Dreams, Memories

          I’m blaming the heat and my lack of work for what’s happening in my brain:

          Last night I went to sleep at 10:15 and woke up at 4:45. When the cat heard me stirring, she came out from under the bed, where I had occasionally heard her heavy sighs throughout the night.  I cuddled with her for a minute, remembering a dream in which I wore yellow socks and was mad at John because the floor of his room was so dirty the bottoms of the socks were black.  I laid awake until about 5:30. Then I had this dream:

          I dreamed I was in a house with white walls. It was hot outside. I thought I better close the sliding glass doors. I stood for a moment and thought, something’s missing. Walter! I’d left him outside in the heat. He was sitting by the patio door. I let him in.

          I turned on a big screen TV. A show about darling teenage girls was on. They had braces on their teeth.  I was sitting on the floor, watching the show and turned to Walter, who was now a  seventeen-year old boy. He had very black hair, cropped short, but not too short, about an inch long, it was thick and lustrous. He wore a long sleeved white shirt and white pants with a black belt.  He wore the latest style for young guys: a 1” wide black tie, like a very thick ribbon, tied in a stiff bow, with two long “tails.” He was absolutely adorable.

          He said a sentence with a made up word in it that started with a V. I knew it was not a real word but I got his meaning. He didn’t like living in a city. He missed the country.  I told him I did too.

          The outfit he wore was very much like what Tom Gray was wearing the first day I saw him at SMCC in 1968.  Tom was sitting, leaning against a sycamore tree.  He wore the white shirt, white pants, black belt, but also had a black vest and brown suede boot moccasins. His hair was medium brown, to his shoulders.

          I had gone back to SMCC with the intention of meeting “a guy” who would take me out of LA.  In January 1970 we left LA for Mt Shasta. Tom returned to LA a few months later without me, under the auspices of trying to get a recording contract.  I stayed until May 1971.

          I think the reason I’m stalled, writing my memoir, is that I’m not looking forward to writing about those years because they were traumatic and I made so many stupid mistakes.  According to Jane Fonda’s latest book, Prime Time, the last one-third of our lives should be spent reflecting on and coming to understand the previous two-thirds of our life, how we got to where we are, what we learned.

          I saw wonderful therapists in the 1970s and 1980s and thought I had come to terms with the mistakes of my youth.  But now they resurface. Now I have the opportunity to look at them with the added “wisdom” I’m supposed to have gained from my experiences since.

          We’ll see. So far, in writing my story I haven’t done much editorializing. I re-read the first few chapters today and found that the ones I like best are the ones in which one main event occurs, not where I cover several years at a time.

          So when I write about meeting Tom, I will have to describe my delight at finding that he was in one of my classes and how I casually  asked him if he knew where I could get some mescaline.  I’ll have to describe that tiny one-room cottage in Ocean Park where he first played Mozart for me on tinny speakers and how his body felt like an ironing board when we laid on his narrow bed.

          In the meantime, I look at my dog with different eyes. Of course I know he’s not a seventeen-year-old boy, but he is my constant companion. He delights when he sees me return from being out, or just from being in another room. Like a kid he’s excited when I ask him to find his squeaky. He brings it to me with bright eyes, anticipating what?

That I’ll steal it, throw it, roll it down the hall?  Or is what I call anticipation just pure delight that he has a squeaky toy and someone bring it to?