Dreams of Swimming

I woke early this morning after a dream where I was swimming deep underwater though the water was actually in a pool that stretched out from someone's home for blocks and blocks. I think I was in the neighborhood of Lower Queen Anne trying to find the house of a dog I walk. I found the dog, but as soon as I put him on a leash and realized there was water all around the house, the dog turned into a 4-year-old boy. And just like the dog, the boy/dog had very red, curly hair.

"Can you swim?" I asked.

"Living here," he said, "I have to!" Then he laughed and dove in.

I followed though I held tightly to the leash that was attached to the boy/dog's belt. We held our breath, but we didn't need to. We could talk underwater and soon I realized I was breathing underwater as well.

"We have to go through that tunnel," the boy/dog told me and so we swam into a narrow passage only to be met by a large, long lizard. Instinctively I knew the lizard was harmless because he looked at us with the same fear and trepidation that we looked at him.

It was then that I heard the voice of a friend who said, "Whatever you do, don't turn around. Swim toward the lizard." My friend had driven me to this watery house and she was waiting for us in her car out on the street. We were trying to swim toward her and somehow she could observe what we were doing.

I started to swim forward, but the boy/dog turned around and swam the other way and I no longer had hold of his leash. Even the lizard looked worried especially when a bright light lit up the tunnel from behind us.

This is when I woke up, my sciatica burning a hold in my left leg and the strong urge to pee overwhelmed me. I got up, hobbled to the bathroom, did my business, and headed back to bed, but sleep was hopeless with my burning leg and butt nagging me awake every few minutes.

Sometimes dreams are just dreams, but sometimes they are not. I can't really figure this one out. I know there is some flux in my dog walking schedule with the said red-headed dog's family putting their house up for sale while trying to find a new home hopefully in the area. Another dog walking client is doing the same (moving that is), so perhaps my curious dream reflects the uncertainty of these two clients.

But the swimming part is intriguing. I love to swim. Swimming calms me. Swimming is a meditation for me. Being able to breathe underwater is often something I can do in my dreams. It feels natural and since I think I spent half my childhood in a pool, it makes sense that I find water to be a safe place.

But the lizard thing and the bright light behind me, the light that I knew represented fear, confuses me. What does that mean?

I'll have to think about this today. There maybe something there, there may not, but I know that I've been trying to work something out in my dreams lately, I just am not certain what it is. Regardless, dreaming of swimming makes me want to actually go swimming, which may be a result of my massage therapist encouraging me to get back in the pool to help with my sciatica.

Easier said than done these days, but I'll do anything at this point to end the burning in my butt and leg.

First up, though...a walk at the park with Rubin...my own curly-headed, semi-blond little boy...so he can go for a swim and romp around in the big field with all the other dogs.

Crossing the Rubicon

Not until I watched the ridiculously overdone ROME series did I put two and two together: The Rubicon is river in Italy. Crossing was forbidden. Thus when Caesar crossed it, well there was hell to pay...really overwrought hell according to the HBO series.

Silly me. Being a history major I should have known this, but somehow that little fact didn't stick. I wonder how much else goes unstuck?

My dreams last night were all over the map, but the one that sticks ended with a huge house fire, an emaciated father standing with his almost dead young son in his arms, and the father shouting to the fire, "Take me, not my only begotten son!" And then the father collapsed and died. I didn't stay asleep long enough to know what happened to the son.

I can't even begin to imagine what that dream was about. Religiously themed dreams rarely populate my sleep, but this one was definitely religious. Except when I woke up from the dream, I kept thinking -- Who was God? The father with the son in his hands or the fire? I imagine many who question the foundations of Christianity have asked that very same question.

The dream has stayed with me this morning. Not in a bad way. Not even in a good way. It's just stuck -- images, sounds, and all -- unlike the factoid about the Rubicon.

Of course, now that I know about the Rubicon I'll not forget it. When things stick with me, it's hard to un-stick them and while that might seem like a good thing, it's not. At least, not always. They become tidbits I gnaw on at the weirdest times -- usually in the middle of the night -- and I have a hard time letting them lie flat. I pick at them constantly.

Perhaps my dream was informed by my late night reading -- Barbara Kingsolver's "Lacuna." I read a lot of the reviews before I purchased the book and most weren't glowing. Reviewers liked the book, but thought it lacked something and they kept comparing it to her other novels, particularly "Poisonwood Bible." That must be a bummer for Kingsolver. Kind of like a famous musician always asked to play their hits from 20 years ago. Does she always have to write that same novel over and over to get noticed?

I mean, I liked Poisonwood, but I also really liked "Prodigal Summer" -- so different from each other, but each with enough weight to draw me in and make me live the stories in my head even when I wasn't reading. Lacuna is very different and yet those images, the rhythm of the voices stick with me even when I'm doing the most mundane tasks.

Yesterday, I had to venture into Costco for some needed items. Costco is always overwhelming, but on a Saturday afternoon, it's stupefying. I survived simply by recalling the voice of Harrison Shepard, the storyteller in Kingsolver's book. His voice calms me only it's not his voice, it's really hers and that is why I find this novel as powerful and wonderful as her previous ones. The character is in my head and yesterday, while elbowing my cart through the crowded Costco isles, I thought about Mr. Shepard's voice (aka Ms. Kingsolver's) again and again. How does she do that, I kept thinking, how does she make me hear him, see him, feel him when all the while it's her?

I like it when things like this stick. It's a comfort. So it's hard for me to figure out how my religious dream of begotten sons connects to the soothing voice of Kingsolver's story. Maybe there is no connection and the psychic patchwork of dreams threaded these facts together until I was left with images of a dying father and a limp son falling perilously close to the flames.

I cannot make sense of what sticks and what doesn't. We each have our own Rubicons to cross, I suppose, I just wonder what hell I'm trying to pay.

No News

I'm doing my best NOT to read the Huffington Post. It was a New Year's Resolution. I made it because I found myself reading it every chance I got and the more I read, the more yucky I felt. It appears that everyone has an opinion about everyone else and even though those opinions are often conflicting, the headlines are bold and threatening, warning of dire consequences should one opinion prevail over another.

I started reading the Huffington Post during the last presidential elections. I wanted to follow the polls and the pundits in hopes that my candidate would get elected. Now that he has, the polls and pundits are chronicling his every move and subsequent opinions about his performance beat on the website like an erratic and ailing heart. After reading the posts, I find myself searching for my own feelings and opinions and often can't find them because they're buried under the words of "experts."

Years ago -- before I was a teacher, before I was a dog walker, before most of my life -- I worked in television news. I was a "behind the scenes" worker who coiled up cables, tested microphones, and sent signals back to the news station for LIVE reports. I enjoyed my work, but found it extremely stressful since everyone in the newsroom took their jobs so seriously it was hard to remember that most people weren't glued to a police scanner just waiting for the next disaster.

I decided to leave the news business because I realized - while driving way over the speed limit to a car accident I'd been ordered to so the station I worked for could have "first coverage," - that local television news was about nothing more than paranoia and tragedy. The stories on the morning, afternoon, and evening broadcasts warned about all the things that could go wrong -- faulty wiring in new homes, baby food with potentially hazardous chemicals, diseases that could befall anyone who touched this, ate that, slept here, or vacationed there.

If the stories weren't fueled by fear, they were focused on someone's sorrow. Numerous times it was my job to hold a microphone up to a surviving victim of some heinous crime or worse, the grieving family. I followed reporters who knocked on the doors of the parents of a murdered woman or stand out on chilly nights while the reporter told the tragic story of the "family in the house behind me."

I have a vivid memory of being summoned from my warm bed on an early winter morning to cover the story of a fire in the north end. A husband and wife were found dead in the burned down house and we stood outside waiting for the body bags to emerge because body bags made for good visuals. And so we waited, for hours, because it turned out the husband was a famous artist who had just been sued by his daughter for years of sexual abuse. We didn't know that at the time, nor did the neighbors who set up lawn furniture to watch the action while they ate their breakfasts before heading off to work.

Turns out the daughter had set fire to her parents' house in revenge for all the tragedy her father made of her life and so we spent the next week searching for people who knew the family, who could provide any information. "Did you see this coming?" was a common question followed by "How does it feel to know she did this?"

It was tragic and therefore was the lead story in the 5 o' clock news followed by a story about a dentist who sexually molested his patients.

Depressing. The job was depressing and stressful and so out of touch with reality. Yes, those horrible things happened, but when all you could focus on were the horrible things it was difficult to find any not-horrible things in the world.

That's kind of how I feel about HuffPost. Well-written, articulate analysis that focuses on the problems of the world is, in my humble opinion, no different than poorly written, inarticulate crap focused on the problems of the world -- it's all just focused on the negative and pretty soon, that's all you can see.

So, I've taken to reading food blogs and photography blogs, and postings about rescued dogs. I still listen to NPR because I can tune out what I don't want to hear and at least once every few hours, there's a great story about creativity or music or a funny new play in New York that I'll probably never see.

This week in my classroom, we're taking a brief look at the Civil Rights Movement as a prelude to a new novel we'll be reading. In my introduction to the students I said that to me, history isn't about events or wars -- it's about people and their stories. So we'll be taking a look, I told them, at the individual stories of the 1950s and 60s. Some will be sad, I explained (because their 5th graders and they are moved by sadness), and some will be inspiring. But remember, I added, that people change the course of history and it's their stories that can inspire us to action.

Those are the stories I wish I could read more of on the Huffington Post. Imagine how that might change our outlook on the world around us?

Living with Elvis

I woke this morning and greeted Elvis in the mirror. We do this every now and then, arranging a visit about once every 7 or 8 weeks. Generally, our get-togethers are brief -- he smiles, I scream and then it's over. But today, looking at Elvis in the mirror, I realized he was going to be around for awhile seeing as how the woman who cuts my hair - Mary - is finishing up her honeymoon in Paris for the next few weeks.

If it weren't her honeymoon, I'd be made at her. How dare she take a vacation (to Paris of all places) and leave Elvis to wreak havoc on my life!

Elvis, you see, lives in my hair. After a night of tossing and turning, smooshing a pillow on top of my head or burying myself in the covers, my hair rises like a mountain on my head. "The bigger the hair," Mary tells me, "the closer to God."

She doesn't mean it. Neither of us are religious and therefore not focused on being closer to God, but still, one look at my stack of hair and even she is singing Elvis tunes.

Many people admire my hair. Not now, of course, not when it's got a life of its own, but in general, when Elvis is away and my hair behaves itself. At 51, I am lucky to have a thick, healthy head of hair, gray though it may be. People often comment on it-- the salt and pepper coloring, the waves or curls if it's recently gotten wet from rain or from swimming, the thickness of it -- but when it gets long, like now, it is so strong and so thick that it doesn't fall around my face. Nope, it stacks up on top of my head.

Once, when I was bored with my haircut, I decide to grow my hair out. It took forever and though I knew I'd have to live through the ugly stage, I didn't realize that the ugly stage would put me in the company of entertainers like Elvis or Conway Twitty or those tele-evangelists who must have to spray their hair with lacquer to get it to stand so tall.

I use gel to subdue any elevation and still, it rises every morning like prehistoric mountains pushed up by shifting tectonics.

My hair got wide, too when I was trying to grow it out. The longer it got, the more it grew out sideways never gaining enough weight to hang down long. So now I keep it short, but if I don't schedule a haircut every 6 weeks or so, the top part grows sky high and Elvis comes by for a visit.

"You need a haircut," my teaching partner said to me the other day. Even though I laughed, I was a bit wounded.

"Elvis is in the house," I sang out. She laughed uncontrollably.

Mary doesn't come back for another two weeks. I'll need to pick up some more hair gel when I see her. I've been over-indulging in the stuff in an attempt to tame the wily beast, but still, every morning, Elvis and I meet in the mirror.

The only thing I'm missing are sideburns and a sequined-studded white leather coat and pants.

Too bad Halloween is so far away.