Me and Jack, we're leaving his place for mine. We're walking through his house. He asks in passing, as we can look out through a window at the church next door and see folk performing janitorial duties, why I don't help clean up anymore, and I say, "Because I don't go to church."

That doesn't seem to sit well with him, and we're a bit churlish now, and when I leave on my bicycle, I go ahead, although he hasn't joined me. I figure he will if he wants. Maybe he's sulking.

A little reddish longhair pup is racing along the street beside me. I have to protect the little guy. Why do they allow him to run wild? The streets are dangerous. I must see about him.

My bike is gone. How can my bike be gone? It was right here a moment ago. (This is the second dream I've had recently where I cannot hold onto my valuables. I think maybe it's a metaphor for aging.)

I must procced on my route home over strange obstacles; hilly lawns under dark oaks with viny masonry walls like in old movies. I somehow recognize a spot in the brush, although there is nothing there to even suggest what I'm looking for. I reach and hold and pull...and my bike comes out of the dirt!

My bike. (I think right here in my dream about the classic film The Bicycle Thief, and wonder if it's true society cannot protect my bike does it follow I may consider nobody else's bike is covered by law or social etiquette either.) It's my bike, all right, only it has a new seat and other accessories. How can this happen so fast? It was right here a moment ago.

But I have it now. Except I must surmount the wall. Is there glass set in concrete on top? I won't know until I'm there. I begin to scurry down the grassy knoll and clamber up the wall.

Wait a minute, I think. I look back. Sho' 'nuff.

My bike is gone again.

I am part of an on-going project. I see the way it is going. It is creating history to fit with legend, which is news, which is memory, which is everywhere and nowhere. I live here.

There is a legend about Shakespeare of Stratford. He ran away to London because he and his mates were caught poaching deer out of the Forest of Arden, specifically the estate of Sir Thomas Lucy at Charlecote. It is a very nice story, but it 'stands on your eyelashes,' to quote an old Reloj Spanish saying.

The problem was, Sir Thomas had no estate at Charlecote in those years. What to do? The history was being rewritten in slow turns; that was the project. You begin with the myth and you repeat and repeat everything that fits and omit what acquits the Bard from the poaching charge.

This is what is happening. I am there and do whatever is needed to continue my own role in the matter, for I know of no other. It is a matter of one or another opening doors and coming in and then after a nondescript time going out again. Everyone seems to be casually busy and there must be some purpose else why would they all be so engaged?

It is in service to the myth, then, and I take my part. I don't really have to analyze it any further. You think all these coming and going are worrying about the plot to our story? I don't think so.

There, that last segment of the vast journal of our lost days, right there, see? The lease on Chilcote? The dates are smeared. I cannot read the dates. And the journal is to be the only resource, for all other documents appertaining will be lost.

I mean, come on, some kids takes a deer that doesn't belong to him, or he doesn't, four hundred years ago? Who wants to spend time proving long-dead innocence? Especially if it does harm to the legend?

A lady, somber, opens the door and enters. Out there are plenty of other doors in the hall, and a stairway. There are myriads of them, walking, frowning in boredom, entering and exiting. See them go. There they go. Go, myriads, go.

There. Sir Thomas Lucy. The page just plopped onto the pile. Overly protective of his deer, it says.

Tomorrow it will be precisely the same as memory.

I am writing furiously by hand and I'm awakening to time's winged chariot. I mean, I am writing a play. I have not quite a page done. The play is supposed to be performed this very evening, and it's already afternoon.

Not only do I have not one page done, but I keep losing that. Where is my page? I move here and there and the staff is not concerned that the charter of all they will do is undone. I am the only one showing urgency.

As if I needed it, there is one other problem. The play has roles which are unfilled. How can we bring in actors and have them learn their lines in the time remaining. It's impossible.

The lead actor will appear with me. We will be about on the dirt streets of a village of the 19th Century. It will be dusktime and we will be in the shady dirt, talking from some distance. (This is sounding like Our Town but that name never came up in the dream.)


The lead actor is my son, or rather an actor playing Will, and like Will he is completely unflustered by circumstance. I say, really, we must put off the play!

He shrugs. Everyone is coming to a gathering this evening and the play was to be part of it. But we can delay it for two days.

I am greatly relieved. Two days. All I know is, at least it ain't this day.

I think, maybe we can have the lines of the other actors echoed in our own, like an old Bob Newhart phone bit.

Two days.

[Note: In the photo above, taken this year when Will and his wife Jill came flying out to visit, the lady in the background at baggage claim offered the most flattering opinion I have heard: "You sure do look alike." I leave it to you to appreciate her kindness to me.]

We are all persuaded to cast off our private illusions for the community standard. A metaphor.

We mumble about it to ourselves and think it's a good idea. Hey, why don't we do it.

The form of the metaphor is a ball of string. It is huge, and it is growing. We each tie our stray string scraps to a central ball...which sits there.

That's it, it's a metaphor which does not move. We all variously and singly come up to the big ball on the square and we tie our pitiful short lengths to it and it grows, inexorably, inexplicitly it grows, and that's all it does. It does not move or mean anything else except it is our community metaphor and it does not even know that. It doesn't know anything, it's just a dumb metaphor.

Once in waking time I had a housemate named Crazy Pam. (My name for her; she only answered to the second part.) She wanted to be a science writer and so she was taking a class up at the University in writing stuff. I think it was called Writing Stuff 101. She actually became an assistant TA or something for the class.

So she needed to know what the parts of writing stuff were. She asked very simply, "What's a metaphor? What's an allegory?"

So I told her. "A metaphor is only a static symbol. The other side of the coin. Screaming headlines. An allegory is an extended replica, like a fairy tale of the tortoise and the hare, or the grasshopper and the ant. It teaches us a lesson in large-print, easy-read symbols we can understand and plug our own days into. If it's a holy lesson, it's a parable."

I think it's significant perhaps in the dream that the simplest form of representative speech is what we all gave up our separate stories for.

The moral for this story is -

I stop by a shop on my bicycle commute. This goes back to the times when I rode miles a day over hill and into the valley beyond. I am thinking here as I ride, though, it's easier than it was, although I remember how it really was. I come easily up to a turn and it's steep and I'm stalled because I'm just too lax approaching it, so I have to dismount. I'm expecting it to be easier than it is.

In the shop now; it sells outdoor gear, and I'm wandering around through the racks. I don't know what I'm here for.

I become aware I have lost my poncho. Then I think, I don't remember the description of it. The grey pullover? The rainjacket? I have lost something and I'm not ever sure what. I will have to ride in my tee, then, and it'll be a mite chilly.

Then, I think, where's my backpack? Oh, dear, now I can't think where I left my backpack. I'll have to report it.

My bicycle! Where is my bike? I am conscious of losing everything, even after I was alerted by the loss of the poncho, or the sweatshirt. I speak with a clerk, and he says, we'll have to have a conference with the manager.

She is quite young; they're all just kids working here. We sit in a private office to go over the theft procedure.

I am helping a clerk cover his vehicle with a tarp of strange compositon. I am watching the sky outside for the light. It's falling fast. I cannot ride in the dark.

And then I think, that's strange, too. I am still planning about riding, and I have no bike. If I'm going to be planning on simulated bike riding, I may just as well conjure a bike with a light.

I'll call Niki J. She'll come for me. I'm a total washout. Good I still have Niki J!