Back again to Woodstock; to the country. Or as Wm Gass has it, the heart of the heart of the country. After long drought, huge rainstorm provides mushrumps’ delight. Witness Claire with dinner late-sized agaric; for the first time in years, we picked pounds & pounds of ceps in Wittenberg Park. There were hundreds of pounds on show.
Back to my swimming routine at the Y. And to old Y regulars. Amng them Jack Mullen, artist and foundryman, seen here in his new hat.
Listening on NPR to accounts of Putin explicit about ignoring ISIS and attacking the CIA-trained & financed ‘moderate Syrian forces’ opposed to Assad, by land (‘volunteer Russian forces,’ as in Ukraine) and air. And right now e-e-e-e-veryone just lookin’ de other way. Putin must be giggling up his Cossack sleeves. Mind you, Onkel Adolf too figured Yanks wuz wimps (he loved Hollywood), and look where that got him. Then again, maybe they’s wimps now.
Classic dream last night. All those who like me hate hearing people’s dreams, skip this para. In the dream I’m in a large cafe in Athens. (The night before Claire mentioned Athena, a friend of ours; when I misheard, Claire was obliged to repeat her name.) I’m waiting for the arrival of a pal, the late Jeremy Paul; then it’s the next day but same place and Jeremy never came and I’m now waiting for another pal, the very much alive Steve Wilson. Who also never shows up. (Yesterday, Lupe, who helps us with our garden on Mondays, mysteriously never came; likewise ‘Lady Rooter,’ a sewer management company, also never came as scheduled by them, to give us an estimate on our new drain field.) Instead I meet a black guy in the cafe and we hit it off. (Last night we had dined at New World Home Cooking and been waited on by a black guy, who vanished for a long while after I asked for the check, causing me to reduce his tip for 20% to 18%, and then was shamed by the fact that he nonetheless ran after me with the scarf – first time of needing one since the spring – that I had left behind.) The black guy persuades me to return to Brooklyn with him – it turns out that we are both Brooklyn College students, in the dream. I’m not sure whether to leave but in the end I do, only to lose sight of him in the tram we both catch. Then I notice my cellphone isn’t in my pocket. (Daily event.) At the next tram stop (funny cute narrow blue and white trams, white with blue trim) I exit the tram to head back to the cafe, but… have no idea how to get back to it. No idea where it is. This is my recurrent dream: I go somewhere, whether through streets or across land or sea, and later wish to return but the dream has run out of memory. It feels like a significant issue: can’t find his way home. Actually it isn’t. Has nothing to do with inability to retrace steps in life. It’s a perfect novelist’s nightmare, though: we think in terms of lengthy narrative. Dream thinks in terms of footsteps in the snow – i.e. vanishing behind you. Look back and no trace. Dream isn’t built to make a lasting coherent chain you could retrace.
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