The Way is the Way

There are doctors working on my hand, the one wounded in a bike accident in real time long ago. They can fix that little finger. They have inserted needles, without pain, and I'm back in a splint again. I am so amazed. Then when I look down in a while, the splint is gone. I tell ya, modern medicine.

They tell me I have every chance of restoring full use of my left hand, and I reply, "You have a debate with Dr Lewis then," referring to my (dreamtime) former plastic surgeon, and one of the new dox says, "No, you have a debate with Dr Lewis."

I must go from here to there now, from one clapboard village along these ridges through several more to yet another. I start out, naked, of course, but then I'm delighted to notice I have on a long T, with beet juice soaked onto the front tail, which I don't tuck in because I have nothing to tuck it into. Anyhow, I'm relatively well dressed by dreamtime standards.

It's a matter of ancient woody towns in close order, and I pass through them, and then realize I have left my vehicle parked back where I started, at the doctors' office. Oh, well. I start off retracing my steps.

I proceed in my usual dreamtreck, through a series of ancient stores featuring odd goods laid out to confound shoppers. You cannot easily transit through this confusion. Here I am in old dingy barnwood trying to find a door opposite the one I entered. You have to have been born here to naviagate this trail.

A young clerk offers moderate assistance, pointing out a dim path of light through indistinguishable fabric. I am most grateful, if only for her concession that my voyage is not utterly foolish.

A bunch of guys occur to me along the way. They know me, and one of them begins talking about the upcoming Dallas Cowboy season. That extra-point fumbler quarterback, Romo or something, his replacement is in camp. They all hope for great magic from the next maybe messiah.

I intended going out for high school football, even now, maybe as a postgrad. I was not able to make practice, but hope to. Maybe I can join these guys soon. They don't seem to blame me for not showing up. (The realtime football team looked down on any guy not suffering their idiot grind with them.)

My dream as always settles into a contented acceptance of an interesting trip rather than any fond anticipation of its happy conclusion.

Postcard from Rouen

This is the village where Papa roamed. It's in the south of Spain, near the sea. Hemingway came here and stayed a season, and now they have his every path and stop marked out and commemorative trinkets available.

I am in an open limo, and there are others in a long string, like a beauty pageant. I am studying closely an ancient tome with a chalky yellowing fabric cover. It's Cervantes, only I cannot figure out which. It might be the one of the crazed knight, but the pictures don't tell that story, and I don't read spanish, especially 16th century spanish, well enough to know.

I turn the page and a letter falls into my lap. It's old, but I cannot tell if it's as old as the book. I can make it out mostly. It's a shopping list. Wow. A four hundred year old shopping list. I'm trying to think about saving a shopping list for that long. It must be pure chance. Who would decide, I'm gong to keep this shopping list forever, to remember the rutabegas at La Dome and the melons from Valladolid. Maybe that's how history comes to be.

A lady in our limo, unknown to me, says, oh, Rouen is closed for remodel. She says it, Ray-een. She asks to look at my book, and I give it to her. I figure someone who is confident about saying Rouen in mixed company must be trustworthy.

I have to run back to my room. I am packing a box of books to trade at the local bookshop. They give you credit. I was wondering how much credit a first-edition Cervantes might be worth.

I really should not have left the old text in the limo. It really was not a good idea, no matter the lady knew French. I don't know French either. Maybe she knew that, and just said Ray-een to impress us. Maybe she said Rouen wrong. Perhaps she's never even been there. Maybe she only wanted the Cervantes.

When I find the limo, it still is moving slowly through traffic in its stately ceremonial pace. The space I have foolishly abandoned is vacant, and when I hop up onto the running board, I see the Cervantes is square in the seat I had occupied.

Whose Turn Is It?

We're going here and then there, through corridors and into rooms where nobody settles. Some of them are over there and some over here with me. I don't know how I'm connected with any of them, but I don't worry.

Now we're out on a dark street, going this way and that. I don't know these folks, I say. Someone makes reference to Neil Young. Another adds a cryptic comment.

I hear it. It's Bob Dylan said that. I try and interpret, using the only reference to literature I can summon at a moment's notice, the early scene with the Australian of the busted lorrie in Green Hills of Africa. Papa tells him, the people who praise it, praise it for the rhetoric, which is unimportant. They put in a mystery which is not there.

I say that, or something like, to ask if Dylan is talking about adding mystery where none exist. He smiles at me. I guess maybe that was it.

It's later, other rooms, and I am thinking, hey, was that so? Me and Bob Dylan? Maybe that didn't happen, I think, still within my dream. Maybe that wasn't him, or maybe he didn't mean that about mystery. I always have conclusions nicely drawn, like about movies, and then later on I see insider gossip from the creators and they incorporate none of my ideas. So are they wrong? I mean, I thought the day of the writer, the auteur, was over, and it was readers' hour now.

Whose turn is it?