for several days, at a motel a little ways from town. When we went and looked at the farm house, from the road, slowly driving by it, we found that the place was neglected, and the hedge had grown up into trees.

Within a few months of returning to Arizona, we got a 1973 Oldsmobile Custom Cruiser, light blue with a white top. It was a very large, luxurious station wagon, with a tailgate that electrically slid under the floor and a back window that electrically slid up into the roof. My mother loved that car.

On December 15, 1984, my grandmother died at the age of 90. After a funeral here, my mother took a trip back to Missouri, for a funeral for her there also. My grandmother was buried there, in Missouri, in a place that had already been prepared for her. I just attended the first funeral, in Arizona. My grandmother lay there in the casket, with too much wax and too much makeup on, looking only a little like herself. I felt she wasn't really there, though, that she had left, and this was just what was left behind, almost like a doll, something that wasn't really her anymore. I cried a lot at the funeral, though. I cried a lot.

My mother and brother, and some others too perhaps, flew back to Missouri for the second funeral. The funeral was held a little too quickly though, too soon for a lot of people to find out about it. A lot of people later said they would have gone, if they had known about it in time.

Perhaps some weeks later, I was coming into the house through the carport door, and saw my mother sitting at the kitchen table, her back to me. My grandmother was sitting in a chair beside her, sideways to her, wearing one of her purple dresses, a small peaceful smile on her face. I paused there in the doorway, stunned. I think I blinked and shook my head a bit, and suddenly my grandmother was gone, in her place a large, but much smaller, plastic doll wearing a small purple dress. I remarked on it to my mother, telling her what I had seen. Then, or a few days later, she told me that other people had seen her there too, and maybe she should move the doll. My mother later told me, decades later, though I think she might have briefly said something at the time, that she had seen her out in the backyard, looking at things.

In October of 1997, my mother took another trip back to Missouri with my brother, again by plane. He had offered to take her, and initially she had thought she wouldn't go, but then felt that this might be her last chance. She got to visit with some old friends, and my brother drove her to the area of the first farm, the one she had grown up on. The coal company had dug up the whole area long ago, long before we moved away, and had torn the houses down, leaving just a chimney standing. They never found any coal, though, and went out of business. The whole area had been restored since then, and now looked normal, and my mother could even recognize some areas.

The house on the highway, three miles from town, turned out to be a surprise, though. They found that it had been destroyed, perhaps by a tornado. One had gone through the downtown area, only a few miles away, on July 4, 1995. Perhaps it was that one, or another, or even something else. However it was done, it was completely gone, just boards laying over and in the basement. My mother and brother could see past the boards into the basement, and some of the old equipment and things were still down there. It looked too dangerous to try to get down there though, so she brought back a board wrapped in paper. It was a thin flat board, perhaps four feet or so long, with part of the edges split off. We never unwrapped it, except for perhaps a very small place, but I plan to some day.

She never made it back to Missouri again. My mother's health declined, and it became impossible for her to travel long distances. She was sometimes in the hospital every few months, and had several close calls. Nevertheless, there were times when she felt better, and we continued to hope for the future. She was usually able to get up and do things, but as time passed this became more difficult for her, though she still tried.

One time at my sister's house, probably sometime in the last two or three years, my mother saw her mother, my grandmother, again. My grandmother brought her pink roses, and told her that she couldn't visit her as often now, because she, my grandmother, was going to the next level. I arrived at the house after it happened, but everyone was talking about it. My mother was in the living room by then, but they showed me the area by the kitchen table where it happened, and where the roses were left. Looking at it, I could see an odd pinkness there, in the whole area, and something else, and my glance kept going there, to the pinkness. When I was asked if I could see them, and if they were three dimensional, I looked again and thought and concentrated and realized that I could. Initially it was vague, just a suggestion of a shape, almost like a faint three-dimensional ink drawing, with the suggestion of petals, but then suddenly, briefly, it was fully there.

My mother passed away late on November 8, 2010, at the age of 79. The funeral had an amazing amount of people, most of whom I didn't know, and I doubt she did. I guess they were friends of the other people. As it had been with my grandmother, my mother had too much wax on her. She also had the skin of her face pulled down into folds around her neck, which seemed very odd, and certainly wasn't how she looked in life. Like my grandmother at her funeral, she had lipstick on. My grandmother didn't wear any in life, not while I knew her, and although my mother had occasionally worn red lipstick when she was younger, she had not done so for a long time. The bright red color looked odd against the pale bland color they had made her face, but I think she would have wanted the lipstick on her. She looked in general very nice, and her hands looked very natural.

As I looked at her in the coffin, for a moment, for an instant, another version of her seemed to recede several feet away from me, away from the body in the coffin, through the side and the open lid of the coffin, a version of her that was alive and several years younger, partly sitting up, looking toward me with her mouth open slightly, a slight smile on her face, almost of slightly uncertain expectation. She was looking toward me, seeming very comfortable herself, but looking a little unsure of my reaction, of what my reaction to her might be. I drew back, blinking and shaking my head I think, turning away from her. I looked back a few times, but the vision was gone now. It seemed astoundingly real, though, in the brief instant of its happening.

My brother gave the eulogy. A day or two before I had been asked if I wanted to say anything, too. Some other people were also going to talk, and I could say something if I wanted to. I said no. I was really tired and feeling kind of shaky, and didn't feel like I could. And although I didn't know it at the time, I was only a few weeks away from going in the hospital myself. Over the course of the day I thought about it, though, and decided that I really had to say something. I felt it was my duty, that I was the only one who could say the things I was thinking about. I had to do it. I went ahead and wrote it down in a rough draft on the computer, then printed it out. I went over it some more on the way to the funeral and while I was there, making a few minor changes, just in my head, not writing anything down.

When it came time for the speeches, my brother went up and talked, then a few other relatives, then I volunteered to be next. I went up and got on the platform, and stood at the dais and adjusted the very ineffective microphone to point up toward me. I looked out at the crowd, scanning my eyes over them. I recognized a lot of people, but most of them were strangers. It didn't bother me that I had to speak before all of them, though there was a time when it would have. Now I just felt that I had to give the speech as best I could, and try to speak loudly enough so that everyone heard me. It was a fairly long speech, but I think I succeeded for the most part in what I was trying to do. Several more people spoke after me, not all of them relatives. I couldn't hear most of what was said, because of the poor microphone and my hearing problem. Evidently the other people were having a lot more success in hearing than I was, as evidenced by their reactions. I know I was heard, at least for the most part, because of reactions to what I was saying during the speech, and because of things that were said to me afterward, in one case about a specific thing I said, and in another case word was relayed to me that someone had said that I should be a professional writer.

Unlike my grandmother, there was no second funeral. My mother truly never made it back to Missouri again, for she was buried out here, in Arizona. It was in a very nice cemetery though, a place she had visited before her death, and really liked. After the funeral, at the cemetery, I joked that she finally got to ride in a station wagon again, referring to the white Cadillac that had been modified into a hearse. The people with me turned to look at it and laughed, remembering how much she had loved the station wagon.

It was mentioned to me that it was common for coffins to be buried on top of each other there, and that when my time came I could be buried there in the same grave with her, if I wanted. I agreed to have it done, though it wasn't anything official. I assume, though, that it will be carried out, that it will be remembered and the arrangements made, when it becomes necessary for it to be done. That time is probably quite a few years away. I have reason to believe that, but you never know for sure.

It seems like so much of my life is in the past now, though there are still things yet to be done. So much is gone now, and much exists now only in memory.

Many things from the house on the highway are still here, though many are not, lost forever along the way. We still have the swordfish sword, and the old organ, and the plate with my mother's face on it, and the shelves with the glass doors, and Uncle Doc's bookcase, and the heavy wood table, and many other things. I miss the things that are gone, though, and I miss the farm and the people and the old times there, when I was very young. I long ago knew, even when I was still a child, that the times there, at the house on the highway, and at the house on Morley in town, would be the best times of my life. I knew it then, and I know it now.

The house on the highway, Part 1
The house on the highway, Part 2
The house on the highway, Part 3
The house on the highway, Part 4
The house on the highway, Part 5

Related posts:

The bedtime prayer
Jumbo Elephant
Finding my grandmother
Red Rover, Red Rover
The shoe salesman's cigarette
Sliding down the stairs
The Idea of a Circle
The broken baby brush
Streaks in the air
The Clarabell Clown doll
Is this really necessary?
Is someone calling my name?
Blood poisoning
My father and the Air Force
Paper airplanes
My mother tries to teach me about God
Perfume
Snakes

Dream - Grandpa and the violins
Dream - My grandmother is voted president of a club
Dream - My grandmother's birthday party, and old cars disappearing into fog
Dream - I meet my grandmother in a hardware store
Dream - With my grandmother, on the bridge
Dream - My grandmother is younger and admires herself in the mirror
Dream - Young self one and two, dreams of different lives
Dream - Through the doorway
Dream - My dead grandfather helps me look for the dogs
Dream - The girl on the mountain

Falling down - An astral visit to the underworld

2010-12-31T13:53:00.006-07:00

On Friday, December 17, 2010, at around 10:15 PM, I was laying on my back in bed, trying to sleep. Perhaps I did fall asleep, or perhaps not, but I became aware that I seemed to be coming out of my body some. My head and shoulders were forward from my body a little, with my awareness in more of an expanded, diffuse state. There was a strange feeling too, and an odd sound, like from around the ceiling, kind of a continuous sound, maybe something like a choir note extending, kind of an aaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh maybe.

I realized that I was trying to have an astral projection, an out of body experience, and tried to keep it going, tried not to dampen it, but becoming aware of it and concentrating on it can be counterproductive. I tried to keep a light touch on it, tried to encourage it, but I felt a slight sensation of it easing, that it was trying to fade, with me settling back a little, more toward solidity, but just a little. I thought, well, if I can't go up, let's try to go down, and I tried to move my head and upper body below my real one, intending to try to rock it up and down and maybe be able to get out of my body that way. I started falling through my body, though, going down. I wasn't sure that was a good thing to do, to fall into the Earth. I wasn't sure how to get back up again from inside the Earth, or how to move around in it. Straightening up so I was in something of a walking position, and turned some to face the west, I tried to to walk, bent forward a little, but didn't make much headway.

Then I was on my back again, oriented as my body on my bed was, my head to the north, and falling through the Earth, falling fairly rapidly. I saw above me a narrow square tunnel, like an elevator shaft, but much smaller, maybe only four feet wide, much too small for my stretched out body to actually be in. Even my head seemed to be outside it. I looked up at it above me, diffuse bands of light and dark and color on it, rapidly going away from me as I fell, the surface somewhat uneven and indistinct, almost like it was made of fog. It was transparent, too, to some extent. A deep, evil voice was saying, to the left and above me, that it finally had me, and was taking me down, and I would never get away, or words to that effect.

I watched with interest, the shaft as I fell, the many layers going away from me. I presumed that they corresponded to something, some kind of levels, though they seemed more narrow than levels that were actually floors. I wondered if they were levels of another kind, and what kinds they might be. The voice was a little disturbing, but annoying more then disturbing. I figured I could get out anyway, somehow.

I eventually ended up in a vast cavern, falling through the ceiling to the bottom. The top was perhaps eight to ten feet above me, though in places it was more, perhaps even over twenty at times, it varied a bit. The ceiling was vague and translucent, with the same unreal feel the shaft had had.

I walked along, slowly. The cavern was full of pale structures, sometimes with short walls and sometimes with taller walls. The walls never reached the top of the cavern, and were usually short enough to see over. Their tops frequently sloped sharply away from central joining points, almost like a very small house without a roof, a roof that sloped on all sides. They were also frequently missing outer walls, and only enclosed or partly enclosed very small areas. Sometimes they had some furniture, also pale and very small. There was also a pale wall to the left, much too high to see over, with maybe more high walls beyond it. It did seem that there were several walls to that side, some intersecting. High walls also enclosed the lower walls to some extent, like rooms within rooms. There was plenty of room to walk along, though, and I continued slowly walking, going around things sometimes, going more or less forward.

I could sense something over the walls, some kind of presence, up near the ceiling of the cavern and beyond it, mostly over to the left and behind me. Something or somethings seemed to be watching me, seemed to be aware of me, seemed to have an interest in me. As I walked along, sometimes going through the rooms and sometimes past them, I became more disturbed and worried, and more and more anxious. It seemed it might not be so easy to get out after all. I still had no idea how I might do it.

I started praying as I walked, to God and Jesus, to come and save me, to come and take me away. I remembered reading of people who had done this, who had been trapped in Hell or with evil entities, and had been saved by the prayer, taken away from where they were and saved, taken back to their bodies.

Nothing happened right away. I continued on, still hoping and praying. I became tireder, and a kind of dreariness fell over me.

After a while, the way seemed to be getting narrower. A tall wall was beside me, to my left, and not far away another tall wall crossed it, partly blocking my path, though there was enough room to go around. To the right was the cavern wall. Ahead of me, beyond the short section of wall, I could see the way continued, at least for a while, though it was becoming much narrower. The cavern began to get darker, the light dimming, fading at the edges, closing in on me to some extent, along with a feeling of closeness, a little stuffiness. My eyelids turned downward, half closed. Whatever was watching me seemed closer, closing in.

Then something happened, something came, a presence, coming down from above, in front of me. It was a diffuse darkness in the dim light, at least as big as a man, but much more spread out, probably covering four or five or six feet, with a greater solidness within it. Even in the less solid outer parts, there was still some solidity, but a diffuse solidity, like a solidity that had no fixed place. It reached out toward me, wrapping dark arms of cloud around me, hugging me, and I was taken up, through the roof of the cavern. I don't remember what happened after that.

National Novel Writing Month 2010 - Winner!

2010-12-31T13:47:00.017-07:00

I was a winner for National Novel Writing Month 2010, meaning that I managed to write a novel of at least 50,000 words during the month (November). I completed it, at least the rough draft, on November 26, 2010, but didn't get the word count verified by the website until the next day. MS Works, which I wrote it in, put the word count at 53,076, and the website put the word count at 53,077. This was a little higher than last year's novel, which had word counts of 52,110 and 52,111. The book for 2010 was a sequel of the 2009 one. I joined National Novel Writing Month [ nanowrimo.org ] on March 20, 2009, as user Stephen_M_99.

Quite a few winner web badge images were available this year. Last year I showed them and said I would choose one to display in the sidebar, but I never did. I think I will just do what I did last time, and show them here, in the blog post. If forced to make a choice, I would probably choose the long one at the bottom.

My novel is science fiction, and I described it as follows in the Novel Info section:

Synopsis:

A sequel to last year's novel, the man who was forced into being a time and dimension traveler for a mysterious agency goes through many ordeals and adventures in a learning process, and continues to create his own past.

Excerpt:

"Have you any idea where she might have gone?"

Jack looked at the creature, then looked away. "Not really. She left a note saying she was going to the store, but I don't think that's what happened. She's been gone two days, and someone's been bringing in the newspapers and mail."

"She's been gone that long, and you haven't done anything?"

Jack twisted in his seat. "I somehow time traveled, to two days after she left."

"I see. Why don't you just travel back and see who took her?"

"I can't," Jack said miserably, "I can't. Other people, or... things... are doing it for me. Or to me. I have no control over it, and I don't know what's going on."

"You really do have a problem, don't you?"

"Yes."

There was silence for a moment.

"I can travel a bit, you know," the creature said. "I can try to go back and see."

"You can? Can I come with you?"

"Yes, of course. Come, we'll stand over here." It walked over to the area by the sink. Jack shrugged. It seemed as good a place as any. He walked over, and the thing took hold of his arm. Jack flinched inwardly.

"Here, here, there's no need to be like that. I'm trying to help you, you know."

Jack stared at the hand on his arm. It was a hand. The nails looked a little funny, kind of like short dark claws, but there were fingers and a thumb. The hand connected to a wrist, which was perhaps a little too hairy, but not much, which connected to an arm, which disappeared up the long sleeved shirt. Jack stared at the shirt. It was wearing clothes. It had always been wearing clothes, he realized, he just didn't want to think about it, and somehow hadn't thought about it. Maybe it made it too much like a man.

He stared at its face. It looked serenely back at him. "Do you have a name?" Jack asked.

"Of course. Would you like to hear it?"

"Yes."

"I'm a bit embarrassed about it, actually. They seem to have had a bit of a sense of humor when they named me. It's Bowser."

"Bowser?" Jack chirped.

"Yes. Technically, Bowser Tiberius Smith. Don't ask."

"Okay."

"I suppose you could call me Mr. Smith, but that seems so formal. Anyway, technically it's Dr. Smith."

"You're a doctor?"

"It's a PhD. Don't worry about it."

"Okay..."

"Why don't you just call me Bozo. It's a nickname they gave me."

Jack stared at him. "I... don't think I can do that."

"Oh? How odd. Bonzo, then?"

"No."

It sighed. "Very well. Just call me Douglas and be done with it."

Douglas the dog? At least it would be easy to remember.

Last years novel:

National Novel Writing Month 2009 - Winner!

The closed doors

2010-08-27T23:40:00.005-07:00

Long ago, when I was probably around 12 years old, on a trip with my family in our car, I was thinking about how hard it was to think now. I felt that it should be easy, all these things I was having problems with, and I should know a lot more than I did. I was basically raging against it, mad that it should be that way.

Looking out the car window, I then looked upward, with my eyes but also in my mind, and saw the blue of the sky fade into a grainy darkness. I went into that darkness, and I saw a massive, dimly lit corridor, very high ceilinged, with many sharp zigzags along the left-side wall. The walls of the zigzags held massive doors, on the sides facing me. and the wall on the right also had doors. They were very tall, around twice my height, heavy boards reinforced with heavy metal straps, some of the doors even vault-like, metal with layered metal slabs. They were all either closed and locked or slammed shut as I approached them.

I walked slowly down the tall corridor, looking at the doors. After a short distance the corridor turned to the right, with straight walls and more doors, somewhat wider spaced. It went on a long distance in that direction, too far to really see the end. To the left, in the corner, was another massive door, metal and heavily reinforced. It was open, but each time I approached it it slammed shut, locked against me.

Though I tried a few times, going back into the darkness to them, I could never get through the doors, and I knew that I couldn't, not now and not for a long time, perhaps not until near the end of my life. They had been closed, either by me or someone else, to keep me away from the knowledge and abilities that I used to have.

I felt that it had been a decision made long ago, maybe before I was born, and that several people were involved. There had been discussions of it and the decision was made, and was being enforced by those who were left to do it, who kept watch on it, and made sure that it was done. They appeared in my mind as giant figures, as a very small child might see an adult. They were wearing simple, rural clothes, and were in a small room of a house, similar to what my grandmother's farm on the highway had looked like, though they would have been in one of the bedrooms instead of the living room. They were sitting on a small couch in front of a coffee table, and on other chairs around it, sometimes standing, too. It felt that I was also somehow one of them, or was with them in some way, and was taking part in the discussion, was even one of the people pushing the decision, was in fact the leader behind it.

After the discussion was finished, the others got up and turned and faded through the walls like ghosts, on their way to carry out and enforce the decision. The other me, though, I felt had withdrawn the other way some, and upward through the ceiling. He didn't seem to be an actual figure at this point, more like a mostly unseen presence. Perhaps he had always been that way, though it was a presence that could make itself known, and could carry on a discussion in some way, perhaps mentally. It felt, too, that somehow that presence was still out there somewhere, that it didn't all become me, that the greater part of it still watched and waited on the other side of life.

Although I felt there must have been some kind of reasoning behind it, something that was felt to be valid by my other, greater self, and by whoever else was keeping the doors closed, and though they obviously had greater knowledge about such things than I did, I wanted them open now, and was mad that I was restricted in this way.

This could be interpreted as a sense of a past life or lives when I was an adult and had more knowledge and abilities than a child would have. Perhaps a better interpretation, though, would be a memory of a time between lives, when I would presumably have greater knowledge and awareness, and was setting the goals and the path of my next, now current, life. Other interpretations are also possible.

Dream - The short evil angel, the plastic trash bag, and the big meal

2010-08-02T11:56:00.010-07:00

On Saturday, July 31, 2010, in the midnight to 6:00 AM area, I dreamed I was driving back and forth to Nevada, sometimes spending a little time there at work. I was recording what was happening on 11 x 8.5 inch lined tablets, lots of them. I was even doing it at places I stopped along the way. I even stopped at some motels sometimes I think, instead of driving all the way at once.

I was eventually spending more and more time at home, still writing on the tablets. I spent a lot of time in bed, too. The bed was neatly made, with a thin white cover with thin dark random lines and dots. My brother was there sometimes, in my bedroom, talking to me, and sometimes my mother, and sometimes my younger sister, too. Things were generally very pleasant, though there seemed some hurry about it, a need to rush, and so sometimes a bit of a feeling of tension. I got quite a bit of sleep, though.

We were going to have a big meal in a few hours, and had hired some people to do it. I thought of it as catered food, though it probably was not quite that way, as it was going to be cooked here. A big white truck came, maybe more than one, and a lot of cooks and other people were rapidly carrying things in, including huge slabs of meat that needed two people to carry, one at each end, slabs that were six feet long and maybe three feet wide and a few inches thick. They seemed very happy as they rushed back and forth, bringing things in, and sometimes briefly talked to us as they went. It was just starting to get night now, probably around sundown.

We were leaving for now, though, going somewhere. We drove to a place and parked in a lot, somewhere to the northwest of home. We came in separate cars, at least partly. Some of the cars had more than one person in them. The lot was already pretty full, but we found spaces to park, in different areas of it. It's possible my father was in one of the cars, I'm not sure. It was night, now. I'm not sure what the original plan was. It seems we were going somewhere, and that we were only partway there, with a lot still to go, but the rest was delayed somehow for some reason.

Walking back toward home, I came across a woman, on a street near where I live maybe, though it seems it might be further out, who had interactions with a little angel. The angel was around three feet high, and shaped like a human dwarf. He was somewhat sinister, and at least partly evil. He sometimes came to her in dreams, and sometimes at least partly physically, though he always seemed associated with darkness, and was never clearly seen. He predicted death sometimes, and told her that her baby would be deformed, maybe even caused it. Her baby was deformed, and lived for a while, long enough to be a small child, and either then died or was killed, perhaps by her, perhaps by the angel, perhaps by someone else, I'm not sure. It seems the baby might have even been caused by the angel, like he was the father, though it seemed like more in a magical way than in the traditional way, like he simply caused it to happen, by his power. She told me about some of this, and I could see it in my mind, and the rest I seemed to sense, like I was partly there when it was happening.

She had the dead child, plus a severed head of a man, in a dark plastic trash bag. The child was very small, and the head was very large and elongated, with the heavy, muscular neck included. The head and neck seemed to weigh more than the child. The woman seemed sad about it, and was a little disturbed by it, at least some, but seemed resigned to it, as the way things were going to be. I didn't see much of how she herself looked, as everything was very dark, though she seemed to be in her thirties, with longish hair that was partly curly. She gave me the bag, and I took it with me. I was going to take it home, though I'm not sure what I was going to do with it afterwards.

It feels like I might have made it home, but then there was a period of time when I was wandering around in the dark, on foot, on a street a little past my home to the east and in that area, going a little onto some other streets I think. It seems I met some people there, happened across them, and talked to them some. I was still carrying the plastic bag with the head and the dead child in it. The bag kept trying to sag, to unfold and get longer, the objects in it shifting around, which was awkward as I kept trying to hold it up, keep it off the sidewalk and the street, keep it from dragging. I was tired and a bit sleepy and not moving very fast.

I finally got back home, still with the bag. There was some problem with the driveway. A slot had been cut in the dirt beside it, on the left side of it, as viewed from the street. The slot was a bit wider as it went toward the house, getting perhaps over half a foot wide. I'm not sure of the purpose of it. It seems there might have been some thought about finishing it up and filling it in, though there was also some thought about using it to enlarge the drive, finishing it up and pouring concrete in it, but this seemed to be a consideration after the fact, after it was already dug. It feels the city might be associated with it in some way, like maybe it was something to do with the pipes. My mother's car, maybe the station wagon, was parked in the driveway beside it, with her and my sister by it, and I talked with them for a while. They seemed concerned about the slot, and whether they should continue on into the carport. I think some dirt and other things were a little in the way, too. There also seemed to be some concern about the engine, or something under the hood, and I sat the bag down in front of the car and spent some time looking under the hood and fiddling with things there. We finally decided to go ahead and put the car in the carport, that it was safe enough to do that, that there wasn't any real reason not to. She drove it in and then they went on ahead into the house. I lagged behind a bit, peering at the slot by the driveway, then I gathered up the bag, which I had picked up again before the car was moved, and went in.

Inside, the house was much larger than in real life, and the people who were fixing the food were almost done. A huge table was set up with food on it, and waiters and other preparers were rushing around with big trays, bringing more food to the table, and chefs were still working with getting the final things cooked, the final things ready. I went into the living room, but had to pause as a man carrying a big tray was trying to rush through from that direction. He abruptly stopped, in front of me, as he realized I was in the way. The head caterer, the person in charge, came in from the other entrance to the living room, with another tray I think, and was frowning at me from the other side of the room. I gathered up the bag and moved slowly off to the side, letting the man through, though I think I took a little of the food from his tray. I know I got some from somewhere. I was eating it, enjoying it, and thinking of the big meal to come.

I got some krill, too, from someone on the other side of the living room. I think my mother, and maybe my sister, and perhaps even the waiter, were talking about how good it was for you, and how good it tasted. Even though the krill was supposed to be good and very healthy, I was a little hesitant about it, though I was interested. I took some and started eating it and some other family members tried some, too. After a while, though, some of them, maybe me included, started to get reactions from it. The backs of one or both of our wrists and hands had swelled up hugely and turned a dull red. We were a bit concerned about this. One of the girls had it happen to her, and maybe my mother, and they were wondering what to do about it. We were in the hall/kitchen area now. I said that it might be the krill, and to stop eating it. I wasn't sure how long it would take the reaction to go away, whether it would be better by the time things were ready to eat or not. They were talking about calling a doctor and asking what to do about it, and I think they did, using a phone hanging on the wall.

I was looking forward to the meal to come, though. It was going to be a big family meal, with a lot of people there. Perhaps even some non-relatives, I'm not sure. It seems, though, that there was something else to be prepared, something else to be cooked and put on the table, before the meal could be considered ready to serve. I had to get the plastic bag with the head and the small child to the cooks. They were going to be put on the table and eaten, too.

I kept thinking that I was writing the dream down, typing it in the computer, and was going over and over it in my mind, putting a lot of it down, sometimes wondering if I had written a certain part, or thinking of the parts I still had to write, that I still had to finish. It seemed very important that I get it all down, and I kept coming back to it. I kept doing it over and over, but I would finally start to wonder if it was real, or if it was just a dream and I was just thinking I was writing it down. In the end it always turned out to be a dream. When I did wake up, the dream tried to slip away, and I had to grab at it, and bring it back, grasping at bits and pieces and filling more of it in, and then grabbing again the parts that wanted to slip away. I finally got it written down, starting probably less than an hour after waking up, or at least waking up and moving around, as I spent some time initially just sitting in the chair, trying to rest some more. I got pretty much all the major parts down, I think, though some of the details were forgotten, particularly in the first part of the dream.

The radio was on, and while I had been sleeping, the Coast to Coast AM show had been playing, including replaying the first two hours. The show had a guest and callers talking about near death experiences, which probably influenced the dream. There was also a show several weeks ago that I had been thinking about, where a man told about meeting a three foot high person with red skin and I think yellow eyes, who said, in a gravelly voice, "I've been in Hell all morning and I can't wait for you to die so I can urinate on your grave." The part about the krill probably came from a later infomercial, with the krill being a source for an Omega-3 health supplement.

Dream - Past and future pirates, the struggle for the throne, and visiting Rachel Maddow

2010-07-29T11:38:00.007-07:00

On Monday morning, June 7, 2010, I dreamed a long dream. There was a long part of the dream, not much remembered now, in which there were carnivals, and people in rooms discussing what to do politically, in what seemed to be a couple of hundred years ago, someplace in England, but it also switched back and forth to the modern day. Sometimes it seemed the people were just wearing period pieces, costumes from long ago, including powdered wigs, though sometimes it also felt that we were really back there. There was some trouble with the opposing side, and trying to get rid of people who might be a problem, and who might be in line for the throne. There was also something about piracy taking place, that some of the people, or maybe the people they were trying to get rid of, were associated with pirates or actually were pirates sometimes. There was some acceptance of it now, but it was something they would have to take care of later, stop it and probably kill the leader of the pirates.

Somebody came back, from Africa I think, perhaps from a ship that had been in that area. He was someone they had caused to be sent out there for a while, through trickery, some kind of military pretense, to get him out of the way temporarily. Now he had returned, becoming aware of recent events, of the deaths of so many relatives, but perhaps also purposely drawn back. After his return they began trying to get rid of him, too, poisoning him so that he appeared crazy. He was evidently the last big obstacle left, before they could move forward with their plans.

Outside, in an empty area near the carnival, just outside and partly under a tent, I met up with him. I saw him there and went to him, feeling a bit sad for him, and wondering if I should warn him. He talked agitatedly and walked around. Other people had been killed and he knew it. They were even trying to blame it on him, though he knew he didn't do it. He seemed to suspect, too, that they were somehow poisoning him, trying to make him seem crazy.

He had a big knife and he waved it around, talking about what was happening and complaining about things, waving the knife in the area of my face and chest sometimes. We finally got into a struggle with it, and though I think I was injured, I finally managed to get it away from him, and we were laying on the ground, struggling, with me mostly on top, with my face very close to his, but off to the side, and my arm folded about as far as it could go. I started to slowly saw through the side of his neck with the knife. He paused, and his eyes were turned my way with a little surprise and apparent acceptance. He talked for a while as I sawed through his neck, getting almost all the way through. I hadn't initially intended to kill him, or wanted to, thinking that I could just stop him, restrain him, but in the end there seemed to be no other way I could be safe. If I had stopped him now, without killing him, he might come after me again later, especially in his crazy state. I stood up, then, wondering what to do next, what I would say. Though I had been defending myself, it seemed possible I might still get in trouble.

A couple of the people who had planned it came, and were talking about it, looking at the body. They got the head all the way off, or maybe I did, and they took it away to a room. I stood there in the room while they walked around discussing it, intending to use it somehow in their campaign. I think his death had come a little earlier than expected, and now they had to revise things a bit. Their campaign wasn't quite at the proper place yet to proceed. The general population wasn't yet set up for it, wasn't prepared to accept them as the leaders without a proper transition of some kind. Some way to prepare the people was needed, so that they would understand and accept them as the proper rulers, accept that theirs was the proper claim to the throne and to the proper advisers to the throne.

Then, later, I was somewhere else, in more modern times, and I was looking at Rachel Maddow, who has a TV talk show on MSNBC. She was in a large room, sitting at a heavy circular glass desk, leaning forward and talking to someone else on the other side of it, someone she was interviewing, possibly a reporter or someone who did opinion pieces. She was hit by a car, then. It was very sudden, the car crashing through the heavy glass outer wall of the room, apparently intentionally. I saw it on TV and they kept replaying it, but it seemed that I was also somehow initially there, off to the side, watching it. She was doing her show, sitting down at the big glass desk, leaning forward and talking to the person, and a car suddenly came in from her right, crashing into the big open room, and crashed into her. She turned toward it as it came, in the fraction of a second before it hit, then she was turning away, her face grimacing as it hit her and the glass desk, breaking the edge of the desk and knocking it and her over.

I looked for her in the hospital, for a long time, through huge rooms filled with beds, separated into little areas with lots of space between them, on different levels of the now uneven floor. Though in the other rooms the floor had been more normal, here, on the third story probably, and in the inner part of the hospital, this big room had ups and downs, with smooth transitions, like it was an outdoor landscape, with hills and depressions, with the low carpet smoothly covering everything.

I finally found her, toward the back, but still a ways from it, in a section out in the middle, with temporary walls partly enclosing it, like office room dividers. She was larger than expected and had a huge head and face, mostly normally proportioned, though her forehead was too large, and she had her hair roughly shaved going back from the middle across the top to near the back, because of the operation she had had to have. The hair was too long to have actually been shaved that way, it must have grown out some, and though I wondered about the length of it in the dream, I didn't think about it having grown out some and the time passing that that would imply. She was smiling and happy and sitting up, wearing pajamas with a sheet wrapped around her from the stomach down. She was talking to someone else, a woman who was also in the hospital. They were evidently playing cards on a little table that was between them.

I got her attention and explained a little of why I was there. I had seen her getting hit by the car, and wanted to see if she was alright. She was leaning forward and smiling broadly at me, and said, "And you came to see me? Awwww, that's nice," and she turned her head and went back to happily talking and playing cards with the woman. She was scary to look at, with her head so big. Her body was a little too big too, like she was a giant, in a mild way, but her head was way too big, especially the upper part of her head. I didn't see any scar on her head, even within the shaved area, though I didn't peer all the way back, and didn't try to. I didn't want to know, it was just too scary, especially when she had her focus on me. It wasn't too bad when she was talking to the other woman.

I had the feeling though that she had a mental deficit of some kind now, that might or might not get better, that might heal completely or might not. She seemed to be doing alright in her talking and playing cards, and seemed very happy, but I still felt that the problem was there. There had felt an underlying blankness in her, like something was missing.

I left her and wandered around the huge room some more, going back the way I had come but on the other side of the room. Someone came and said I shouldn't be there. I was happy enough to go by then, being very tired and trying to find the way out. He went with me. I found I was crawling on hands and knees, slowly. He was looking concerned and finally asked if I needed help, if I wanted him to get someone, meaning emergency personnel, to examine me and try to treat whatever was wrong. I slowly assured him I was alright, trying to smile a little, saying I was just tired, and slowly made it to the door and through it. He watched me go, still looking concerned. I was in fact injured, from the fight before, and it was bothering me, but I didn't want to say anything to him about it.

Then I went out to the back, to another section or another building. A couple of people were there. One, a thin man, had been in the hospital and had gone crazy it seemed, and got something like a knife and started trying to kill the other man and then me, though I seemed to have become someone else. He stabbed the other man or cut him somehow, then was coming after me. He was talking, rambling, looking very nervous and tense. I backed away, into a place where a lot of sheets were hanging around, some over portable room divisions. The area was cramped and a lot of things were there, including, I think, a hospital bed behind me. The other man was back in the short narrow hallway, wounded, maybe dead or dying.

I kept moving around, while I was also somehow a little ways off, watching. He sometimes tried to stab me, but usually got the sheets. He finally did manage to stab me, though, I think on my chest near my left shoulder, or maybe my side. I was bleeding, dark blood getting on my shirt and running down, dividing into several streams. It didn't seem to reach my waist, though. I was struggling with him, and finally another person or two showed up and got control of him. The other man who was stabbed earlier also showed up and helped. It looked like he was going to be okay.

Then the group of us had to get out of there. The detectives were closing in on us because of what happened earlier, the murder of the man who was dressed in 18th or 19th century garb. We went out into a kind of parking lot, a huge one that extended way out, but it contained all kinds of things, including strange futuristic planes and maybe spaceships. It seemed to be mostly a place where old ones were left, though I saw some taking off and coming in, coming down out of the sky in a swoop, going over the water and then into the lot. The parking lot ended in a docking area, with a vast expanse of water, perhaps the ocean, beyond. The lot seemed to be mostly industrial, though there also seemed to be some military presence.

We had to go out further in the lot. The detectives were going to come out, I could hear them talking about it. A police inspector in late middle age was in charge, a short British man of medium build with faded dark hair and mustache. After they came out into the lot, we then went back inside for a while, in one of the rooms. We talked for a while about things, and maybe stayed until the next day, but then I said, getting suddenly increasingly nervous, that we really had to leave.

We went back out to the parking lot, far into it. The girl who was with us was supposed to have prepared a getaway vehicle. She led us to an old Ford Mustang, that was sitting several feet high, above the pavement. It was crowded in with a lot of other things. She had done something with a panel that was put on under the back, under the gas tank, hidden a key there I think, but also something else, something that had to be done to start it, something with the wires I think. She folded the panel down and was looking in the space there, under the gas tank, her head stuck partly in and one of her arms, which went in and out as she tried to do whatever she was trying to do. I stood there with the other man, sometimes talking to him. I was starting to get a little nervous, a little impatient. They were out in the lot looking for us, we had to get going soon. I tried to hurry her up. I noticed too that it was an automatic transmission, which I found odd, as we usually got a manual one, because we usually had to push them to get them started. This was going to complicate things. I didn't think pushing would work with an automatic, and now we had to get into the wiring under the dashboard.

I was rolling my eyes and remarking on it, and the inspector and his men slowly walked up, talking to each other. They paused when they got to us, but then eventually started up again and moved on, still looking for the people, not realizing it was us.

I felt better now, and less in a hurry. We were going to steal one of the big flying ships, one of the freighters. They were odd looking things, like huge worms that were flattened some in the middle, with paneled wraparound front windows. The body was perhaps 40 or 50 feet long, with a small bend in the middle and the back slightly raised. The car was just to get us down the lot to where they were. The police would probably see us take off, and realize it was us and try to stop us, and send other ships after us, but by then it would be too late, we would have too much of a head start. It was like piracy, I thought, and that's what we were, modern day pirates, and we were going to use the ship to carry out more piracy, stopping vessels and forcing them to give us their goods.

Dream - The out of body experience and the egg-shaped soap that might be my soul

2010-07-26T05:27:00.004-07:00

On Sunday evening, June 6, 2010, I had a dream in which I was at home, but it was different, with a lot more rooms. My mother was also there, and maybe somebody else too. I talked to her a little, but didn't actually see her much, as she spent most of her time in other rooms. Things seemed strange, and everything, even the air, had a kind of grainy feeling. As we talked, I wandered through various rooms, ending up in one that didn't normally exist. It was mostly bare, with pale walls.

I was carrying what seemed to be a bar of very large soap, maybe seven or eight ounces. It was vaguely egg-shaped, but with sharp, almost square, edges, with flat sides and just a little rounded on the top and bottom. I had been intending to take a shower at some time, I think, when I got around to it. Something was going to happen later, it seemed, or somebody was going to come, maybe the next day, in the morning. It was late at night now, and things seemed bleak. I held the heavy soap in my right hand, and glumly looked at the bare, grainy walls.

Suddenly I was drawn away, back to my bedroom, flowing through the air, my body stretched out and distorted, still hearing the voices from the other rooms. As I settled into bed, or my spirit did, I felt a return to more solidity, and became aware that I actually was in bed and had been sleeping, but was now waking up. I still held the large bar of soap in my hand.

Then I felt a change, a kind of coolness, and like my body was changing to bright points and shifting forward, my head and upper body moving partly out of my physical body, moving upward a little, but still not fully out. As it was doing this, my perspective also shifted, the ceiling becoming closer. I recognized what was happening, from the feeling and the shift in vision, the going closer to the ceiling. I was trying to have an out of body experience, an astral projection, and was already partway out of my body. I wanted to have one, and tried to concentrate on making it happen. The ceiling seemed to loom much closer for a moment, like I was right underneath it, so close that I drew my head back some in surprise, squinting at it. I didn't feel too much different, but there seemed to be an increase in outside noise, a kind of muffled roaring and murmuring.

Then I was back where I had been, still on the bed, partway out of my body, but less so than before. I was still holding the heavy soap. Amused, I dumped it out of my hand, to let it fall back over the side of the bed, on the side toward the wall. It didn't seem important now.

I thought, still with amusement, that it might be my soul, like in the book by Roger Zelazny, "Jack of Shadows." In the book, on the dark, magic-controlled side of the earth, a person's soul was contained in an egg-shaped rock that he found he held in his hand, when he died and was resurrected and found himself laying on a mound at the south pole.

If it was my soul, I had just dumped it. Oh well, I could always come back and get it later, I thought, and went back to trying to have an out of body experience. I don't remember much after that, though it seems that something did happen. Maybe even quite a bit, which brings a certain uneasiness to thoughts about it. Thoughts about beings I might have met, and contracts entered into and broken, and struggles with the beings and struggles about them, and an opposing side that helped me, and that I helped, and some difficulty in getting my soul back after all. It seems like something like that might have happened, it feels like it might have, but there's no way to know for sure. I have just the briefest of memories. There was never any soap, though, it was all part of the dream. I know; I looked for it after I woke up.

Dream - Getting fast food and taking my aunt to a restaurant, then going to my brother's house and when I return to the restaurant my food is gone

2010-06-04T04:32:00.007-07:00

On Saturday, January 23, 2010, I dreamed I had been at a small shopping center I think, and then went and picked up my aunt, my mother's sister. My mother had wanted me to. I had a big, white, fast food bag in the car with me. I had a big sliced meat sandwich, either beef or ham, ham I think, on a large hamburger bun, and I got it out of the bag either before I picked her up or after, and was eating it. I also had a very large iced tea in a paper cup, all of it from Arby's I think.

My aunt got in the car. There was a lot of stuff in the car for some reason, and it was fairly crowded. She was fussing a bit, and started saying she was hungry too and hoped I had gotten her something. I said that I had and picked up the bag from the floor, near the central hump and slightly on the passenger side, and next to the seat. I opened it and got her sandwich out. It was huge and vaguely squarish, as big as four slices of bread made into a square, but on a kind of hamburger-bun-like thing, mostly square but with broad rounded corners. It might have had some folds on the top. Inside it at the front it had two small hamburger patties and at the back two huge ones, and like mine was wrapped in white wax paper.

She took it, kind of bothered, and was looking at it and was saying it was too big. I had been wondering some about that too now. When I bought it I had intended for it to be that size, and thought that she might give the large hamburgers to her cats. I took back the sandwich, frowning and talking to her, saying alright, I would fix it. I tore off one of the sections with a small hamburger and gave that to her. She accepted it, still fussing some, and started eating it.

I took her somewhere, another eating place. The place was fairly crowded, and I went to a round table, big enough for four people. It had a lot of stuff on it, left behind by other people. I put the bag and my drink on it. My aunt said she had to leave, and put what was left of her sandwich back in the bag. I had intended for her to take the rest of the sandwich, but I hadn't said anything to her about feeding the hamburger she didn't eat to her cats, and she hadn't really seemed interested in it. Oh well, it felt like it was too late to bring it up now anyway.

I started going through the bag, thinking I would go ahead and finish off what she hadn't eaten. I think the rest of my sandwich was in there too, along with something else, maybe some fries, maybe some dessert, I'm not sure. The big hamburger was broken up into sections now, and separately wrapped. To my surprise I found that part of it looked like it had been eaten too, maybe part of both of them. I found the small one she was eating, that was mostly gone, just an arc of it left, so I couldn't have confused them. I wondered if part of the big ones had been torn off instead of eaten. I couldn't be sure, and decided to just eat the part away from the part that looked like it might be eaten. I went ahead and did so, though I don't think I quite got finished. I got distracted by something.

My brother and his wife came, and he was showing me something, in a place he had nearby, that was actually attached to the eating place I think. It seemed to be a combination business and home. His children were there, younger than they are now, still in their teens. There was a big section with long counters, partly in rows and partly in a box shape. They were a kind of grainy pinkish tan, and they had little computers and other small electronic devices on them, widely spaced. At least some of them were things he had developed for his artwork. He pointed them out and showed them to me a little, then went off to the living room, which was an extension of this one, to watch TV with his wife. His daughter showed me around some more, pointing to the devices and talking about them while I occasionally asked questions. At some point the devices changed quite a bit to other things, still small electronic devices though, just different designs. I was given something to eat at some point, maybe when I was talking to my brother, some kind of big puffy bread thing, maybe an over-sized dinner roll, that I carried with me and ate.

I decided after a while that I had better get back and check on the food I had left at the table. I found, then or a little earlier, maybe before I had gone to my brother's place, that another family had come in, and was going to use the table. It seemed like they might just want to use some of it though, and I had hovered around, moving my drink some I think, and moving the bag to a slightly different section of the table. The table was already crowded with other stuff, from before I had first come there. The father, a tall, fairly thin man, was talking and making some room on the table, saying that this one looked alright and part of them could sit here. A worker or two, women, came and were carrying away part of the old stuff.

When I came back later, to check on my food and maybe get a drink or two of my iced tea, I found that though the table still had a fair amount of stuff on it, the bag of food was gone, and though my iced tea initially seemed to still be there, when I moved around the table looking for things, sometimes going toward the counter of the restaurant and back, I eventually found that it was gone too, and I couldn't find it anymore. I was disappointed that it was gone, too.

I eventually left, maybe going back to my brother's place, but then leaving again in my car, still crowded with things. I needed to go somewhere, maybe home, though I think I was going somewhere else first, maybe to a shopping center, perhaps the one I had been to before or another one.

I think the dream had a lot more, particularly in the beginning, more at the shopping center and maybe even some at home. Somewhere in the dream, maybe earlier, maybe in a different dream, I was out with my car, and stopped at the base of a tall dirt cliff. I had something with me, some item I was holding, maybe something I had found there, and was talking to someone, maybe my mother, who maybe was still at home. I might have been on a phone, though I was also holding something else, and someone was with me. I initially forgot all of it, but some started coming back within a half hour or so.

Dream - Shopping at a hardware store, then riding on top of a train while someone tries to shoot me

2010-06-04T04:23:00.006-07:00

On the night of January 19-20, 2010, Tuesday-Wednesday, I dreamed I was in a very big hardware store, shopping for something with some other people. We had to leave, then. It was almost time to close, but we had to leave anyway. I wanted to look at things one last time. We were trying to find some stuff as part of something we were trying to put together for a gift for someone. I was trying to find some kind of small mirrors and silvery pipes, maybe one and a quarter inches wide. I convinced the others to let me try one last time. Only a couple of them or so were with me, near the exit. My brother was there too, either with me there or still back in the store. The others were still back in the store somewhere.

I went along the front to the other side, then back into the interior of the store. At the back I raised up in the air, to the top of where some tall ladder-like things were stored, maybe 8 to 10 feet high. I tried to get above them, to a shelf they were leaning against, but it was hard. I was pulling myself up, trying to get on top of them. I had been intending to quickly fly along over things, looking down on them. As I pulled myself up, the ladders kept growing, getting higher. They were very high, maybe 14 feet. By the time I finally got on top of them the shelf had grown too and was a few feet wide now, and seemed to be aluminum with some small narrow ridges running down it.

A store manager had been keeping an eye on me, from maybe 10-15 feet away. I was also an employee now, a fairly new one, who had gotten into a little trouble before because of something, and I was a little worried about being reprimanded again or even fired. I walked along the shelf for a little ways. The manager had gotten up on it too, and was fiddling with something on the wall. Besides the pipes, which were smaller now, maybe half or three quarters of an inch thick, and the small mirrors, which were round or oval, I was also carrying a small screwdriver and pretended to be doing something with it, tightening some screws up there.

The scene changed, then, and we were on top of a train, going away from the city, going east. We were quickly out in the countryside, for the most part. Another train was maybe 20 or 30 feet away to the left, to the north. The manager stayed ahead of me, to the east, for the most part, though sometimes we were close to each other, and sometimes talked a bit, and sometimes we were 5 to 15 feet away. We went past occasional crossroads. Someone was trying to get us now, shooting at us sometimes, sometimes from below.

A few superheroes showed up, to try to help us. The man trying to shoot us had actually hit someone, me I think. I was wounded in some way, though I'm not sure how.

I got off the train onto a road that curved in from the north and then went east. The manager or somebody else also got off, maybe more than one person. I think at least one person got off before I did. The bad man got off, too. The train was still moving, but was not going very fast, probably less than 20 miles per hour, maybe less than 10. I don't think it ever went terribly fast, perhaps 30 to 40.

I went off the road among some small hills at the curves. Sometimes I was in a car and sometimes on foot. The hills were mostly dirt, sometimes with a reddish tint. There were two other roads here, being built through the wilderness, parallel to each other, sometimes going across or along gullies and small canyons. I went along the road for a while. Other people were there too, trying to make their way east. Some others were on the road going back west. I made my way back to the main road.

The scene repeated in part a few times, and I went off a long exit ramp to a road that the previous road went underneath, deeply recessed at that point. A few other people did, too. It seemed to be night now, but not very dark. I went left, and got to a road to the north, maybe the main one, and headed back west.

I got back to the curve. I could see where the car swerved earlier and went off the road into the hills. The heavy skid marks were there, and then it repeated and the person was actually the villain, disguising himself as me, or at least pretending to be me. He didn't actually look like me, and seemed to be wearing some kind of minor costume. Some superheroes flew in, to check on what was happening and to help. The villain talked to them, talking about what happened, telling some false story, pretending to be me. I stayed back among the hills, but finally came out, and exposed him. He went off then, trying to escape and hide. I left, too. The superheroes were looking for him, but there was some concern on my part about him going after me.

I was going away from the city again now, apparently on the main road going east, but after a while it seemed to actually be going north, and maybe even northwest, maybe toward Wickenburg or maybe even past it. I pulled off the road at a place with a few buildings, set back from the road a bit, with a parking lot in front and some tall bushes in front of the road. It didn't seem to be too far from the city, at the edge of it. It felt more like a road not too far from Central Ave., maybe even Central itself, though probably not, since it didn't actually go too far out of the city. My brother was out driving too, along with some others. I'm not sure how many cars were in the group, but he had at least one other person with him in the car. I think my father was in one of the cars, too. It was still night, and darker than it had been earlier, though there were some lights along the road, and by the buildings. It was a place I had been to before in other dreams. I talked to some other people while I was there at the buildings, some of them from the group. I'm not sure my brother got there before I left.

I went back toward the city, and stopped at a place that felt like it was on the northwest corner of 68th St. and McDowell Rd., or maybe 64th St. It was a convenience store, a place I had been to in other dreams. I'm not sure it was actually at that location now, though. While it felt like it was there, it also felt like it was further north. I talked briefly to some people there, and went back to my car, which I think I might have parked near the road. I was expecting my brother and/or father to come, but I'm not sure whether they did before I left. I drove back out onto the street, heading south.

I became more and more aware that I was also laying in bed in my bedroom, laying on my back with my legs apart a little. The radio was playing somewhere, in the next room I think, though it was still clear. I would go back to the dream and then back to being aware of being in bed. Sometimes I was doing both, in bed while the dream was distantly happening.

After a while I was more and more in bed, then was becoming aware that it wasn't real either, that I was actually sitting in the chair in front of the computer, with the radio nearby. I figured that I was laying back some in the chair with my head back. It's an office chair and doesn't recline, though it can tilt some. I thought that I must have my left leg on my briefcase, which was sitting upright on the floor, and my right leg on my plastic lunchbox. This would mean that the chair was turned to the left, with the computer and its desk on my right. It felt very much like I was laying in bed, though. It was a very convincing illusion.

My right leg was tingling more and more though, my calf, and was hurting near the ankle and some on my foot, places where I had sores. The other leg was starting to tingle some, too.

Eventually I was just outside the dream, feeling like I was laying in bed still, and listening to the radio. This went on for a while.

I finally decided that I needed to move, to get my legs off the things and back on the floor. I wasn't sure I could still easily do it, though. I finally opened my eyes and raised my head in a smooth dreamlike motion. I was a little surprised, I wasn't sure I would be able to. I then took my legs off the things, one at a time, my left leg first I think. My calves had been laying on them with my heels hanging over. They still felt funny with my feet on the floor, deadened some, almost half asleep. It took a while for me to really recover. I stumbled out of the room. It was hard to see properly, and hard to keep my eyes open. It had been a fairly long dream.

Dream - The Clark Kent-Superman movie, and the superpowered actor who portrayed him

2010-06-04T03:58:00.009-07:00

On Tuesday morning, January 26, 2010, I dreamed a house was being moved, on a street a little to the south of where I live, lifted up, on a giant forklift-like device. My father and my younger sister wanted to do it for some reason. It was put in the street next to the sidewalk, in front of another house a few houses down the street to the east. I figured they probably didn't appreciate it being there. We were staying in a house a few houses to the west of the house that was moved. I'm not sure who owned the house, it seems like it might be my grandmother or my sister. I knew a little more about it in the dream. It had been moved at night, I think, but time passed and it became the next day. I wondered if I should try to move it back myself, but didn't really feel I should. There was a question, too, of where I should put it.

I flew around in the air, looking at the houses nearby in the neighborhood. I saw a house on a street a little to the east, a street that went north-south in a slight curve. The house had a small auxiliary house directly beside it, filling up the side yard. It looked ancient Greek or Roman, and had files of columns, and appeared to be made of concrete, with a peaked roof of concrete. I flew on, then looked at it again as I came back. I found another place with a small auxiliary house the size of the other, but it was slightly more normal looking, darker in color, with pale tube-like things going along the corners and roof edges, and as designs in other places, still with some columns out front, possibly with a flat roof, unless I've got the roof style switched with the other one. It was out in the front somewhere instead of in the side yard, maybe even in the street. I thought of how I would tell my mother about them, as examples of what other people had done, to make fancy buildings to store stuff in, even if we didn't have the money to do it right now.

Scenes from the new Superman movie that was going to be released (in the dream) kept breaking in to my consciousness. It seemed fairly lighthearted, with a lot about Clark Kent in it. The person playing Superman didn't look like anybody who had played him, though perhaps closest to the one in "Superman Returns." He looked more like the comics' version by Curt Swan, though perhaps a little slimmer.

The scene that kept being advertised as a kind of title picture, showed Clark Kent looking almost like he had just tripped, on his side, just above the ground, his feet separated and a little higher than the rest of him, making it appear that he was actually flying and had just swooped in. His long light gray coat was flaring out around his legs like a long cape, and his head was lifted a little and turned back looking past his feet. He was holding the hand of another Clark Kent, who was on his knees I think and leaning forward, his back mostly to the camera. Past him was Lois Lane, standing, her arms out slightly, leaning forward slightly, her back also mostly to the camera, but like the second Clark Kent with some of her face showing, appearing to be somewhat surprised.

I saw briefly also that scene as it came to be, the few seconds leading up to it, and it did seem that he had flown in. Other scenes also showed sometimes, sometimes fairly long versions of them, several seconds, maybe even minutes. I eventually became him in a way, although it was still a part, and he was still somehow a separate figure, and I had his powers, or at least some of them, and the movie was in some way based on my life, or something about me.

I went to find my mother, to tell her about the movie, that they had finally made it, that I had finally got something done. I think I might have written it, or had a hand in writing it, or it had been based on something I had written. I went to where she was working. She had a job behind a counter in a big building. Another person, a man, was also there. They were separated by several feet, talking to different people. A lot of what they did was apparently help people out who came and asked questions. There was a very large, mostly empty room in front of the counter. I think it had some things, but I'm not sure what.

My mother looked a lot younger, maybe in her fifties. I talked to her about the movie, happy and a little excited. She acknowledged me and talked to me a little, but seemed distracted and generally didn't look my way. There were some other people back there too, in a back room. I could sometimes see them briefly. There were also a few scattered people in the large room, coming and going. Talking to people wasn't all she did. She seemed to also be concerned with something on or just behind the counter, some papers that were laying down, maybe in a file.

I moved off a bit out into the room, still talking to her. Though the room was mostly empty, there were a few long things, sales racks and shelves, with small merchandise on them. One was sort of parallel to the counter and one was at right angles to it.

I moved to the one that was sort of parallel to it and then went around it to the other side. I raised up my lower legs and glided along beside it, talking, demonstrating to her, even if she generally wasn't looking, and even though I had moved now around to the side of the display where she couldn't see that part of me, what I could do. I had starting gliding though, I think, while still on the side where she could see it. Part of me was concerned that other people might also notice, and part of me saw that a woman in front of another counter that was some distance away, and by a wall that was at right angles, more or less to the first counter, had turned to watch what I was doing, and a woman behind the counter there who was helping her also seemed to be looking. I felt that they would probably discount what they were seeing, that it couldn't be true, though part of me wondered if they might try to follow up on it.

I left the building, and went out into a kind of winding alleyway that went along beside the buildings there, which seemed to be the lead-in to a park. It had a tall concrete block wall lining the passage. Behind me I saw or sensed some people from the store starting to follow, including the woman who had been in front of the counter. I went down the alleyway toward the park, then came back. Some kids, teenagers or a littLe younger, were following me, both ways. Evidently they had seen something.

I came to a section where there was another partial concrete block wall inside the other, in the passage, off to the side with just enough room to go behind it if you wanted to. It had a sloped top, slightly rounded but not much, with the tops of the blocks cut to make the slope, and a layer of cement on top I think. It wasn't as tall as the walls, getting to almost six feet at the highest point. I went along quickly behind it.

Then it replayed, and replayed again I think. I seemed to be watching it now, with the person doing it no longer me but a separate figure, an actual Superman figure, though not dressed as Superman. As he went along the partial wall he ran his hands along the top, accidentally putting too much pressure on it and pulling some of the top blocks, or partial blocks, as they were cut down versions, off. He slapped them back on quickly and somewhat roughly, acting like they made a mistake when building it, and rushed on. The kids were staring open-mouthed at it and looking at it and at each other, and going closer to examine the blocks better. He was going to repair it later I felt, when people weren't around, or have the real Superman come and do it. I felt that he was somehow just another person portraying him, though he seemed to have at least some of his powers, though reduced versions of them. I wondered if the real Superman would be mad that it was done, and if he would be mad that other people were going around portraying him.

I moved along to the park-like section and went to the right. I seemed to be going along now in front of a school. I was moving along an area in front of rows of buildings. The ground was sloped some, going up and then leveling off and maybe even back down a little before the buildings. There was a concrete curb before the grass, with a paved area that ran along beside it. The ground where the slope was had some dips now and then, making it look a little like hills. I stopped at one, but I also seemed to be watching the Superman figure again, who again wasn't dressed like Superman. He reached down to one of the dips, where a pipe stuck up, and water started shooting out. There was also a pipe and faucet back at the nearby building, with a hose I think that ran to the dip. I thought it was another thing that had broken and would have to be fixed, and someone from the building was wailing now, about it and about something else, something to do with me, and the Superman figure looked a little upset, and sometimes looked toward the building.

I woke up when the phone rang. I had been sleeping in a chair, by the computer, making the phone closer and easier to hear.

Earlier, maybe before 6:00 AM, I had a dream about school, and going there, and having to take a test I hadn't studied for, something with a lot of math and equations. I'm not sure I had even read the book once. I had intended to at least go over it some, but time ran out and now I wasn't sure I could remember anything. I had trouble finding the room for the test then too, and it seemed to keep replaying. The test became less important, though, as it went along, until there was some doubt it was ever actually given, or if it was it wasn't really anything that mattered, almost like it was some minor advertising thing, some kind of minor survey the teacher was doing for some clients. The dream was fairly long.

Dream - The superhero emulators, the stolen object, and the dog with the toy train

2010-06-01T12:54:00.006-07:00

On Sunday, May 23, 2010, in the morning, I dreamed I was in my grandmother's house in Arizona. It was different, though, larger, and had a room-size basement near the kitchen. I became a couple of comic book heroes, particularly Spider-Man, though I wasn't really them, just emulating them, with reduced powers. At the same time I was apart from them, watching.

Time was repeating itself with something getting stolen or not stolen, something just outside the front door, something small, like a hardcover book with some little object on top of it, and a strap around it all, only it wasn't a book.

In the basement room, a couple of bad people came, and attacked one of the sometime heroes. I intervened and beat him up. The other one was holding back, partly hidden near the doorway, and higher up than the floor, near the ceiling. The Spider-Man person was still out in the back yard exercising, swinging around with the webs and climbing on things. He wasn't in costume, I think he was shirtless and just wearing pants. He eventually came back in, and was attacked by one of the men, I think the one I had beaten up. The man was fighting with him and I was watching incredulously; didn't he know he was trying to fight Spider-Man? Though he wasn't really as strong as the real Spider-Man, he seemed to be stronger than the guy he was fighting. The other man crept out and was trying to attack him too, and I beat him up, then joined in and beat up the man the Spider-Man figure was fighting, quickly ending it. Then I threw the bad guy out into the back yard, just gave a quick casual toss and out he went. The Spider-Man figure had turned and stared at me, somewhat surprised by it suddenly being over. The two people had been sent by the enemy, a man who was against us, and who was trying to steal the object outside the front door.

I had finally managed to save the object, after several times of having it stolen. As time repeated itself, I had found it there in time and retrieved it, and was happy and somewhat triumphant about it, though I knew it wasn't over, and I would have to keep watch, because time would repeat itself again.

I went out from the basement into the front room, and was talking with my mother, who looked younger, maybe in her early fifties. While talking I noticed to the left side, as determined while inside facing toward the front door, still in the front room, there was a dog something like Spats, a dog we used to have, large and shaggy, but with some gray in its hair instead of mostly being white. It went over to the right and began playing with an electric train engine, which was on a couch out in the floor not far from the front window. A lot of things were on the couch, it was pretty much covered with them.

At first it just seemed to be a small dark electric motor mounted on a small board, along with a few associated things, but it later changed to become a little train engine. I wondered if it was a good idea for the dog to be playing with it, and remarked on it to my mother. She seemed interested, but discounted the idea that it could be a problem.

I looked toward the door and saw that it was time already, as the incident kept repeating itself, and someone had come up and was snatching the thing again, which was laying down just outside the front door. I saw it through the door screen. I said something and got up and ran outside, accosting the perpetrator on the edge of the porch, although he was not the actual thief, just the mastermind.

As I went up to him I had been more my normal form at first, normal at least for the dream, as I was somewhat younger and slimmer than in real life, and still at least somewhat tall. Then I was gradually assuming the form of, or taking over the body of, a short, proper old man in 19th century clothes, with a large upturned collar.

At first I was standing there as I normally was, taller than him, holding him by the face and neck, angrily threatening him, demanding that he give the object back. He was smugly refusing, saying he didn't know what I was talking about. Of course it hadn't been him personally, I knew that, it had been one of his men, but he was responsible and knew all about it.

Then the police were coming up the walk or beside it, talking, trying to calm things down, talking like they knew me, dressed like police in the early 20th century. I found then I was gradually changing to another persona, an angry old man, the owner of the house, dressed in 19th century finery, and my hand drew back until it was just holding onto his neck or face a little bit, and then back further till it was not even that, more touching the lace sticking up around his neck, while he, slightly taller than me now, another old man, looked back at me smugly and haughtily.

The policeman, about to give a more stern warning, and maybe take me in, now looked uncertain, and was saying, "Well, if nothing really happened... Come on Mr. so-and-so," referring to me, I don't now remember the name he gave, trying to calm me down to let the other man go.

The policeman was leading him away, then, to the man's carriage, down the wide concrete steps at the edge of the concrete porch, and into the yard, which was partly paved and partly dirt with a little low grass.

I shouted, "What if I have proof!" in the sharp snappish voice of a cranky old man.

The other man, the enemy, halfway or more to the carriage now, turned and sneered at me and said, "You have no proof."

The policeman, down by the carriage, rounding to the other side of it, sounding somewhat distant now, said, "When you have the proof, call me. Until then...."

I watched him help the man get in the carriage. It was a horse drawn carriage, and it had to go over a swimming pool to get out. It was in the way, a small narrow swimming pool with brick along the edges, an outer row and a slightly sunken inner row. I watched as the driver slowly, carefully moved the carriage over it, the tall wheels going along on the slightly recessed row of bricks like it was on rails. I watched, fascinated.

Then as it neared the end it speeded up and turned to the left, the two wheels on its right going over empty space over the swimming pool, without any problem. The carriage continued on into the street, through the wide opening in the tall, black, iron fence, going away.

I turned and went back to the house, returning to my more normal appearance, for the dream figure. I went back into the house and resumed talking to my mother, hoping that when the scene replayed we could catch it and stop the thing from being stolen. The dog began to lay down train tracks from the couch, on little slabs that it joined together. The tracks went from the couch down onto the floor and turned towards the door, then going out the door and down the short steps immediately beyond it, onto the concrete front porch.

Dream - The complimentary cake

2010-06-01T12:44:00.004-07:00

Sunday morning, May 23, 2010, I dreamed I was in Nevada, driving off to work and then, after work, driving back to town. I was in the dark blue 1987 Oldsmobile, I think. I had recently come back from Arizona, maybe the previous day.

When I left for work, I was worried about having enough gas, but I thought if I had to I could stop at a couple of places before I got back to town, particularly the service station on the corner where the road turns toward town. I didn't want to, though, and besides I was a little suspicious of the service station on the corner's gas, and probably more so of the other one. I did have enough gas to make it back, though, and didn't think about it after that.

I had read something in the previous day's local newspaper, in the want ads, about someone giving out free cake tonight. They didn't say free, it was some other word meaning that, maybe complimentary. They were doing it because of something else that was happening, maybe a special occasion, maybe a fund raiser, maybe something else, I don't remember now. I thought I would stop and get some on the way back from work. I thought about it off and on that day at work, sometimes looking at the ad again, and sometimes wondering if I would really go ahead with it, but I kept reminding myself of how I had wanted to do it. I also thought if I should mention it to other people at work.

I was driving back into town now, into a neighborhood. It was night, early evening I guess. I didn't take the turn I normally did in the neighborhood, I went the other way. One of the cars from work went by, turning in the normal direction, the people in it looking back at me, probably wondering what I was doing. I took a few more turns, and the street itself turned back to the left, the area beyond it a broad dirt area. A lot of cars were parked along the curb. It was difficult to see the numbers painted on the curb because of them. I went on for a short while, just a few houses, then decided, based on the numbers and my feeling about the matter, that I had gone too far, and the house I was looking for was way back, maybe near the corner. I picked up the paper from the seat beside me and peered at it in the dark. It was supposed to be number 75.

I parked back at the corner, in the dirt area, and walked up beside a house and looked in the front window, from a distance. The kitchen table had a lot of stuff on it, including some large odd shaped un-iced white cakes, apparently in the shape of animals, maybe rabbits. A woman was there, slightly overweight, and a couple of kids. This looked like it was probably the place. I thought I should probably ask them.

One of the kids, a boy, went out back to the swing set. I went out there too, at a distance, staying out of the yard. The mother came out the back door, and I saw that what she was wearing was a pink flowered house dress or nightgown. She called to the kid to come back inside, that it was time to eat, and the kid said something and started to head for the house. The woman turned around and started to go back in. The soft rain falling on what she was wearing looked oddly slick and shiny, and I realized that she was wearing a transparent raincoat over her dress. I also saw that the dress had a seam down the back which had separated in the area of her rear, maybe two or three inches. Nothing was visible through it right now, though, it was just a dark line in the seam. I wondered about the advisability of actually asking them about whether this was the place with the cake, and wondered if I should just leave and forget about it. I really wanted some cake, though.

I went back to the front, and the sidewalk, and wandered there for a bit and among the cars, thinking I would try to find the house numbers on the curb I guess, and maybe getting some courage to knock on the door, when I saw an old woman out there, dressed in fancy clothes and heavy makeup. She was smiling, grinning, and asked if I was looking for the cake. I said that I was, and she took me in the house. The younger woman and the kids were at the kitchen table, the woman standing. The kids might have been, too, or might have been sitting down, and the woman was talking to them. I looked over at them as we went into the house, but we didn't go into the kitchen with them, and they ignored us, paying no attention.

The old woman took me instead to the left, to a table in another room. A huge rabbit-shaped cake was sitting upright, with light brown icing in heavy swirls. It didn't seem to have anything cut out of it yet. She talked to me, still happily grinning, as she went to it and made a cut up on the head, not quite enough to get the piece loose, as it still needed a cut down from the top. Then she reached down to get something to put it in, a piece of plastic wrap. She asked where I was from, and after a slight pause I said Arizona. She was asking something then about that, some nice conversational comment maybe, and apparently forgot where she had started to cut the piece earlier, and put the triangular serving blade under the bottom of the cake, where the bunched legs of the rabbit were. Still talking and distracted, she lifted up and tried to take the piece out, which hadn't been cut at all, and a big section broke off the cake, going up about eight inches, slanting to an edge at the top. She looked at it, startled, and said, "Ohhh!" Then, grinning again, said that I would just have to take the whole thing, referring to the large piece she had broken off. She put it in the plastic wrap, somewhat awkwardly, got it sort of cradled in it, and gave it to me. I thanked her and left.

I went out into the night and the soft rain, holding the cake that was awkwardly set into the somewhat bunched plastic wrap, which went around the bottom and up the sides some like a bowl, and not too much at the top. I was eating the cake as I went, and slowly walked back to the car.

I found it was the old green 1970 Chevrolet El Camino, a mid-size car that was half pickup truck. I had left the window most of the way down too, in the rain. I hadn't intended to be gone this long. Trying to find where the door lock was, I saw that it was in an odd place on the back fender, a foot or so from the wheel. I put the key in and turned it, and a window started to rise up from the fender that formed the side of the pickup bed. I think the window in the door also rolled up. I was startled, not expecting this, especially the window in the fender. I guessed it was some kind of automatic thing that had been built in, in case someone put a roof over the bed.

I got in and tried to shut the door, but it wouldn't latch. I wondered about that, thinking about a car I had that kind of trouble with, but it hadn't been this one. I wondered if this one had developed it, too. I seemed to be too crowded also, that might be part of it, I was too close to the door. I tried to scoot over some, without much success, and turned and saw to my surprise that my father was sitting there, and on the other side of him was one of my nieces. They were both younger than in real life, and she was still a child. Then I realized that this was one of the car models with a back seat and four doors (which didn't exist in real life), and I was in the back seat. I got out and went around to sit in the front. I had a lot more room, there.

I slowly backed off the dirt into the street, and turned so the back was pointing down the street. Another car was now trying to come from around the turn, and had paused. I put the car in drive, feeling tired and sleepy, but the car was still rolling backwards a little. I looked at the transmission markings and wondered if I had moved the lever enough, whether it might be in neutral instead. It was hard to tell. I moved it over some more, and after a pause, because of its age I guess, it suddenly caught and the car started slowly moving forward.

I drove around the curve and started looking for a way out of the neighborhood and back home. I sometimes ate my cake as we went. They were both somehow in the front seat with me now. My father suggested I share it with my niece, and, I guess, with him, but I had been looking forward to eating it and didn't want to. My niece started whining about wanting some, and started to cry a little, and my father was saying I should give some to her. I said, somewhat irritated, that I would find some place that was open and get her something there.

I went to the left and found after a little bit what seemed to be a main road, though it was just two lanes, and got on it, going left. We drove away, the neighborhood on our left, and very little our right. Soon we were driving through a long area that was largely empty, seeming to be on the outskirts of things. After a while, I found what seemed to be a very small shopping center and turned left onto it. A few other cars did too, not many. It was closed, and I think I was just looking for a place to rest, to sleep for a while, though I'm not sure I did.

Then it was getting lighter, toward morning. I started the engine and began slowly driving along the shopping center parking lot, trying to find a good place to get back on the road. There was a break in the curb, but it was raised too high from the level of the parking lot, which was mostly gravelly dirt in that area, and I thought the car would bottom out if we tried it. We seemed to be somewhere in Arizona now, on the outskirts of things, though it didn't feel that we had gone very far.

I finally got out somehow, turning right, going back the way we came. After a while I stopped at another small shopping center. It seemed to be in the afternoon now, on Sunday. I carefully drove through it with my car, through the entrance and into the building and then out into a large open area, a kind of large outdoor plaza, with the shopping center forming a big rectangle around it. Some kind of local celebration was going on, some kind of Indian-themed thing, with pots and ceramics and other things on display, and various minor games set up for the kids.

I drove slowly and carefully through part of it, along the edge of it. They had some little pots and ceramic figures set up in a partial ring in the way, though, a little ways into it, and I had to carefully thread the car through them. I turned right, then, and headed slowly into a space between buildings, heading out of the shopping center, but then turned around and headed back. My father was asking why I didn't continue, they might have had a shop somewhere on the other side where I could buy something for her to eat, but I said no, I wanted to try somewhere else. I didn't say any more, but I just didn't want to try searching around this place any more, it seemed too much work, and it bothered me to be in there with all this activity going on.

I tried to go back the way I came, but found that the ceramic stuff on the ground was now too much in the way. There was enough room to walk through, but not drive a car. I stopped and stared at it for a while, and started to go and then stopped again. There wasn't any way I could safely drive through it. Like before, it curved around an area with a tall thing in the middle, maybe a statue and fountain, but now there was just no opening big enough to get through.

I finally reached down the outside of the car door with my left hand, my right hand still holding what was left of the cake, and, still inside the car, picked the car up. With my feet sticking out through the bottom of the car, I then walked on through the display, and went through the entrance to the inside of the shopping center. I found though, that the way out was narrower than I remembered. Instead of double doors set together, they were now set apart from each other, with maybe eight feet between them. They were also being locked by some women. It had evidently gotten too late and the place was closing. It was still afternoon, but might have been around 5:00 now, and I guess the place, not being in an area with a large population, closed early on Sunday.

They saw I was trying to leave and one of them went toward a door to unlock it, the one on the left. I stared it it. It seemed awfully narrow, just intended for a person to go through. I finally headed for it, thinking it would have to work somehow, that I would make it work, somehow. While the woman held the door open, I went toward it, and I found the car was narrow enough now that I could walk on through, and I walked on through, happily.

The story behind "The mountains and the road"

2010-05-10T03:19:00.004-07:00

The title story in the March 5, 2010 post "Wordzzle 102 - The mountains and the road" was based on something that actually happened. However, it happened long ago, back in the 1960-65 area, and my father was driving, not me. I was just a child, and the whole family was traveling across the desert somewhere in the American Southwest. I don't remember now why we were making the trip, or what state we were in at the time. We made a lot of trips in those years.

My father had been driving for a long time, since before dawn I think. Perhaps we had even been driving all night, with my mother doing part of the driving. This may also have been the time when he was driving into the morning sun, and had the sun shades down on the windshield and partly unfolded maps and whatever else he could find stuffed in along the upper part of the windshield, trying to block the sun's rays. I'm not sure, though.

In any case, we drove along a road through the desert. The road was very straight and mostly flat, with minor dips. In the far distance in front of us were mountains, low and indistinct and gray, and probably partly beyond the horizon. We drove toward them for a long time. Hours passed, slowly.

Sometimes we could see mirages on the road ahead of us, in the distance, looking like dark wet places, but they always melted away as we got closer. We talked about the mirages. My parents pointed them out to us, at least at first, and explained that they weren't real. Traffic was light, but I think it picked up some as it got later in the morning. I think the road was just two lanes, and people occasionally passed other people, including us.

The mountains slowly got larger and closer, very, very slowly. It seemed to be taking a very long time. I gradually began to be able to see some features on them, though they remained purplish and hazy looking. As time wore on they got larger and larger, and I could see a lot of things on them, a lot of details, though the mountains still retained the purplish hazy look. I started to wonder what would happen when we reached them. The road didn't seem to reach the mountains, it seemed to just abruptly end before it reached them. I think I could faintly see in some places on some of the mountains the faint trails of roads, but none of them led to this road. And still we kept getting closer, and still the road just seemed to end at some place before the mountains were reached.

Then finally, we got close enough that I was able to see that the road abruptly turned to the right. I could see cars traveling along that section, some heading toward us and some going the way we were, though they were at right angles to us since they were on the part of the road that had turned. I even saw them reach the turning point, and turn and start to come our way, though that part was initially hidden, either because it was a little lower or because a slight rise was in the ground between us and it.

We finally reached the turn, sometime in the early or mid afternoon I think, and drove along beside the mountains. I watched them go past us and gradually recede. Eventually we reached a point where they started to taper off, and I saw a place that had a big separation between the mountains, with a road that wound through the flat section there, coming from the mostly flat desert beyond, scattered with what I guess were numerous but widely separated little bushes. I watched cars traveling on that road, small and far away, as we came to that area and gradually went past it. The mountains continued on for a little bit past that area, but with smaller isolated mountains rising up out of the desert.

We continued on, to wherever it was we were going, as the afternoon got later. We probably had another day or more of traveling to do. It was a very long trip.

Dream - The uniform woman's birthday and then zombies

2010-05-10T03:08:00.001-07:00

Around February 17, 2008, I had a dream in which I was at the radiator shop with my mother and a woman who supplied the uniforms (who looked like Mr. Monk's wife, from the TV show). We were all sitting at a small table, talking. The woman's birthday was today.

Finally it was time to pay her and my mother started looking through her purse for her checkbook, but couldn't find it, and it seemed she might have left it at home. I said that I could go home and get it. I wondered, though, in my mind, if the woman would be able to wait while I did this because she had other stops to make. Nobody responded to my suggestion. My mother continued to look through her purse. The woman was softly crying. I repeated my suggestion but was again ignored.

I came to a feeling that the woman didn't know that I didn't have a checkbook and couldn't pay her either, and that she felt that although my mother normally paid her, that I could make an exception and pay her myself this time, and that I was unwilling to bend the "rules" and do this, even though it was her birthday, it was her birthday and now she wasn't even going to get paid.

The woman drove off in her uniform van crying, with me running beside her for a little while, trying to comfort her, but she drove away. The shop had a large dirt area all around it, with no other buildings nearby. The van had been parked sideways at the front and she drove around the side and around the back, driving off pointed toward the south, with me finally standing there watching her go, unable to keep up with the van any more. It was dark now, though earlier in the dream it was before noon.

I went back into the shop, either through the front or through the back and ending up toward the front. Some people were driving up and coming in. I went toward where the office was in real life, but in the dream the shop extended past the office (which might not have been there at this point in the dream) and into a largish room where various parts were stored, many sealed with plastic to cardboard backs and hanging from hooks. I was going to point out the parts to someone and suggest that they look through them and see if what they wanted was there (and I think I did this).

There were two large glass doors, actually thick plastic, to the side near the parts area, and someone came in, perhaps through them, and warned that something bad was coming. I don't remember how it was worded, but some kind of evil people were coming. I went toward the clear plastic doors, which were each perhaps six feet wide. The doors sometimes had small metal frames and sometimes they didn't have any. They came together without any post or door frame between them, joining to each other. I went out through them and some people, perhaps five or six, were starting to gather, coming from different directions.

I went back in and got a battery-powered electric drill that had a huge drill bit on it and threatened one of them, pointing the drill at the person's chest. The end of the drill was still a foot or two away from the person. He smiled and looked amused, saying, "You don't really think you're going to stop me with that." I came to realize that they were all dead, like some kind of zombies.

I went back inside and closed the doors, but all they had to lock with was a short (perhaps a quarter inch long) rod that stuck out of a small bar that swung over and went into a slot or opening attached to the door on the left, the rod/bar thing was heavy duty metal, perhaps cast bronze, but it was too small and as the people outside started to come against the doors, mindlessly but increasingly insistently bumping against them, the doors shifted up and down and the rod kept coming out of the slot.

I was pushing against the doors with my shoulder, going along the length of the seam between the doors trying to find other places to join them together. The person who came to warn me was at the other door, helping hold it closed. I found toward the bottom where two metal tabs with openings were attached, one on each door, where something could be stuck through them, and higher up I found where two eye-screws were attached, one on each door, and also set so something could be put through them. One was on top of the other, but they were not quite in a vertical arrangement. I found a drill key in the parts section somewhere and stuck it through the screw eyes.

The pushing and bumping from the other side kept getting worse, and I had also been hearing a kind of muffled grumbling, almost groaning sound from them that was growing more insistent. I kept telling the other person to get some padlocks. I knew there were some hanging in the parts room to the side of us, hanging in the their plastic-sealed cardboard (I don't think I actually said much about where the padlocks were, just to get them). At least some of them. I knew, had loops thin enough to go through the openings. The person wasn't bringing me the padlocks, though, and I kept asking for them, as I desperately continued trying to keep the doors from opening.

The bike that failed

2010-04-28T10:24:00.003-07:00

When I was a kid, my father bought me a used bicycle, from some people in the neighborhood. I already had a bicycle. but it was smaller. The new bicycle was large and heavy, and had a small chrome coil spring on the front, almost horizontal, and narrowing sharply at both ends. The new bike was a blue-green color, while my previous bicycle was red. It was a Schwinn, and like the previous bike was a single speed, and braked by pushing the pedals backward. It was much harder to ride than my old bike, though. It took a lot of effort. I think my father wanted it for me because I was tall for my age, and overweight, and he wanted something that fit my size better. I rode it for several years after that, and it was, in fact, the last bicycle I ever owned.

I put rectangular metal baskets on the back, on either side, so I could carry things in them when I bought something at a store. I also put a headlight on it, battery operated, with a white exterior that was a rounded square at the front and widened slightly as it went back, before tapering to a cone shape. Beside it on the right I put a horn that looked like a much smaller version of it, except that it was chrome and tapered more at the sides than the top and bottom, and had a grill in the front instead of a lens. I used the bicycle quite a bit, even going at least once to the Woolco store in a town that bordered ours.

Years passed, and I learned how to drive a car. I drove the car sometimes, but also made an effort to sometimes ride the bicycle. I could see the time would come when I would not ride the bicycle at all, but I wanted to put it off as long as I reasonably could.

Sometime when I was 17, I think, and probably in September 1970, or near there, I decided to go to the local drugstore on my bicycle, to see if they had gotten any interesting books or magazines in. It was probably on a Saturday or Sunday, and it feels more like it was Sunday, though I can't be sure now. I had intended to go earlier in the afternoon, but I kept putting it off, reading probably and maybe watching some TV. Finally, as it was getting close to sundown, I told my mother what I was going to do. She objected, saying it was too late, but I insisted on going.

I got on the bicycle and went down the driveway into the street. The street is slanted slightly downhill, so that helped, though it would make it more difficult when I returned. I started standing up on the pedals and pushing hard, to build up a lot of speed, because it would still be a fair amount of effort to pedal it, even going slightly downhill. I intended to sit down and glide for a while, after the bicycle was going fast.

Suddenly, though, after I had gone past a few houses, I found myself lying in the street, halfway over the handlebars. I was still holding on to them, with the end of one of the handlebars, probably the right one, jabbing hard against my ribs near my side. I didn't know what had happened. I think one of the wheels, it had to be the back one I guess, was still slowly turning. I had a faint impression of just coming to a stop, sliding there, just the last few feet.

After a few tries I managed to get off the handlebar that was sticking into me. It was awkward, because I had to let go with one hand to find a better place to push at, and without the support of both hands my weight fell much more on the handlebar that was jabbing into me. I finally did it though, and got to my feet. I felt kind of banged up, but seemed to be alright. I was wearing a light jacket, blue in color, and I found that one of the sleeves, the left one, had a small triangular tear, about an inch long, in the upper part of it. That was a little odd, since I had been laying in the street on my right side.

I felt totally betrayed. To be going down the street and everything seeming to be alright, pleasant even, and then to end up laying in the street on my side with no transition. It didn't seem right.

I looked up and down the street, but didn't see any cars driving on it, just the ones that were parked by the sidewalk and in the driveways.

I put the bicycle back on its wheels. The shaft the handlebars was on had gotten twisted around, and the handlebars were no longer aligned with the front wheel. I think I had noticed that while it was still laying in the street. I put the front wheel between my legs and twisted the handlebars around until they aligned again with the front wheel, then started walking the bicycle back home.

I was significantly farther down the street than my last memory before the accident. There are two slight bends in the street, one going one way and the other the opposite way. My last memory was before the first bend, and I was quite a ways past it now, perhaps five or six houses. The street was in a light shadow, too, meaning the sun had either gone completely down, or far enough that it was hidden behind the houses, maybe because of the bend in the street causing this section of street to not be pointed directly west, and putting more houses in the way of the low sunlight. Or perhaps some unknown period of time had elapsed while I was laying in the street. I had no way of knowing, though it couldn't have been long, as it wasn't really dark yet. And there was that wheel that had still been turning, even if just a little.

I still didn't know what had happened, and felt betrayed, just betrayed, that the universe could allow something like this to happen, with no explanation for it. I walked on with the bicycle, feeling very bitter.

As I walked, I eventually noticed something laying in the street, a few houses back from where I had fallen. It was something small and dark and flat. As I got closer to it, I saw that it was a bicycle pedal in the street. I looked at my bicycle and noticed that the right pedal was gone. I realized then that it had fallen off the bicycle while I had been standing on it, and that that was what had caused the accident. I had no memory of it happening, or of the struggle I must have gone through, fighting to keep from falling over while I went that distance down the street to where I finally fell. I pictured then that I had fallen back on the bicycle seat, and pushed out with my right leg over and over trying to keep the bicycle from falling, and ended up halfway over the handlebars when the bicycle fell over.

I think now that, since I was leaning forward, I probably fell forward when the pedal came off, and may have missed the seat entirely. My foot would have hit the street and instantly been dragged back, the impact and extra drag trying to tilt the bicycle, along with me leaning to that side. I would have been partly sticking out past the handlebars, low over them and maybe even with my upper body actually resting on them, with my leg well to the back, with my foot, probably mainly the toe, jabbing against the ground trying to keep the bicycle from falling over. I had apparently gone past three houses like that, before finally losing the battle. Since I had been going fairly fast, it would have just taken a few seconds, though. The impact had been great enough that it wiped out my memory of it, along with a little more, to account for the missing memory of going around the slight bend in the street and what happened after that.

I picked up the pedal and continued home.

After I got home, I told my mother, who was there in the living room, what had happened. As I told her, I noticed one time a sharp pain in my side, when I turned my body a particular way, but I straightened my body and continued talking. My mother, who was sitting at the opposite corner of the room from the front door, was mad at me for tearing my jacket, and said that I couldn't wear it to school now, and we didn't have the money to buy a new one, and probably said something like "I told you not to go." She also said, "I hope you're not hurt, we don't have any money." I assured her I wasn't, just banged up and bruised a bit.

I sat down by the front door, and started working on a jigsaw puzzle I had been doing. I did a lot of jigsaw puzzles in those days. After a while she said, more conciliatory, "You're not really hurt, are you?" Again I assured her I wasn't, just beat up some.

I wondered though, to myself, about the pain I had felt. It wasn't like anything I had felt before. When I finally stood up again, I tried twisting my body again, and the pain was enough to take my breath away. It was a very bad pain somewhere internally, low in my chest toward the side, sometimes it seemed more toward the back. It was hard to be sure exactly where it was, and I didn't know what was actually injured. I realized that I had to keep my body fairly straight from now on until it was healed. If it healed. If I made it for a week without it getting worse, or maybe killing me, I thought it might heal on its own.

From then on I was careful to keep my body straight. When I had to talk to someone who was off to the side, I turned my whole body to face them. When I got into bed, I started at the foot and went in on hands and knees, keeping my back straight, before carefully laying down and then carefully turning my body to the position I wanted to sleep in. After a week or so I checked to see if the pain was still there. It was, perhaps just slightly diminished, just slightly duller. A few weeks later I checked again. It was quite a bit less but still there. I forgot about it for a while, and then after several more weeks remembered and checked again, and it was gone.

Several years later, I had lost quite a bit of weight, and was laying on my left side in my bed, leaning on my left elbow, reading. I had been noticing, from time to time, that the ribs on my left side seemed to bulge out at the bottom when I did that, but I assumed that it was because my left side was stretched out in a curve, emphasizing the lower part of my ribs there. It bothered me though, that it should look like that, and now I finally decided to check it out further, to test it, to see if the explanation was correct. I laid on my back, and found that my ribs on that side still stuck out too far, and the ribs in general on that side stuck out in a rounded shape, sticking out farthest at the lower edge. On the other side, the right, the ribs actually had a section in the lower half that was depressed some. I turned onto my right side and right elbow, to see how the ribs looked when stretched like the left ones, but the right ones hardly stuck out at all, just a little bit.

This upset me quite a bit, to think that something was wrong with me like that. I eventually told my mother, and talked about it with her. I knew I hadn't been that way back when I had lost some weight back in the early to late 1960s, and I hadn't been that way when I was much younger and also a more normal weight. It must have been hidden by a weight gain that had occurred during high school, and for a couple of years afterward, before I started losing it again. I finally figured out it must be the bicycle accident that had caused it, having no other possible explanation for it.

It bothered me to have to be like this, to be deformed in this manner, though it was not noticeable to others unless I pointed it out. I also noticed, later, on rare occasions, that when laying on my left side reading, when I shifted position some it felt like one rib grated against another, and shifted to a new position slightly on top of the other one. It was another annoyance, but it didn't usually happen, and after a few more years it didn't seem to happen at all.

My mother worried about it a lot, and still sometimes does, even saying that I should have an operation to fix it. I keep turning her down though, saying that it's not causing any problems, and they probably wouldn't have done anything for it if we saw a doctor at the time, other than maybe putting tape on it. And although my mother worries about it, it long ago stopped being a worry to me, becoming just a curiosity, and a bit of a mystery over exactly what damage was done.

I never did see a doctor for it, but one time, maybe 15 years or so after the accident, I mentioned the ribs to a doctor while being checked for something else. He said that injuries to the breastbone could cause the cartilage to scar when it healed, twisting the ribs. I accepted that as a possible partial explanation, but not a total one. I still felt that it didn't explain everything, though I didn't say so to the doctor. To me, the ribs seemed to have too much deformity to be totally explained by something like that.

Sometime after the accident occurred, perhaps weeks, I'm not sure now, I went to a bicycle store and looked over the pedals on the revolving rack they had of them. I found some that looked like the ones on my bicycle, but I may have gone home and checked to be sure before I bought one. I don't remember now. In any case, I did buy one, and put it on my bicycle, still feeling somewhat bitter about it.

I rode the bicycle several times after that. I never quite felt confident when I was standing up on the pedals, pushing at them, and I tended to do that less than before, and not as vigorously. There was always the thought that, though unlikely, it could happen again. As time went on, though, I drove a car more and more, and I eventually just drove a car to where I wanted to go, wherever that might be, as I had known would happen, and never rode the bicycle again.

Dream - The choice

2010-04-28T10:17:00.005-07:00

I had an interesting dream on the morning of Friday, April 18, 2003, involving an important choice in my life. I'm not sure what was happening in the first part of the dream, perhaps something about school or work. Then the direction of the dream slowly changed.

The dream was mostly very dimly lit. I was in a large house or other building, with several rooms, some of which were oddly shaped. I went into a large dark room with an audience seated, waiting for me. Some sort of initiation was to be performed, but it was almost like a coronation. I was the honoree. The room was also filled with people moving about in a large central area with a broad, relatively short aisle leading to it. I saw a glimpse of a young woman and some other people who greeted me. I was led into the room by an older man, and maybe one or two other people. The young woman initially appeared to be largely undressed, wearing a light-colored small poncho-type garment, tapering to a point between her shoulders, and nothing else. I noticed as she moved quickly away toward the front, though, that she was actually wearing some tights made out of some shiny, relatively heavy, material.

I followed after her and was presented with a choice. Both the young woman and a small boy, perhaps three or four years old, were placed before me. I understood that I was to choose one of them. I realized that it was to be a very important choice, determining the future course of my life. I felt it was also in the nature of a test.

Everyone was waiting expectantly for me to choose. I started talking, analyzing the situation. I said that the boy was symbolic of various things, the last one of which was the future. As I said each thing, the audience nodded expectantly and seemed to become more pleased as I named each additional symbol. I turned to the woman momentarily, having temporarily exhausted my symbols for the boy, and said that she was also a symbol of the future.

Wishing to postpone my decision as long a possible, as both choices seemed desirable in their own way and I didn't wish to exclude one and choose the other, I kept talking. I asked if I could ask other people for their opinions. Everyone nodded expectantly while continuing to smile and watch. I asked if I could choose both of them and they nodded and smiled more deeply, seeming to be pleased.

Though I did not choose then, and seemingly never did actually choose, it seemed to lose its urgency after that and the dream moved forward to a new situation. I became aware that people were happily cheering and the initiation was over for the moment. I felt that I was actually some figure of ancient royalty that had just passed the test, fulfilling some ancient prophecy for the return of the prince.

As I moved away to exit through the way I had come, I noticed the CIS Manager, the computer person from Fallon, Nevada, a tall man with gray-white hair and beard, in the crowd that had been sitting but was now moving toward the exit with me. I didn't get close enough to speak with him. Outside the room, I felt that there was some enemy approaching, but I had passed the test successfully and was filled with power. I even flew about, leaving the building and coming back. I talked briefly with the young woman, at one point asking her what she thought my choice should be. Her personality seemed happy, but somewhat respectful, perhaps because of my rank. She seemed to be willing enough to talk, but she seemed evasive and somewhat quiet on this subject. Both she and the boy seemed at times to be somewhat foreign, perhaps Mexican, although this was much more prominent with the boy.

I left again and then came back in through a small entrance way/hallway that immediately branched in all directions. My mother was there and I talked to her briefly. She seemed to be cautioning me about something. She was also one of the people that were with me when I originally came there. I then went back in, and woke up shortly thereafter.

In looking back on the dream, although in the dream I was definitely leaning toward choosing both the woman and the boy, I never explicitly made the choice, which seemed very attractive and seemed to represent a family and the continuation of the family line, through the boy, into the future. The choice of either one separately would have meant other things. The woman, of course, would have been an attractive companion. Choosing the boy instead of the woman, though, would have meant companionship on a different level, that of childhood. In a way, in real life I chose the boy instead of the woman, as I did not wish to grow up. I felt the best time in my life was when I was too young to go to school, and I viewed growing up with great anxiety, feeling a great foreboding regarding it. In a way, this foreboding was correct, though some would argue it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. (I have had, though, many psychic experiences, including correct predictions of the near and far future.) In the dream, even if not implicitly, I chose a different course.

Wordzzle 102 - The mountains and the road

2010-03-05T23:57:00.004-07:00

Favorite posts, Part III

2010-03-05T10:34:00.001-07:00

These are some of my favorite posts, from the third hundred posts.

291. Fun with the DOS prompt
275. National Novel Writing Month 2009 - Winner!
261. My time at GeoCities
231. My head under me, trapped in darkness
217. Finding my grandmother

297. Wordzzle 96 - Pixie party
294. Wordzzle 95 - Other realities
283. Wordzzle 93 - Food fright
279. Wordzzle 92 - The Scarecrow and the King of the Turtles
276. Wordzzle 91 - No telling
273. Wordzzle 90 - Passing inspection
269. Wordzzle 89 - Sugar-coated
265. Wordzzle 88 - Who done it?
250. Wordzzle 87 - Impractical nurse
243. Wordzzle 86 - Past times
237. Wordzzle 85 - Puppetry
232. Wordzzle 84 - Breaking through
228. Wordzzle 83 - Exit, laughing
218. Wordzzle 81 - Under the sun
213. Wordzzle 80 - The alligator people
209. Wordzzle 79 - Shadows and smoke
206. Wordzzle 78 - The wall
202. Wordzzle 77 - The silent majority

295. Dream - Crashing the car, then saved, then a woman who was drinking
293. Dream - A game with superheroes and a villain
290. Dream - Band of brothers
286. Dream - A car with the Golden Girls, and I become a giant and move my car by hand
285. Dream - Working as a policeman, mistaken for a black woman, and the pie-slice shaped books that I took without paying
282. Dream - The Old West town in another dimension
281. Dream - Hidden areas under the ground covered with a layer of hard dirt
280. Dream - Using a computer that shows a list of news stories
274. Dream - Finding my brother's apartment and trying to get ready for work
270. Dream - The long line and the door with no return
266. Dream - The small buildings in the lake, some with red liquid and some with blue
244. Dream - The tornadoes and the dinosaur tree branch
240. Dream - Summoning the Grays
239. Dream - Attacked by a giant Phillip from Guiding Light
238. Dream - Oh how high the shadow grows
234. Dream - Captured by miniature golf playing mobsters
233. Dream - The plane like a fly, and as Spider-Man I am captured and taken deep under the ground
230. Dream - Getting strange powers, running from people as a woman
229. Dream - Traveling, carrying engines, and the building in the grasslands with the old woman and the folding luggage
225. Dream - Finding an old schoolmate, Sally Field [not really]
221. Dream - A massive engine being revved higher and higher
219. Dream - Writing exercises that affected reality, and the way station to another world
214. Dream - I am in a TV reality show
211. Dream - Gangsters, and a red blotch in the air
210. Dream - The mobster restaurant and the Cadillac
207. Dream - The new timeline and the psychic lecturer
204. Dream - The auction of the lion-thing
203. Dream - My grandmother is voted president of a club

Wordzzle 101 - Dr. John

2010-02-26T23:53:00.006-07:00

Wordzzle 100 - Captured

2010-02-19T23:54:00.015-07:00

This is my contribution to this week's Wordzzle. Wordzzle is a game in which each week word lists, used to create stories, are given on the blog Views from Raven's Nest. Participating users post their stories on their own blogs.

This is my entry number 44, for Wordzzle week 100.

Ten Word Challenge:

transfixed,
treachery,
basics,
fragrance,
sampler,
pregnant,
cartoons,
lark,
spartan

He watched the Saturday morning cartoons, and the treachery therein. It had started as a lark, but he sat there now, transfixed. He felt his brain being driven back to basics, the overlays of civilization falling away, until there was just the fear, and the fascination, and the tension. He felt he was seeing a sampler of terror, infused with a fragrance of frustration and utter failure. He watched, trembling, as pregnant pause after pregnant pause brought forth yet more disasters. He tried once to gather his resolve and his strength, recalling perhaps how the Spartans of old had held out against all obstacles, and tried to turn it off. The remote fell from his limp paws, however, as the Road Runner prevailed yet again and his adversary met a particularly ugly fate. The coyote sat there, watching, a whine escaping from between bared teeth, a whine that slowly grew into a howl, a howl that seemed as if it might never end.

Mini Challenge:

rapid,
camping,
blandishments,
transitory,
plug-ins

Should he be a he-man, an outdoorsman, go camping, wrestle bears, save people, be a hero, and enjoy the blandishments of others? Such things were transitory, though, and rapidly faded away. He looked among the other plug-ins. Ah, here was one for President. That looked more promising...

Mega challenge:

transfixed,
treachery,
basics,
fragrance,
sampler,
pregnant,
cartoons,
lark,
spartan

rapid,
camping,
blandishments,
transitory,
plug-ins

It's amazing how rapidly things can change. He had been out in the wilderness, hiking along remote streams and forested slopes, camping each night in a new place. Everything had been going well, until one night a horrible fragrance had gradually spread throughout the area, increasing until it was stifling in intensity. Then something had come and taken him, and he didn't remember what happened after that.

When he had woken up, it was daytime, and he was alone. He was laying on branches that had been formed into a bed, or perhaps nest. He was in an open area the size of a small house, surrounded on three sides by the mountain. A partial cave formed at the back where the inward slanting slope provided a partial overhang.

He walked to the front and looked down. The slope was very steep, but should be passable, at least for those who came prepared. He wasn't prepared now, though, and lacked even the basics. Everything was back in camp, wherever that was, even his shoes. It looked like he might be here for a while. He wasn't sure how to get out in stockinged feet.

He spent the rest of the day alone there, and examined the place thoroughly. There didn't seem to be any easy way out. Some plants grew there, but he didn't see anything that looked much like food. There wasn't any water either, though he supposed there would be quite a bit when it rained.

Late in the day he crouched by the edge and looked over again. There just didn't seem to be any way he could keep his grip for very long. He would start sliding, and the slide would turn into a tumble, and a series of falls, toward the trees below. If nothing else happened he would eventually have to try it, though. It was that or stay here and die.

He meditated for a while on the treachery that had put him here, and on how transitory life could be. If this was something from the cartoons, a fix would appear, even if the fix was something impossible. If this was something bad happening on a computer, downloads or plug-ins might be available to fix the problem. Life wasn't that easy, though, and sometimes fixes just weren't there.

That night the creature came back. He had been sleeping, but became aware of the smell, and forced himself awake. He saw a huge figure, indistinct, coming towards him. It was carrying something, and thrust it at him, making strange hooting sounds. He tried to push the material away from his face, feeling branches and maybe roots, and what seemed to be huge hairy fingers. The creature was persistent, though. He rolled, trying to get away, and the creature grabbed him. He pushed out at it, and felt a huge belly. He was puzzled for a moment, and then realized the creature must be female, and pregnant. He paused, momentarily transfixed by the thought, and then the creature was pushing his head down, into the mass of sticks and roots. He struggled violently, swinging his arms and kicking, hitting whatever he could. The creature grunted and threw him through the air what seemed to be a considerable distance. He landed awkwardly and painfully on his shoulder, and lay there moaning. The creature came to him and began to roll him back and forth, slapping at him and screeching. It went on and on, and eventually he lost awareness of it.

When he awoke it was morning again, and again he was alone. He went to look at what the creature had brought him, and he found that it was indeed some branches and roots. He guessed it was supposed to be food, but he wasn't sure it was something humans were meant to eat. He gingerly gnawed at the roots for a while. They tasted strange but not overly bad, but he couldn't bring himself to eat much of them. He wondered if he was going to be reduced to eating wrens and larks and mice and bugs, and a whole sampler of forest life. There didn't seem to be much of it where he was, though, and he wasn't sure how he would catch any of it anyway.

The creature didn't come back that night, nor the following night. The next day he dug in the dirt with a rock, hoping to find something, anything. He found some worms, and to his surprise, he ate them. He could really use some water now, but none was available. He worried about the creature coming back, but almost hoped it would. He hoped it would bring him something to eat, something that looked more like real food. He had given up on trying to fight it. It was simply too big. Even the ancient Spartans would have trouble fighting such a thing. And if he somehow managed to really hurt it, it would likely strike back much harder, and he might not survive. He thought of trying to talk to it, but there seemed to be a significant language barrier, and he wasn't sure anyway what niceties he could say or blandishments he could make that would convince it to let him go.

The next day it rained, and he spent a long time trying to catch drops from the air, but finally abandoned it and began drinking from the dirty puddles. He found himself eventually crawling along the edge, drinking from little streams of water shooting out over it. He moved along it, searching for better and cleaner streams, when suddenly he slipped, and slid over the edge. He grabbed and clawed desperately at the slope, as he slid down it, water rushing around and over him. Finally he came to a slightly depressed area and managed to stop. He clung there, unable to move, almost drowning in the water, as the hours wore on. Finally the rain eased up, and then stopped. but he found he still couldn't move, as there was no place he could go without sliding again. As the day darkened into night, he began to shiver uncontrollably, and he was afraid he would lose his grip anyway, and be lost.

Then a giant hand grabbed him, and he was thrown over a hairy shoulder and carried back up the slope. It brought him back to the nest of branches again, somewhat scattered now by the water, and laid him down. In a minute it threw something down by his face, something that smelled like a fish. At least it wasn't branches and roots this time. He was too tired to do anything right now, though, too tired to do anything at all.

In the morning, he found a sharp rock and scraped the scales off and began to eat it. He wasn't used to eating raw fish, particularly like this, but he got quite a bit of it down before he began to feel sick. He stopped eating and went off a ways and sat down, waiting for the feeling to pass, hoping that it would. By midday he was feeling a bit better, but still not ready to eat any more of the fish yet. He saw some more worms in the mud, but wasn't quite ready for them either. He found some puddles to drink from, and toward the end of the day nibbled some more at the fish.

The next night the creature brought some fungi, and he really wasn't sure if he could eat that, but he tried it and it didn't seem to cause him any harm.

Over the next few weeks the creature brought him various things to eat, usually some form of plant life, but sometimes other things. He had difficulty in eating a lot of it, though, and found himself growing thinner and thinner. He began to talk to the creature, and while the creature seemed interested, he wasn't sure it understood anything he had to say. Nevertheless, he talked to it about his life, and about why he had been in the mountains, and about how it wasn't going to work out keeping him here, that he was slowly starving to death. The creature occasionally made comments in its own language, and seemed sympathetic, but still kept him trapped there, on the mountain. He showed it his skinny arms and legs, and his ribs, and his stomach, and pleaded with it in a voice that was increasingly faint, and increasingly sounded strange in his own ears.

One night as he slept the creature came and picked him up and carried him away. He swatted at its back ineffectually for a while, and then gave up and just mumbled complaints in an odd, old-man's voice, before growing too tired even for that. After a long time the creature set him down, and then he was alone.

In the morning he found that he was back in camp. The tent was still there, leaning to one side and partially collapsed, and the pack of supplies was still hanging from the tree where he left it. He got a can of Spam from it and found he barely had the strength to open it. He did manage to open it, though, and ate the whole thing. He drank the water in his canteen, and then got some more from the nearby stream. He ate and rested for a few days before he felt well enough to pack things up and start the long walk out of the wilderness.

He wasn't sure why the creature had captured him. Perhaps it just wanted companionship. It had realized in the end, though, that it wasn't going to work out, and had brought him back. Perhaps it had understood something of what he had said, but more likely it had seen that he was getting skinnier, and in the end wasn't going to survive. It was nice of the creature to bring him back, and not just continue to keep him until he died.

He could never say anything about it, though. Few people would believe it, and those that did would fill the woods, looking for it, most of them trying to shoot it. He didn't want that. He would just say that he was lost for a while. That was easy to believe. He had been gone a long time and looked it. They probably even had people out searching for him now. In fact, he saw a helicopter in the air, coming this way.

Some favorite posts

2010-02-19T18:29:00.003-07:00

These are some of my favorite posts, from the first hundred posts.

46. The Journey to 479

88. Howdy Week
84. Where's my shoe?
80. Where's my sock? or Sock on, sock off
73. The Idea of a Circle
67. What lay around the bend
64. A nail, or something like it
56. My first cars
54. The cactus came through
45. The broken baby brush
44. A record at school
43. The cat that wasn't fooled
32. Streaks in the air
28. Fears
26. The Clarabell Clown doll
24. Is this really necessary?
22. Murmuring voices
21. Half paralyzed, and something tried to take me away
18. Is someone calling my name?
17. UFO - A silver grain of rice against the sky
15. The noisemaker
14. Pouring water, hot and cold
11. The hidden spider
9. Blood poisoning
8. My father and the Air Force
7. Paper airplanes
6. My mother tries to teach me about God
5. Crackers and butter
4. Perfume
3. Snakes

99. Dream - Contacted by space aliens, a father prepares to leave
97. Dream - The bird-boy, the Christmas pageant, mall shopping, stolen presents, and the award
91. Dream - On the run
87. Dream - The descent: Witches, flying reptiles and the tall tree-like man
83. Dream - Young self one and two, dreams of different lives
79. Dream - The superimposed cat
74. Dream - Leaving Earth
72. Dream - The figure with the hat and coat
70. Dream - The watchers in the walls
69. Dream - The underlying structure of reality
66. Dream - The doomsday machine
63. Dream - The figure that came out of the wall
62. Dream - The long white hallway
59. Dream - A warning from a future self
57. Dream - The mall under the ground
55. Dream - Getting lost
53. Dream - Flying with the professor
48. Dream - Through the doorway
47. Dream - The elephant entity
41. Dream - Footsteps, mine and others
40. Dream - The pale spider-like thing
38. Dream - The girl with the disappearing face
37. Dream - The figure in the doorway
36. Dream - Composed of bright particles
35. Dream - Flying with a leprechaun
34. Dream - And fly away
33. Dream - My dead grandfather helps me look for the dogs
31. Dream - The drugstore outside the universe
30. Dream - The brilliant light
29. Dream - Acquired by China
25. Dream - The girl on the mountain
20. Dream - Destroyer of worlds
19. Dream - First contact
16. Dream - Captured and consumed
13. Dream - The contest
12. Dream - Possible futures and what came after
10. Dream - In the Matrix
2. Dream - The cloud came down

Wordzzle 99 - The tower

2010-02-12T23:53:00.004-07:00

Dream - Tiny crystal skulls

2010-02-12T12:08:00.003-07:00

On Sunday evening, May 18, 2008, I fell asleep while a TV show about crystal skulls was on, and dreamed I was watching a show on TV. The dream TV show had a couple of simple cartoonish cars, like paper cutouts, on a road, and then I was part of the story.

I parked the car at the edge of the road, on the pavement. There was some kind of car trouble. The road wasn't too wide and was unlaned. It had room on it for two or three cars. My mother was with me. We went somewhere, to a big building.

Someone met me on the way and talked to me. He had an invitation or ticket to the conference. He had a small crystal skull, a little smaller than a baseball, and people who had been sent them or received them somehow were people who were invited, like the crystal skulls acted as invitations or tickets in. He thought I had gotten one too and was surprised that I didn't. He went on, then.

It was dark now, and had been for a while. I looked through the iron fence at the building, and somehow got past the fence and then went on in myself. My mother had gotten separated from me, and I'm not sure now whether she made it into the building before me or not. Evidently people could get in without a skull, though it was worrisome at first and the people with the skulls, apparently one or two thousand, tended to act elitist.

There were exhibits of lifesize or larger crystal skulls, many or all of them homemade by the participants, though some may have come from other cultures and earlier times. A lot the skulls were quite bizarre, and some of them had the top of the skull cut off. I reunited with my mother as I was looking at the skulls, and tried to show them to her. It seems we had to leave now, though, and I went down the row of them at the back of the building, partially a double row because sometimes they were on both sides. A raised counter with a slanted glass display ran along behind them, with an occasional person behind it.

Wordzzle 98 - Inside the box

2010-02-05T23:58:00.003-07:00

Posts about posts, Part V

2010-02-05T14:00:00.002-07:00

In 2007, 2008 and 2009, I posted collections of posts I made to a message board I visit frequently. This is the fifth collection of these posts.

On that message board, new threads crowd out old ones, old in this case meaning oldest last update. Threads can persist for a long time, however, if they are posted to frequently enough so that they stay comfortably away from the bottom of the list.

I help to keep some of the threads going, by posting to them when it seems that a new post might be needed. On threads about writing or poems, I have sometimes posted poems. Most of these poems refer to posts or posting in some manner, and most of them are short, sometimes very short, though a few are fairly long.

As originally posted they did not have titles, but I have given them titles here. The times shown are in Arizona time (MST), not the time on the message board, which uses Eastern time.

TIME TO WRITE (2)
5:13 AM 12/4/2007

Time to write
If you might

UP WE GO
1:22 AM 1/13/2008

Up we go
Enjoy the show
And if you like it a lot
Post what you've got

HERE I GO
6:56 AM 1/31/2008

Here I go,
Once again,
If this thread is saved,
We all win.

IT MIGHT BE TIME
4:10 AM 4/8/2008

It might be time
To write a post
To prevent a thread
From becoming lost

So a post I write
And place it here
So that this thread
Is not a loss to bear

Threads go by
Some stay, some go
Will this one stay
In time we'll know

Threads go by
And disappear
This stays for now
Please keep it here

Wordzzle 97 - Marshmallow threats

2010-01-29T23:56:00.005-07:00

300th post

2010-01-29T10:34:00.004-07:00

This is the 300th post on this blog. As with the second hundred, it came fairly quickly, in a matter of months rather than years. A couple of major events that happened this time were the transfer, with some modifications, of the files from my site at Yahoo Geocities, and the completing of a rough draft of a small novel for National Novel Writing Month.

My posts on these can be found here:

My time at GeoCities (Sunday, November 01, 2009)

National Novel Writing Month 2009 - Winner! (Tuesday, December 01, 2009)

Related milestone posts:

200th post (Friday, August 21, 2009)

100th post (Saturday, January 31, 2009)

Well, here we are (first post, Monday, August 22, 2005)

Dream - The road like a dog frame

2010-01-29T09:53:00.002-07:00

Around October 8, 2008, I dreamed I was at a military base, probably in Arizona or New Mexico. A lot happened in the earlier part, at or around the military base probably, but I don't remember it anymore. There was a large warehouse-size room there, though.

Then I was driving, showing some other people how it was done, and what they had to do. It seems like some people were after us, or were going to be after us. I was driving through a mostly flat area with some low hills. It was mostly dirt, kind of an oily looking dirt.

I went to an area that had a road like a dog frame, as seen from the top and back and slightly to the side, like an inner frame for a toy or perhaps a stick figure outline for a drawing. There was also a faint body outline, but it was not part of the road.

I drove along the framework, watching from far above and maneuvering the car like it was a toy, making tight loops along the dark line of the frame, loops that also appeared dark like the road. The loops were so tight and close together that they appeared mostly as a dark mass, obscuring the line of the road. I was trying to show the people how they were supposed to drive, how to cover their tracks.

Toward the end I was getting very tired, and as I went down the last leg, at the back of the figure, the tight loops became zigzags with visible space between them. It was going to have to do, just finish it. I was saying something to the effect to them that they got the idea, anyway.

Dream - A block wall across the back yard

2010-01-29T09:44:00.004-07:00

Around October 10, 2008, I dreamed that it was around midday, and I was in the house talking with my mother, who was somewhere nearby but not necessarily in the same room. Looking out a window, perhaps the one in the kitchen door, I saw a block wall in the back yard, and went out to examine it. I found that it was being built across the middle of the back yard, going from one side to the other, starting at the east side, but was only about one half or two thirds of the way across and was obviously unfinished. The dogs, the Pekingese and the Boston terrier, had been trapped in small rooms, boxes really, built of concrete blocks attached to the wall. They were apparently put there in the rooms/boxes, constructed for them, to keep them from bothering the person building the wall and also to keep them from escaping into the alley. The wall wasn't very tall, maybe three or four feet, but I think it was intended somehow to be a replacement for the old wooden fence by the alley.

I didn't know who was building the wall, or why they thought they had to do it. I talked with my mother about what was happening. I looked out at it now and then, but I was having trouble catching anyone actually out there working on it, though the wall seemed to progress sometimes between the checks.

I finally caught someone. He seemed to be some kind of Asian person, like a Korean. I went and talked to him and tried to explain that he couldn't be doing this. I seemed to be having trouble being understood, though. He seemed to be trying to ignore me most of the time, with an almost desperate look on his face. When he did talk to me, he was very hard to understand and his English seemed to be limited. Finally, he left.

After a while a middle-aged man came out. I guessed he was the house owner. I got the impression also that there was a somewhat thin teenage son involved earlier or who might have been involved. I had the impression that the Asian man was someone they hired, though it seemed that sometimes he might have had a tendency to change back and forth into the son, at least when he was back or in their yard.

The middle-aged man went over to where the wooden fence had an inset for the time, long ago now, when garbage cans were used instead of the large plastic containers supplied by the city. The inset was gone now. That part of the fence was taken down and the man was trying to put a heavy, bent, angled metal bar across a gap between the block wall of the neighbor and the remaining part of the wooden fence, which seemed to have been extended some at that point, perhaps by some of the inset portion that had been taken down.

The metal bar was about three feet long and had a pale coating of some kind, with a little rust showing through along the edges and an occasional spot of rust along the sides. It seemed to be intended to be part of the new gate, which by appearances was going to be slightly wider than the old one. Most of the rest of the gate was still just open space, though it had a vague something in the bottom third, like a bunch of one inch slats almost matted together.

I went over to him and tried to explain that he couldn't just be doing this, that it wasn't right, that this wasn't his yard. He seemed to be having trouble with the concept though, and kept insisting that it was his right. I seemed to finally get through to him though, and he finally agreed to stop, and as a final effort got the metal bar to latch properly onto the wood. Then he left. I was left there with the unfinished work, and I would have to somehow get something put together with it myself.

Wordzzle 96 - Pixie party

2010-01-22T23:48:00.008-07:00

Dream - Driving on a road on the side of a vertical cliff, then throwing an odd device into the backyard

2010-01-22T00:56:00.003-07:00

Sometime in January, 2008, I had a dream in which I was driving, and the road became too steep and the engine couldn't produce enough power. I finally went to the right across the lanes, and the road got more and more lanes, lanes that kept turning up toward the left and going almost vertical, and the lane markings contracted to perhaps a foot wide at the curve and the painted dotted lines on the road turned to continuous stone ridges. I drove sideways across the lanes and the road was now for all practical purposes vertical and slightly bulging, a cliff that curved around, with me driving horizontally across the bulge.

I saw a few people and a small building or two on the land not far below, and I stopped and went down to them. It became dark, and I was looking with a flashlight in the building for something. There was some object in a far corner under a thick shelf that reflected the light back at me. I discovered that it was a small shiny dumbbell with cylindrical ends, with one of the ends almost pointed at me. I felt that it contained something dangerous, some device of some kind, and was not what it looked like. I left, and the room turned out to be the utility room at home. I told my mother about it and she was concerned, and so I went to have another look. I took the device and threw it out in the yard toward the fence. I thought it might be something left by a spy.

Dream - Crashing the car, then saved, then a woman who was drinking

2010-01-22T00:40:00.005-07:00

On Sunday, August 25, 2002, or thereabouts, while sleeping in the afternoon, I had a dream. The first part of the dream is lost, but later in the dream I was driving somewhere, perhaps from Fallon, Nevada. I may have been going to Reno, but the roads were closer to what exists going back to Arizona. The road was not a complete match for reality in any case.

I was driving the dark blue 1987 Oldsmobile and was extremely tired. The road led uphill and was only two lanes. Rain was falling. The road turned to the right and leveled out. I turned the steering wheel, but had to turn and turn for the wheels to turn enough. I finally had the steering wheel turned all the way to lock, and it wouldn't turn anymore. It was still not enough. For some reason, the car couldn't turn at a tight enough angle, and instead turned in a broad arc that sent it around the corner and onto the opposite side of the road. The road bordered a cliff at that point, and did not have a guard rail. Both wheels on the driver's side went off the road, and then the car turned nose down and tilted until the windshield was pointed at the ground. I saw muddy ground and puddles far below, rushing up very fast. I wondered how I was going to get out of this one and grimly thought "God be with me."

There was a period of blankness and then I woke up, still in the dream, and found myself parked off the side of the road. I was still in the same area, but the road now had a long, wide paved parking area at the edge along the cliff and a guard rail. I was parked at a slight angle facing the guard rail. Another car was parked a ways back, along the way I had come. I was concerned that the person in the other car was watching me, but I was also amused by it.

I was not as tired after my nap, but I realized that I had forgotten to pick up the Saturday paper before I left town, and had completely forgotten the Friday paper. It was too late now for the Friday paper, but I figured I should go back to town and get the Saturday paper. I was reluctant to do this, but turned the car around and did it anyway. It was now early morning.

When I got back to town, a relatively short distance, it was evening. I drove through the parking lots of adjoining small businesses, directly from lot to lot, looking for a newspaper machine. Eventually, larger businesses appeared, such as grocery and other stores. They had large doorways on the sides, near the front, and I slowly drove through them into the stores and inside along the fronts of the stores, still looking for newspaper machines. People were in the stores shopping and paying for things, but the stores were not especially crowded. I felt that the stores had been built to allow cars to drive through like this, and nobody seemed to notice me, but I became increasingly disturbed and decided to go back into the parking lots after exiting this store. I went into the parking lot and turned right, heading in the direction of the street. It was dark, and may have been extremely early in the morning, just before dawn.

At some point I was no longer driving the car. A Mexican woman came out from the store. I felt that I knew her slightly. She was going home after working there. At the sidewalk, there was a dark spray pattern, in a Christmas tree shape a few feet long, like a bottle or glass had been violently knocked over. The stain was dry, but I felt that it was relatively recent.

The woman, who was perhaps in her thirties, thought that her sister had left it and was concerned that someone would find out that she had been drinking again. The woman searched for a cork that she was sure was there. She wanted to find it to remove the evidence. I finally found a small cork, but it was really tiny and got away when I tried to pick it up. It bounced energetically several times, perhaps going eight feet in the opposite direction, that is, behind me. I was not able to initially relocate it, but finally did. I woke up before securing it, however.