He feels like he’s chasing time. Time is like a red laser dot, nominally a pointer, but often used to tease cats, and he’s the cat. He knows he can’t catch the time dot but he can’t stop his nature from trying.
A String of Short Dreams
My Dad and I were together. Both younger than RL, we were out hanging out, talking and walking by a wide, busy road.
We ended up at string of used car lots. That pushed us into reminiscing about cars which we’d owned, Porsches, Mercedes, Cadillacs, Chevies, Corvettes, BMWs, and so on.
We came across a red C4 Corvette, a series produced in the 1980s and 90s. The car was on display, hood and doors open. Dad had a blue one of those, so he chatted about it. Somehow, he talked himself into buying it for my older sister, Debby, because he thought she would like it. Well, it was a car and a Vette, and in excellent condition, so she probably would, I agreed, though I didn’t think it a car she’d buy for herself, a grandmother with three children and seven grandchildren.
I met with Debby later and asked if she liked her car. She didn’t know what I was talking about. Thinking that I might be spilling a surprise, I tried not saying anything but finally confessed that I’d been with Dad when he bought her a red Corvette. Then I gave her giving some details about the car. She laughed as I spoke, asking, “A Corvette? Why did he do that?”
I told her, “I don’t know. It was a whim. He thought you’d like it.”
She just laughed.
Dream end.
The next dream found me in a house. The large and luxurious house was mine but not from my RL existence. My wife and I, younger than RL, were home when the power went out. I went downstairs to the garage to check the circuit breakers. As I entered the garage, the power came back on, so I went back up. Then I thought I heard a noise from the garage and went back downstairs. I found some doors open. At that point, the power went off again, but I heard the circuit breakers being thrown. Someone is messing with me, I decided, and called the police.
The police immediately arrived. Angry at that point, I told them what transpired and they looked around. Nothing was found and they left. I then installed an alarm. It immediately went off. I didn’t know if I’d installed it wrong or it was due to an intruder, so I went into the garage to investigate. Someone ran out through the back door when I walked in. I ran over but it was night, they were in black, and I couldn’t see them. Cursing them and muttering about security, I closed and locked the door.
A third dream found me worrying about cats. Outside, in a patchy lawn by an old house, I’d see a kitten and then go try to find it. Most were tabbies but there was also one black kitten. Sometimes I saw them and chased them around. Frustration and irritation joining hands and skipping through me, I said, “Screw this, I give up.” With that, I sat down on a block of white cement. I’d tried, I told myself.
As I sat there, the kittens emerged. Coming to me, they climbed my legs and settled in my lap. Then they looked up and meowed at me, which is where the dream terminated.
The final remembered dream had me at a relative’s house. They were people I didn’t know but some of my family was there. I was a young man in my early twenties, home on leave from the military.
More relatives who I didn’t know arrived. I went downstairs into a small family room. Newcomers followed me down. Male and female, they ranged in ages from around five to seventeen. I don’t know how many were there. Intensely curious about me, they peppered me with questions. Trying to distract and entertain them, I suggested we listen to music. I then showed them a stereo system. I told them, “This is my old system. I replaced it so I brought it here and installed it so that they could use it.” It was the actual system which I now own.
I played a song from Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon album, “Wish You Were Here”. The oldest male told me that they also had a stereo system there and showed it to me, located exactly opposite mine, and I hadn’t seen it. He then played an AC/DC song, “Highway to Hell”. As this played and we talked about music, I realized that there were four stereo systems in the room, which I thought was funny and amusing.
They were still asking me questions, like they were interviewing me. I sprawled out on a sofa and answered. One of the young girls asked if she could lay on me, then did so without me answering. I was uncomfortable with this, shifting my body away from her. She put her head on my chest and said, “I can hear your heartbeat.”
The dream ended.
Overall, it was a busy night of dreams.
Sunday’s Wandering Thought
Two subjects wander through his mind as he situates himself at the coffee haunt to write. One, it’s raining and holidays are coming. Those conditions always make drivers less attentive and more dangerous. In his two-mile trip to the coffee place, he witnesses two near misses with people in cross walks and another involving cars making turns. Stay alert, he tells himself. Dn’t be one of them.
Two, what’s with the pajamas look? It’s forty degrees F out. Cold rain spits down. It’s leaning toward noon. Yet people of several generations are walking around in sandals with fleece clothes that resembles something worn to bed. And the sandals? Well, the whole ensemble looks like they rolled out of bed and were too lazy to dress and put shoes on. He wonders if they brushed their teeth. Their hair looks uncombed. Well, that’s fashion.
Yeah, he knows, he sounds like a cranky old man.
He knows.
Saturday’s Wandering Thought
Emails pack his inbox. He subscribes to emails driven by his interests. But many that he subscribes to make him pay for it by sending him three to six emails per day beyond his basic requests. This season is particularly miserable, a terrible trifecta of politics, holiday sales, and dire health warnings. It drives him one more time to sigh, close his email, and think about giving that thing up.
A Little Thanks
I belong to a beer group. Tongue in cheek, we refer to ourselves as Brains on Beer because the original founders were smart individuals, usually retired engineers, physicians, scientists, and professors who met to drink beer and talk science, the arts, and technology. Most of the original group passed away. Now there’s me and some worthy replacements, but you know what’s said about any organization that will have me… Anyway, each week we collect donations after we pay our beer tab to fund local STEAM projects. (Yeah, it used to be STEM.) Throughout the year, we keep searching for causes to support. We received a nice little thank you letter from one of our 2022 projects this week.
Makes me smile into my beer.
Friday’s Wandering Thought
His name is Michael. It’s a common and popular name in the U.S. That mildly irritated him on a tiny, personal island of thought. Sharing a name made him less special, knowing how silly such a response was. But there it was.
He couldn’t stop himself, though, from looking up and seeing what Michael was like whenever his name was called in a coffee shop. He frequently wanted to tell them, “Hey, my name is Michael, too.” The other Michaels usually looked like confident and intelligent people. He wondered how they would view him.
His complicated thoughts about his own name often made him chuckle to himself. He wondered if the other Michaels felt the same.
The Formal Garden Party Dream
I was hosting a formal garden party at my estate. Apparently I was quite wealthy and famous. It was catered and I had nothing to do but make decisions.
Servers were in white jackets and black pants. They were a humorous good lot. Attendees, which were mostly women, wore formal gowns. Jewels and pearls abounded among them, along with bare shoulders. Men were in suits or tuxes. Settings were elegant, with fine china and gold flatware, beautiful place settings around large round tables, linen napkins, flowery centerpieces, and lots of crystal for wine, water, champagne and other drinks.
Meanwhile, I was dressed in old shorts and a shirt, and sandals. I was lending my place and my name but I wasn’t specifically attending. Everyone else was working there or paying to attend. All proceeds went to charity. I was to give a talk but that was to come later.
They were asking me to sign things, an impromptu effort. Sign this for so and so because it would mean so much to her. Things kept going hilariously wrong with that. This pen is red ink; do you want me signing this in red ink? We had no proper paper to sign so I was tearing small bits off different things and trying them out. Then I put in the wrong name. Misspelled words. Silly things. I laughed at all of it.
A special dessert was brought in on large silver trays, to be served later. A young black man, tall, good-looking, and my friend, was overseeing this. After he had them set up, he picked one up; he gave me a nod and winked. I selected a yellow rose, took the dessert from him, and then walked through the gathering. Everyone noticed and watched, growing silent as I randomly chose a woman at a table and gave her the rose, along with the special desserts, which just looked like a small baked thing to me. She gasped in delight and others begged me to give them one, but I walked back out in my shorts, shirt, and sandals.
The Communication
She and her hubby used to use “143” on the pager to say “I love you” as many people did. The numbers relate to the number of letters in the three words and had been around for over a century, from when a lighthouse in the Boston area of the US used the sequence for its light in the late 1800s.
She had not thought of the number for years after her spouse passed away in 2015. But then a friend called and said, “I’m sending you a photo.”
The photo was of a car odometer. It was reading 143143. The friend related, “I was driving on the highway, looked down and saw that on the odometer. I knew what it meant for you so I wanted to pull over, take a photo and send it to you. But I couldn’t pull over then. I kept going a bit and finally pulled over, sure that it was going to be ruined. I was surprised that it still said 143143. As I snapped the photo, I heard your husband said, ‘Tell her that she’s going to be alright.'”
Wednesday’s Wandering Thought
Ponder and wonder were different by only one letter. So were wander and pander. He wondered and pondered about the wonder of that as his thoughts wandered, pandering to his laziness and procrastination.
Michael Seidel, writer 