Tag: Dreams

Adventure Dream

This dream, one of two remembered from last night, was wild.

I was part of an intergalactic crew. We were a small crew. I don’t know anyone’s names in the dream. My commander was a female and not anyone that I recognized.

I seemed to be in a television show. I was younger than I am, and appeared nothing like I ever had, except being white and male, with brown hair. I had the strange powers of being prescient and a great jumper. Both skills were nascent, and I spent large parts of the dream trying to improve both. At one point, I’d developed my jumping sufficiently that I could jump higher than a pub’s wood counter, and hang in the air several seconds, apparently suspending time and gravity. I was still learning about it.

Meanwhile, the series’ story line seemed to be that our little band was trying to help some small creature escape the powers that would capture and experiment on him, and return him to his home planet, across the galaxy. We were constantly being chased. People were trying to ambush and cheat us. We were in several fights.

In one episode memorable to me because my character played a greater role, I noticed that our vessel’s systems were alerting us to being followed. I notified the Captain. Meanwhile, we went planet-side, to a small bar. There, we met with someone to make a deal. I don’t know those details.

I remember that I knew from my prescience that someone was coming for us. So I announced, “I’ll take care of this.” Leaving the group, I went to a front foyer to await our attackers. Cold, heavy rain fell through the darkness outside. I wasn’t a big person. Other men were standing in the foyer. “Are you waiting for a fight, too?” I asked one. He looked down at me and nodded.

The attackers arrived and I gave them a thorough thumping via my special skills. Then, deal done in the bar, we departed the fix, heading for our space vessel and on to our next adventure.

Strange, but true. Well, in my dreams, hey?

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A Dream of Lost Identity

After twenty years in the military, I suppose it’s not surprising that my identity is linked to my time in the ranks. I’ve been retired for more time — twenty-two years — than I served — twenty-one years — so my continuing dreams about identity and being in the military disturb me.

In this latest one, storms were raging. I was the new MFWIC – mo-fo who’s in charge — and was geared up and entering a tense situation. Everyone was waiting for me. But arriving there, I discovered I lacked my military identification card. I knew I’d forgotten it. That embarrassed me. I fumed about the loss without saying anything, but none dared approach me, as all were aware of the situation. All I could so, though, was stew with frustration while waiting to go back and get a new ID.

Returning to the staging location, I didn’t need to say a word. Nobody else did, either. Everyone was waiting for me to get there. As soon as I did, a young female airman in old BDUs wordlessly went about providing me a new ID card. Once she did that, I turned to leave and begin again, more than ready to do so.

And the dream ended.

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Happy One Hundred Fifty-three!

We’ve reached day one hundred fifty-three. Hump day’s pregnant belly is becoming visible over the horizon, that day on which half of this glorious year commonly called twenty seventeen will be completed.

Completed. Done. In the rear-view mirror. Under the bridge. In the books. Finished.

Which will mean, writers, you will have half a year remaining to accomplish those tasks, goals, objectives, and plans you established for yourself somewhere back in the neighborhood of day one.

Think about what you’ve done.

Consider what you want to do for this year, and then put this year in the context of the other years of your life.

How does it look?

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Dreams of Dishes, Numbers and Highways

Dreamed of doing the dishes last night, along with being on a highway and trying to help others find their destination, and having a pair of fours and eights.

In the dishes dream, I was washing fine china in a gray plastic tub. The china had a pretty, delicate pink flower motif on them. The water in the tub was clean, warm and soapy. Filled to the brim, it was outside. There was a bit of crud on the china, so I was using a nylon pad to try to scrub them clean. That wasn’t working, so I went for a walk to find a better solution. While doing that, I eavesdropped on young people around the neighborhood. I became confused when a young woman called her dog, because his name was Michael, which is my name. Why is she calling me? We had a good laugh over it.

The highway dream featured a heavily traveled highway. I was in an open-air car, as most of us were. Small, the cars weren’t important and were barely noticed in the dream. I heard some others talking behind me. Realizing that they sought information on different topics and were lost, I understood that I could help them.

The dream became a little strange, then. Traffic started moving. I pulled off at a split where the congested highway headed into the desert. Traffic stopped behind me. As I hurried to explain to the others where to go, I flipped through scenes of information. None of it was technologically advanced. Some, for example, were flip-charts tied together by twine. Barely held together, the scenes came alive whenever I stopped on one. In this way, I tried to help them to the information they needed. But I was wrong about what they needed. One in particular was searching for information on whittling but I’d presented him with information on something else. I also kept getting distracted by other interesting pieces of information I saw. Then I noticed that the highway traffic was backing up. Knowing it was my fault, I apologized to the others and took off, seguing into the third dream.

In this final remembered dream, I was first shuffling cards, then looking at cards, and then being dealt cards. All I know is that I kept discovering that I had a pair of fours and eights. That same combination kept coming up, red fours and black eights, although I don’t recall the suites.

The dreams are enough to keep me wondering for the rest of the day.

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Today’s Theme Music

Here’s a Friday two-fer.

I’d planned for a celebratory song today but this one dominated one of my dreams last night. “When the Levee Breaks” is an old blues song. I became familiar with it through Led Zeppelin’s cover of it in nineteen seventy-one.

In my dream, it was my wake-up song, playing every day on my radio at seven in the morning. I know this because I was explaining that to other people. I told them, I’d begun doing that in June, so I’d been doing it for a year. During that time, I’d found a new shortcut, I explained. While explaining that, I pointed out a window at a new white concrete highway that was alongside a shoreline. The sky was so blue and the sun was so bright, it awed you into silence. Vehicles were on the road. It looked like typical commuter traffic.

We joked a while about hearing that song everyday. I know it was “When the Levee Breaks” because one other asked, “What is that song?” Then he answered himself as I answered him, “”When the Levee Breaks,” by Led Zeppelin.” He nodded, laughing along as we spoke. He said, “It’s a good song. I don’t know if I’d want to hear it all the time.” I answered, “I only hear it in the morning.” He replied, “Well, even that might be too much, if it’s every day.”

I awoke from that and the other two remembered dreams feeling like a dark cloud had been lifted. You decide, though: will hearing this song every morning be too much?

 

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So Just

Illness interrupts life, if you’re fortunate. The less fortunate end up in hospital, hospice, or a grave. For me, the latest illness is an interruption to my usual routines.

  • Took a hot shower on day three, first since March 20.
  • Didn’t exercise or walk, achieving less than four thousand steps on each of the the first two days, far below my Fitbit goals.
  • Didn’t post, and barely read anything, until the third day.
  • Didn’t write, edit or revise. Didn’t address any publishing biz.
  • Didn’t do yard work, or go out anywhere, and scarcely kept up with the news.
  • Ate little but soup and buttered toast for the first several days, and drank large quantities of tea and hot water.
  • Binged season four of ‘Justified’ and advanced halfway through season five. No ‘Red Dwarf’ was available streaming. RD has been my sickness staple since the turn of the century. I have some of the DVDs and tapes, but it was easier to stream TV.

Being sick allowed some thinking time. I remembered that I’d dreamed of trying to help a general get to a hospital a few days before my illness, and wonder if I was attempting to warn myself. I dreamed a bunch when I was sick, about broken plumbing, stolen baseball gloves, fake roses, taking charge to organize people and processes, family, and flying.

I dreamed of flying a lot during the illness. It wasn’t like Superman and other superheroes would fly, horizontally, with their arms stuck out in front of them, as though diving, or with my arms swept back like wings. No, my flights were like I was walking through the air. I would step up into the air, find my direction, step toward it and be there.

There was some goofiness. I sang to myself. One of the things I sang was, “You say , “Meow,” and I say “Hello. Hello, hello.” I don’t know why you say meow, I say, “Hello.”” I just kept messing with the Beatles’ song, substituting meow for everything “you say”.

It was a mild illness in the relative spectrum of how these things go. The illness has faded to a harsh cough, a throat that’s sore when I cough, and some mucus. Energy is back up to about eighty-three percent of normal. The sensation I couldn’t get warm is gone, the aches have receded, and clarity has returned to thinking.

So just resume everything.

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Entangled Writing Dreams

I don’t know how to describe last night’s dreams. Many and layered, I would awake from them, think about them, and drift back into the dream, or begin a new one.

I dreamed mostly about writing. I would dream I was writing. I dreamed I saw my books on shelves in stores. I dreamed I was signing autographs. I dreamed I was holding one of my books. Of course, I was pleased, proud and delighted to experience these dreams, even as I knew they were dreams.

Then I would dream I was writing again. Some of the dreams were staples of my blog posts of catfinitions. Other times, I dreamed about novels being conceived and pondered, and the novel in progress. I wrote scenes in my dreams, awoke and thought about the scenes, and returned to dreaming and writing. At one point, I awakened from a dream with an insight into something I’d thought of before, regarding ‘the cards’, and the sequencing of them. I hadn’t been comfortable with my execution of this as originally conceived, but here it was, explained in full in my dream. “I’ll need to think about this tomorrow,” I promised myself, because I didn’t want to awaken myself by thinking.

Then, in a break from dream writing, I dreamed I was singing in Spanish. A crowd of people were gathered to hear me. I don’t know what the song was, and was surprised in the dream when I realized it was me singing Spanish, because I don’t speak nor understand Spanish. I didn’t resemble myself in the dream so much as Fernando Alonso, the twice Formula 1 World Driving Champion from Spain. He and I look nothing alike but I knew in my dream that it was me.

In the morning, feeding cats, looking out windows and mentally perusing my dreams, I saw some of it as helpful for the novel in progress and other writing being contemplated. More, though, was wishful, optimism crystallized in dreams.

***

After writing the post and thinking more, I became curious about singing in a language I didn’t know in a dream, and so I did a search. This article was found, to add another twist to the dream.

After reading the article and watching the video, a connection to what I was writing in my novel leaped into my understanding. In it, with all of its entanglements, was the entanglement of a brain coping with something irrational and attempting to apply a veneer of logical explanation. This is done by appropriating others’ memories of the history they’d learned to apply an intelligent setting, from their perspective. In the way that it all works in my novel’s setting, something that works well for one person is borrowed and applied by others as being true, and becomes the basis for the reality of ‘now’ shared to create our impression of our lives.

Fun stuff, and a h/t to my dream brain and Psychology Today for boasting my insights into my writing.

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Flight

Bruce learned he could fly when he scared his family with his first lift-off at his second birthday party. General excitement and amazement, with shadows of fears, greeted his brief zooms over the picnic table, tomato plants, and aging white back yard fence.

He didn’t remember the flight. He remembered Granny McCune taking him by the hand and speaking to him. No words were recalled but her face, white and softly folded, small — one of the reasons he enjoyed her so much was her small stature, like an flowery elf, he’d decided, something he’d never shared with anyone — remained sharply focused in his mind.

Flying, itself, though, he forgot all about that. He was a little boy in America, he was growing, going to school and learning a lot. Nobody else flew and no one encouraged him to fly, so he forgot. Granny McCune, may she rest in peace, died when he was five. He didn’t know why. Then, there’s a memory gap, it seemed like, between her death and funeral when he was five, until he was living in Chicago when he was eight.

Even as an adult, he didn’t understand why they were living in Chicago. They were staying with aunts and uncles but he didn’t know why. By then, he had a little sister, as he always called her, instead of younger sister, to go along with his big, older sister. He was the only boy and a middle child. Dad was away often. He didn’t know what his Dad did then.

While in Chicago, he shared a bedroom with a cousin, Clarence, who was fourteen. The room was small, and he slept on a little cot beside Clarence’s twin bed. Keeping his curiosity to himself, he wondered where Clarence’s other twin bed was, because, he figured, if it was a twin, there must be two, right? Yes, that’s what he thought.

Clarence was a big baseball fan, a big fan. Wearing a Cubs hat and a pitcher’s mitt and holding a baseball, he listened to the games on a large Philco transistor radio in his room whenever he could. He wanted to be a major league pitcher, like Don Cardwell, who’d just pitched a no-hitter for the Cubs, but even then, while pitching for a Little League team (who were unfortunately, the Pirates), he knew he didn’t have it. He tried, and was better than most, but something inside him told him that he couldn’t do it, he told his little nephew without rancor or sadness, but rather the casual, matter-of-fact peculiarity with which the family processed victories, defeats, deaths, weddings and holidays.

Being an older American male and encouraged by his Mom, and Bruce’s mother, his Aunt Linda (who, shockingly, Clarence found attractive, which disturbed him because she was Mom’s sister), Clarence became a mentor to his little cousin, teaching him to play catch. Bruce showed a remarkable natural ability for catching the ball. Throwing was another matter, but throw that ball anywhere and he’d race and jump for it.

Naturally, doing one running and jumping effort, Bruce took off.

He’d not really noticed that he’d done it. To him, it was about getting the ball. Clarence would have put it down to an amazing jump, except Bruce continued hovering, pleased with his catch and then focusing on throwing the ball accurately to Clarence.

Catching the ball, Clarence watched Bruce land and then walked to him. “How’d you do that?”

Not understanding the object of the question, Bruce shrugged. “I don’t know.” It was his stock answer. Other children wanted to know how he remembered things so easily and effortlessly. He didn’t know and didn’t want to explain. He felt the same about whatever it was that Clarence was asking him about.

“Do you know what you just did?” Clarence asked.

Certainly, Bruce understood what he’d just did, he caught the ball. That seemed so obvious, he shrugged. He was beginning to wonder if he was in trouble.

Looking around the yard like he was worried about a wild animal getting him — something Bruce understood because his Mom always warned him to be careful, “And don’t let the wild animals get you,” — Clarence said, “We’d better go inside.”

Clearly, he’d done something wrong. Bruce said. “Can’t we catch a little longer?” Why couldn’t that be done? Only darkness, the threat of wild animals, and an adult’s summons or admonition curtailed his activities. This seemed very arbitrary of Clarence, a word Bruce had just learned. He hoped he was using it correctly.

“No, I’m just thirsty,” Clarence said vaguely in what Bruce recognized was a lie. However, if Clarence was going to lie, that’s the way it was going to be, because Clarence was older than him. So, shrug, oh, well.

That night, there was an intense meeting in the dining room involving Clarence and all the adults. After that, Bruce’s Mom and Aunt Jean sat Bruce down and sat opposite him in a way that told him, This Is Serious. “Honey,” his Mom said, touching his cheek in the manner that she did, which irritated him. Pulling back and grimacing, he pushed her hand away and said, “Stop it. You’re always touching me.”

Aunt Jean and his Mom looked at each other. “He doesn’t like being touched,” his Mom said. Aunt Jean nodded. His Mom explained to Bruce, with interruptions and assistance from his Aunt Jean, that he should not fly, because others couldn’t fly, and that would scare them. He didn’t understand why they’d be scared of that, because he wouldn’t do anything to anyone, and pestered her about that point with impatient questions, until she finally said, “I know, I know, Bruce. Just promise me that you’ll never fly again, okay?”

“I promise,” Bruce answered. He wasn’t happy. In bed later, he thought it all over. He understood he’d flown without trying. That’s why Clarence stopped playing catch, he figured. Clarence did have a look on his face. He didn’t look afraid, but that must have been it. He thought he’d apologize to Clarence the next day but a family emergency interrupted.

It took some time for him to understand what had happened, years, really, but his Dad had been killed in a car accident in Indianapolis. His flight and his cousin’s reaction fused with his promise to his Mom, and his Dad’s death into a defining core of his future behavior.

For a long time, Bruce didn’t fly. He didn’t tell anyone he could fly. He went to college, met girls, had sex, was drunk a few times, and sick sometimes, and smoked joints five or six times, but he never told anyone he could fly, and he never flew. He pursued a normal, flightless life of graduating college, finding employment, marrying, becoming a father, divorcing, marrying again, divorcing again, and settling into ruts that dissatisfied him more and more as he aged. He thought life would have been different than it was, and it disappointed him that it wasn’t.

It was at a party one evening when this reached a natural point. Fifty-two years old, he was the oldest person at the party by a few years. He thought the others, his co-workers, had invited him because they were being polite. It was a tight group of people, and even if he thought little of the others’ intelligence and talents, he liked them as individuals. The party sounded fun, too, and he was in a funk, as he noted to himself, an abysmal black mood that he didn’t think was ever going to end. He’d endured other funks but this one seemed worse. He was thinking about going to a therapist about it, although, he tacitly informed himself, his problem was that he didn’t feel like he fit, and he felt lonely. He didn’t believe anyone particularly cared about him, not even his children, sisters or Mom. So he had no outlets for his complaints. That’s why he needed a therapist, just to have someone to talk to about what bothered him.

The party wasn’t working out. Held at Michele’s house on the coast, he was a little jealous of everyone else. They seemed happier, more satisfied and better engaged. They laughed a lot. As they did, he slipped to the edges. Drink didn’t entice him. He thought that if he left, nobody would notice, so he tested that theory by slipping out.

A misty sea breeze regaled him outside. He heard the ocean but didn’t see it. Sunset was imminent, so he walked down a street in the beach’s general direction. Seeing a sign marked, “Beaches”, he followed a trail through some grass into a sharper, damper sea breeze. The trail went up, away from the beach, which disappointed him. He thought he’d walk along the beach at sunset, but after a while, he found himself on a bluff. Tule fog dominated the ocean’s horizon. The sun was just eating into it.

His ongoing internal treatise about who he was, what he wanted, and why he was dissatisfied, was resumed, and then he remembered how he’d flown. The memory burped up out of the nothing of thought in such stark clarity that he was certain he was thinking of a book he’d read, or a movie that he’d seen. But then, with still introspection, he recalled his flight when he was eight years old and his promise to his mother not to fly. He took out his cell phone with a thought that maybe he should call Mom and ask him if he was remembering that right, or not. But then, he thought, why hadn’t it been mentioned all these years? Also, he remembered it with more intimate details that whispered, “It’s true,” to him. And although he loved his Mom, she really was about herself, her health, and the grandchildren and great-grandchildren these days. She rarely actually asked him, “How are you?”

Instead he thought, why? I will just fly. Others were on the beach and the bluff, but he didn’t care. So, as the tule fog swallowed the setting sun’s dulling tangerine presence, he stepped forward, off the ground and into flight.

Others always argued about what was seen and what had happened. He would not know that. Flying felt so beautiful and natural that he immediately felt released. The sun’s last rays were warmer, and the breeze was less. Without thinking much about it, he kicked off his shoes and let them plummet to the ground. The rest of his clothes followed, piece by piece, even his cargo shorts with his wallet, and his boxer shorts, until all that he wore were his expensive sunglasses. So attired, he rose into the sky above the tule fog, into the space where the sun was still over the horizon, and continued flying toward it. Small craft were underneath. Swooping and laughing, he waved to their occupants, pleased with their reactions.

Why hadn’t he flown all these years, he asked himself. He’d been missing out an a powerful element of himself.

He continued on, climbing higher, until his sunglasses slipped off his face and he rose into the ether like a happy, unencumbered two-year old, leaving behind a huge mystery about what had happened to him. His BMW was still at Michele’s house, and they had the reports of what others had seen. There was one video of the flying man incident on someone’s cell phone but everyone thought that was faked. His shoes washed up on shore at different locations and were collected as unremarkable trash, as was his other clothing, and his wallet was found years later, hundreds of miles north of where he’d disappeared. Some claimed that was evidence that he’d been alive, hiding under a different name.

Only his mother, on hearing the news that her son was gone, understood, and accepted.

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A Dream of Threes

One dream. Three interwoven elements.

Three suicides.

Three coins.

Three people.

What the hell does it mean?

I witnessed two of the suicides. I wasn’t certain the first one was a suicide in the dream. Then I was told it was.

A brief recap: I was on a winding mountain road. The road was in excellent shape, paved and lined. Walking with friends, energy bubbled through me. A mix of tall, green pines and hardwoods covered the mountain’s sharp edges. Looking up to a blue sky troubled by a school of cirrus clouds, I saw a small economy car come off a mountain and sail down to destruction in a ravine. I think the car was red and white, but I don’t know the make, model or year. The moment as real as any reality I’d ever experienced.

We were shocked. The accident site was hundreds of feet below us, so we couldn’t reach it to check on survivors. While we were discussing this, a speeding vehicle’s sound was heard on another mountainside. Hearing it sound, we turned in time to see a burgundy Toyota pick-up truck race up another mountainside on the wrong side of a double-yellow line. As it reached the peak, it turned into the vehicle it was passing, clipping its left front quarter panel. The truck continued with little change, driving off the road onto a wide, dusty run-off area, and then off the mountain, into the air and down to the other vehicle’s crash site.

I was certain that the second was a suicide and told that to friends. As I did, a former Sheriff came up. I explained to him what we’d seen and my theory. He confirmed that they were young lovers. The girl was driving the little economy car, and her boyfriend was in the Toyota. She’d been told he couldn’t see her anymore, so she drove off the mountain. Learning she was dead, he did the same, to join her.

We were shocked but continued on. Meeting a female beggar, I gave her a coin, which made her happy. I don’t know what the coin was. My group discussed where we wanted to go. Decisions were made. Seeing another female beggar, I gave her a coin. She was thankful and ecstatic. Some of my group didn’t approve of me giving money away. I didn’t care although I was knew I was running short of funds.

We kept walking. When we met others, I would tell them of the suicides. When I did, I clearly saw the scenes as sharply and clear as though they were happening at that moment.

Digging a hand down into my jeans pocket, I came up with a handful of coins. Among pennies, dimes and quarters was a silver dollar. Then I found a gold dollar. That pleased me because I had more money than I thought. Spying what I believed was another silver dollar, I noticed it was larger, so I looked closer. It turned out to be a four dollar silver coin. I was surprised; I didn’t know such a coin existed.

While that took place, a third woman approached me. I prepared to give her some chain and was just deciding what it was to be, when word of another suicide reached us. I don’t know who it was.

The end.

Well, that’s where the dream ended, but not my thoughts about it. Usually, clarification comes when thinking and writing about my dreams. Today, the only conclusion I reach is that I have more than I realize. That’s seems shallow and incomplete.

Trying to find answers, I look up suicide in dreams and find Jeremy Taylor’s site.

Suicide in Dreams

When “death” appears in a dream, it is a very reliable indicator that the dreamer is growing and changing so profoundly that only the “death” of the old “me”, (or part if “me”), is an adequate symbol of the psycho-spiritual process that is taking place.

But I’m not thinking about killing myself. Yes, I was thinking changes were required, however. While not writing much the past three days as I visited with family and travel, I kept thinking about my writing. I’d concluded, changes in the novel-in-progress were required, changes in my approach were required, and changes in my attitude were needed.

Yes, I supposed that could be three suicides.

Turning to the three coin, this interpretation on dreambible.com spoke to me:

To dream of finding coins represents positive feelings about gains being made in waking life. Feeling good having more than you did before. Insight into problems, increased power, or freedom gained. It may also reflect feelings of being lucky. A lucky discovery or rare coincidence in waking life. Missed or lost opportunities that have reemerged. Awareness of the value that something in your life holds.

Three beggar women? No explanation I found scratched my itch so I relegated it to background thinking. From that morass came a new approach.

I’d not witnessed the third suicide, but had been told about it. That happened as I found the third coin, when the third beggar woman approached me. Three became the critical link. The first suicide was the past; the second was the future. The third suicide, unseen, was the future. It came as the third beggar approached. She wasn’t given anything but it was during this period that I found the third coin, a unique “four dollar silver coin”. That’s a special coin, so the future will be special.

The past is paid and done; the present is paid and finished; and the future awaits, special.

Nah, I’m reaching. Maybe that’s all wishful thinking – or wishful dreaming. (Hah!) Perhaps a better answer will come to me. Maybe the dream means nothing and I’m consuming precious neural energy tilting at windmills.

Or maybe I’ll dream a more satisfying answer.

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A Dream of Departure

Man, were we busy. People were returning from other assignments, and we were all going in new directions. I knew them all, co-workers, comrades, friends. Our energy was high. My wife was busy with a special task but was becoming frustrated with her role and how others regarded her.

Our commander got up on a table to address us. He began lamely. Not getting the response he expected, he went in a new direction and then told us he’d talk to us later. We resumed our preparations.

I was happy and excited, anticipating new directions. “We need to celebrate,” someone said. “Yes,” I agreed. “We should get beer,” another said.

“I can make beer,” I announced. As I did, I went back to a clear plastic bag. Dry yellow foam filled it. Holding it up, I said, “This is beer.” The bag was as light as cotton candy. “You just need to add water.” Others were doubtful and amazed, but I was undaunted, joking with them about the brew that would result.

The bag was not closed. Tilting to one side as I pressed forward, much of the yellow foam fell out. I remained undaunted and in a humorous frame. Still talking and laughing, I began scooping up the foam and shoving it back into the bag. Another came to help, holding the bag open for me. We found this very funny.

We crossed the gathering and paused. My wife intercepted me. She was angry. “Who spilled the water?” she demanded, pointing. It took several repetitions before we grasped her question and where the water had been spilled. It wasn’t much and didn’t matter to me or the others. This irritated my wife, who stormed off in dismay. Shrugging it off, the rest of us continued to prepare to party and depart.

Afterwards, my wife and I walked along a sidewalk. Everyone was moving their possessions from their homes. Movers were going to some houses. We waved at folks that we knew but then started finding some possessions discarded along the walk. We didn’t think that stuff was supposed to be there. Beginning to pick up the first pieces, we quickly discovered a larger cache of personal, prized possessions. We were stunned. The quantity was too large for us to do anything except heap it. The mystery of how it all came to be there consumer our attention.

While we did that, one of the people came along. Recognizing some of the stuff as hers, we pointed things out to her. “I don’t care,” she said. “They can do what they want with them. I’m through with it. I’m going on.”

They settled the question in my mind. If it didn’t matter to the owner, why should it matter to me?

So much depends upon how something is regarded.

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