WALKING SHOES

I am wandering away from home. There is someone who is nice to me. We disrobe. Then I notice she has other interests. Another guy is with her, and here I am. She slowly casts more and more of her ministrations toward the other one. She smiles at me, wanly, with regret, like a good-hearted blackjack dealer when you draw a queen holding 16.

I will not stand for this. I will leave immediately. But it would be less dignified and dramatic were I to sort around in the apartment for my shoes. That's no way to stage an exit, rummaging for shoes on the floor while your lover has a fling with another.

I just grab a pair and leave.

I notice that one shoe is a small house.

I exchange them. It's all right now.

I am home again. There's company. Hi, company! I sit with my wife and company. I can relax now. I put my feet up.

"Man, I think you could afford a better pair of shoes."

I look at them. My feet are in the light of the TV, crossed at the ankles. My wife knows my shoes, and these ain't them. They are dark and ripped, one of those perforated styles of the twenties.

I try and think of an explanation for why it is I wear strange shoes.

When I was young, I sat in an auto out in front of Bontex Cleaners, owned and operated by my Dad and his brother, Uncle Bush. Voices inside rose. Anger. I sat for some time. I was a patient kid.


Dad came out and drove me home, and later I heard him say to Mom, "...that trick Bush pulled in front of Timmie..." I knew it was about the heated discussion, but I never had understood any of their words.

Sometime not long after, Bush bought Daddy out and there began an adventure in searching up a new career. My Daddy was very bright, and he was easily the greatest sportswriter on the small town paper where he worked for a while, but he had no higher education and we struggled. He entered into a campaign for County Clerk. We festooned our old Packard solid with posters for Hut Bowden, nailed up placards, knocked on doors, and he even went on the radio (gratis, I believe, as he had some sort of in with the owner at KFYN).

He came in last of four, and his confidence was shaken considerably, and he leased Quality Cleaners in a town sixteen miles away, and that's what he was doing when he fell down dead one day.

So two nights ago, I was having two dream at the same time. One had a dual track; I was at once and the same time at home in the Santa Cruz Mountains, dreaming, and also lying in a tent with Niki J at the Bright Angel Campground near the River inside Grand Canyon. I could wake at either location, because I was in both. It's like the instant when you decide whether to commit your weight from the dock into the canoe. I was very confident of this. So I continued my dream.

And it was about the topic debated by Uncle Bush and my Daddy which had set our troubled course all those many years back. I never heard a word back then, but I heard them now.

It was about Mel Ott.

Uncle Bush thought him the greatest outfielder ever, and a true power hitter, and Daddy said he was a lout and a bum. Couldn't hit a cow with a bass fiddle. He was an all-star, raged Bush, and Hut laughed, yeah, in the years when they played with slabs of beef on one hand in cow pastures marked off by barbed wire.

That was it, then. They were arguing about Mel Ott. I don't even know who he played for, and I have no idea who was right, but it sure is a relief to finally know the cause of all our trouble.

When any of us observed one of those big city TV rigs in our town, we always thought first of Glenda.

I'm going to the library. There's something I want. The library is over a store in a small town built like a set for B westerns. It's the Leatherwood's place; a strange family with some kids I knew from back home in waketime. They own it and there's a key like one of those huge old-fashioned door keys.
I find the key up there on the second floor in a conspicuous place, like lying on the floor before the door. The library is reached by an inner stairway like one traveled up by the tawdry dance hall girls and the drunken cowboys in old westerns. I fit the key and open the door.
In there, I say, it's so loud up here. You can hear all the voices down on the street; the window is open to them. It's so loud, I say.
All attention in the room, maybe a lounging Leatherwood or two and some other young folk, is on Glenda's latest adventure, in the form of a typewritten half-page. She is publicly complaining of her husband Larry's fishing. Her campaign is taking many roads, utilizing many media sorts.
Here is a video of Glenda in her old cheerleader costume, surrounded by the current high school cheerleader troupe. They are dancing and jumping, Glenda perhaps a bit less agile than her mates, and the yell goes something like

Rickety-rackety rose!
Rickety-rackety rise!
Either you stay home with me,
Or more than a fishie dies!

Cut to a segment of Glenda singing during a high school assembly about her lamentable lonely state while her lover is out with the fishes.

All alone am I
Ever since you said goodbye
Throwed me over for a plagued fish fry...

Larry is a very stoic guy. He just says, oh, that's Glenda. The truth is, he doesn't fish very much. Mostly, he sits downtown and drinks coffee when he's not at the Plant. He doesn't hang around the house, because Glenda is usually out filming, and he doesn't argue. He shrugs, and sips.
I gather up the Glenda typescript, because nobody seems to be taking care of it. Later on the street, I encounter Glenda. When I present her with the package, I apologize to her. The envelope includes a couple of vinyl disks now, and they've been broken against a VHS tape. One smaller record is intact, but two others are broken. I'm very sorry, and so is she. Glenda is very glum. I say, of course it can be reproduced.
I know it isn't an original campaign. Some time ago, and far away, another wife set out on just such a media frenzy against her husband. There was much publicity, and this must have impressed Glenda at the time. I don't know if the first event was more justified than Glenda's complaint.


[A waking note: Glenda and Larry are two individuals from my old high school days. They've probably never even spoken to one another. Glenda is a farm girl, and a little abashed about that, and Larry was the sort of guy who would allow you to believe anything to his credit, regardless of the truth of the matter.]

I have proved Einstein's Relativity in my dreams. Albert told us that one who traveled near the speed of light away from the earth would be exponentially younger than a twin on earth once he returned. I have noticed that long sequences in dreams, as in the one following, occur in very limited dreamtime. I can gauge the latter because I am often awakened just prior to the alarm and drift back to sleep for a very few minutes. In that time, much occurs. Therefore:

1. Dreams travel at near the speed of light, and
2. Albert was right.

---

On a campus, moseying this way and that, dark in keeping as always with my lack of visual perception, or perceptive vision, I have an assignment, though I'm not in school. I know I must, but I don't understand how. It's like high school; I was somehow disengaged when something important was explained.

I understand the outline of it. We are to diagram a root of a local tree, which resembles an apricot but without flour or fruit. It remains low to the ground, sinuous as if struggling to rise, and somehow one large root follows the trunk up out of the ground.

The assignment is to gash the root just above the ground, then lay the tool we used aside, and draw the innards of the root. I see Niki J's artwork, and it's very nice. She used a motor-driven utensil I don't recognize, and it's laying before the tree, which has a large gash exposed in the root/trunk near the ground.

I will use an ax. I will set to work shortly. First however as in all my dreams there is a certain amount of walking one way with decisive intent and then coming back in the reverse direction with an equal amount of assurance. I'll start on my work pretty quick now.

From close up, I'm watching the crew dismantle a postmodern drag engine. They talk to one another like on any work crew. Two of them lift a blower off, which is unlike any blower ever seen outside a scifi flick. They place it over on a bench.

Now I must take the engine somewhere. (All my dreams are moving, as my days be sitting.) We start off, but we have, of course, two cats to take with us. One bounds off up the wrong path and I must catch her. She has the shape of a squirrel and a bobbed tail and grey-white-black coat, and the funny part is, I can catch her.

The other is off to the other side, and there is danger, because an auto is coming now. I rush to that side of the road, and just barely catch this one before he leaps into the path of the oncoming vehicle, whose driver gives one of those patented disgust headshake frowns.

I enter a dark bookshop. The engine is to drive something important there, maybe the card catalog, for all I know. I leave, and find a lady signing in at the desk lobby. Her family motor is just set in the floor behind her, like an inboard Evinrude. Everything drives something else, and I don't question it. The lady notices a list on the counter, mentions it. Hey, there's a list.

Yes, I say. It's my lifting routine from fifty years ago. Haven't used it since, but I like to keep it handy. She continues her entries onto the form.