It was a warm weekend evening. Acorns were falling from the Oak trees, banging onto car tops, crunching underfoot. Izzy was pulling at the leash.
I dialed my cousin. “Hi, David!” she said.
We spoke about school. We spoke about the kids. She asked about my progress in year two. I asked about her recent trip to Frankfort and her plans for the future. And I told her about a dream I had.
It was a dream in which the kids were posing in a photograph. They were all there, the whole family and some others, but what stuck in my mind was Jack’s pose. The look on his face. The angle of his shoulders. And the silver-grey suit he was wearing that made him look like a model in a high-end men’s clothing catalog.
She was silent for a moment. “You mean the photo Bette sent?”
“No,” I said. “This was a dream.” I described how I remembered nothing from the dream itself. How I just remembered that image. But it was from a dream.
“Hm,” she said. “That’s weird.” But she said nothing else. And we returned to talking about other things.
The next day, when trying to stitch together the remaining pieces of my blog/email setup, I looked at my inbox and saw an email from Bette. And I only then recalled having reading it. And I only then realized that my dream wasn’t a dream but rather the memory of the photo Bette had sent.
So here is the point of this story…
This year teaching is admittedly much, much better than last year (especially at this point in the year). But it is still consuming me. I get home and collapse for a while to read, and then we eat, and then I sit at the computer and work on upcoming lessons late into the night. And evidently this is consuming enough of me that memory and dream have mixed together in a jumbled mess.
“Hm,” she said. “That’s weird.”
Indeed.