Monthly Archives: April 2007

24 Apr

One of the classics.

Now that I’ve been trying to remember my dreams, I’ve actually had less success in doing so. I’ve been remembering tidbits — things like a minivan filled with mandarin oranges in water, or having to go to the bathroom really bad at school and peeing into a bucket of flour I kept in the back room. But I’ve been losing the overall plots pretty quickly cuz I get up and immediately start thinking about what I’m doing at school that day.

So here’s one of the all-time best.

I’m sitting at a picnic table across from a monk. He’s dressed in one of those brown Gregorian robes and he’s got the hood up, obscuring his face from view. I’m reading to him, and it becomes evident that, in fact, I’m tutoring him. Every once in a while, he’ll hold up a hand and repeat a word he doesn’t know the meaning of and I’ll explain it to him.

He’s slightly retarded, and he has a lisp.

So there I am, reading some book out loud, and I come across the word “cahoots,” which the monk doesn’t know. So he holds up his hand, and says, “Cahoot-th-s?” He pauses, lifts the hood from his face and says again, “Cahoot-th-s?”

And I’m a little stunned because I don’t fully know what cahoots means. So I say nothing.

And that’s it. I wake up, and I start laughing.

16 Apr

Last Night’s Dream

I’m standing at the deli counter and the grocery store is about to close. I’m the only one there and I’m patiently waiting for the deli woman to turn around and see me so I can ask for some ham. But before she does, this enormously obese woman walks up behind me and says, “I’ll take a pound of the white bean salad when you get a chance.”

I give the obese woman the evil eye, but she’s immune. She doesn’t look at me.

The deli worker doesn’t respond. She reaches in the deli case and pulls out the ham. Obese woman says, “I’ll take the rest of that ham, too.”

Now I’m pissed. So I say, “Can I get a half pound of ham?”

Obese woman looks at me like I’m the one who’s broken the rules.

The deli woman wordlessly cuts the ham, as a third woman approaches and says, “Ooh, you ain’t gonna throw that ham out, is you?”

I’m on the brink of walking away angrily as I watch the deli woman. She puts the ham in a container, weighs it, and gives it to me. “Anything else?” she says.

I’m surprised, and I say, “No.”

And she says, “Let me give you some advice. You need to be a little nicer. You ain’t gotta come in here with your pencil-whipped fancy pants and get all crusty.” (I have no idea what “pencil-whipped fancy pants” are).

I’m about to say that I was angry at the other customers, but I just leave it at “Okay,” and I walk away.

15 Apr

Excuses

I’m experimenting with writing a longer piece right now, so I’m not sure if I’ll have anything up for a while. In the meantime, I’ll fill some space with explanations of a few dreams I’ve had.

This past week, I had one where it suddenly came to my attention that I had two new dogs. We’d had them for a month, actually. But I didn’t know anything about it. One of the dogs was named Quiet, because it was very quiet and tended to stay out of the way. The other dog was named Sharon.

I was walking around the house practicing a Chinese phrase I learned recently, “Ni hui jiang zhong wen ma?” which means “Do you speak Chinese?” (I’ve been doing this in real life, which is why I was doing it in my dream. I haven’t yet learned how to say “no.”)

Anyhow, we were babysitting two Japanese kids, and when they heard me say, “Ni hui jiang zhong wen ma?” they got really excited because, they claimed, “zhong wen” means “Japenese.” (Not really.)

That was it. The dream ended.

An amusing dream, but not one worthy of the Hall of Fame, which I’ve decided to start compiling. When my Creative Writing Class is a little slow, or when I’m passing out a story or something, I often tell them my dreams. I typically have one that I remember every night. But they seldom stack up to the Cahoots dream, or the “Seduce Me” one, or the Phil Donahue one, or the God-Loves-A-Good-Argument one.

More to come.

10 Apr

Mrs. Morton’s House 7

Still, every once in a while I’d sneak away to feel sorry for myself. I took walks through the neighborhood and looked through the windows at normal families. I imagined Mom running beside me. Sometimes I even talked to her. One day, I happened to pass the witch house and I stopped in front. “See that house?” I said to no one. “A witch lives there.” I could see my Mom jogging up to the door, talking with Mrs. Morton’s daughter. But then my daydream took a turn, and I pictured her falling in the dead yard.

They told me she died of cardiac arrhythmia, but it didn’t make any sense to me. “Heart attacks happen to fat cigar-smoking men,” I thought, “not to my mom.” I needed someone to blame; I needed to destroy something, to connect a punch. I knew it was wrong as I was doing it. I knew Mom would scold me for it. I knew it wouldn’t help. But as the rock was leaving my hand, I was also hoping that maybe after I got scolded and shamed, she would be back in my bedroom, rubbing my back and telling me she loved me.

It landed with a disappointing thud a foot shy of a window. I was looked around for another rock and as soon as I found one, the porch light came on. The door opened. It was the daughter. It was a cool May evening, not fully dark yet. The air was thick and misty. Around the porch light I could see a foggy halo.

“What’s your name?” she asked me. I knew she was going to call the police on me, but I had been caught.

“Alex,” I said.

“Alex?” she said. “Are you Alex Sandoval?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m sorry about your mom,” she said. I didn’t respond. “You know, she’s okay now. She’s in a better place.”

“Yeah, thanks,” I wanted to say, “like I didn’t hear that twelve times at the funeral.” But I didn’t say anything. I just stood there.

“You know, Alex,” she went on, “it’s supposed to hurt. If it hurts, it means you loved her.”

I sniffed and blinked quickly to hold back tears. Part of me wanted to throw the rock at her, the other part of me wanted to go cry in her arms. I did neither. “Why is your grass dead?” I asked.

“My mom killed it by accident last spring. She fertilized it too soon, I think. It’s not so bad now.”

She was right. The lawn was mostly green, no browner than the other lawns in the neighborhood. Along the side of the house, there were some carefully planted hostas.

“What about the trees?” I asked. “Did your mom kill those?”

“No. Those are elms. Some bug got to them. I’ll have to get them removed.” There was an awkward silence. She walked toward me. “Did you know my mom used to sew all my clothes?” she asked. I didn’t respond. “And around Halloween, she used to make all my friends a costume? She had this great witch costume she used to wear and she would hand out these huge king-sized candy bars. She was a lot of fun.”

She was standing ten feet away from me now. I felt short. “Why doesn’t she do that anymore?” I asked. She was silent for a long time. I started to wonder if she’d heard me.

She couldn’t look me in the eye when she said it: “She died almost a year ago.”

I let the rock drop from my hand. Before I knew what was happening, tears were gushing from my eyes. Mrs. Morton’s daughter stepped closer. I began sobbing. I felt hot shame flush my face. She hugged me tight.

She hugged me tight and rubbed my back.

07 Apr

Mrs. Morton’s House 6

That year in school, it became more and more acceptable to talk about girls. In one conversation, somebody asked, “Who’s the prettiest girl you’ve ever seen?” When it was my turn, I said, “the witch’s daughter.” The group erupted.

“What?”

“You’ve seen her?”

“How come you never told us about this?”

I told them the whole story, leaving out the part about my mom talking to her, and they chattered non-stop. I had mostly forgotten what she looked like, but I made up details because I kind of liked the attention.

Mark came up with a new theory: “maybe the witch kills anyone who sees her daughter.” But he quickly reconsidered. “No. Maybe the witch kills anyone who touches her daughter.”

Everyone looked at him like he was crazy. Adam said, “So we’ve got to put together a recon mission to see her.” They all leaned in.

The “recon mission” became our new topic of conversation throughout the remainder of winter and into spring, though we never actually acted on it. I guess beautiful women are scarier than witches. As the sole witness of the witch’s daughter, I was the expert. By April, I was starting to enjoy sixth grade.

One day, shortly after Easter, I came home from school and nobody was there. It wasn’t unusual for Mom to be gone after school, but that day the house felt eerily quiet. When Dad came home minutes later, I knew something was wrong.

He knelt in front of me and hugged me hard, like he was clinging to a tree dangling over a cliff. He started sobbing, which I’d never seen him do. “Mom’s left us,” he said. “She’s flown away.”

It was hard to believe any of it was happening. Dad crying in front of me, delivering this impossible message. It was disorienting. For some reason, I said, “she can’t fly.” And he hugged me and started sobbing again.

She was out for a jog through the neighborhood when she fell. A couple of high school students discovered her when they almost ran over her in the street. They called 9-1-1, but by the time she got to the hospital, she was dead.

In the weeks after her death, everything reminded me of her: a pillow knocked off the couch, the clothes folded in my dresser, the musty smell of the basement. Dad cut his hours at work so he could be home when I wasn’t in school. He said it “prevented us both from wallowing in self-pity.”

Still, every once in a while I’d sneak away to feel sorry for myself. I took walks through the neighborhood and looked through the windows at normal families. I imagined Mom running beside me. Sometimes I even talked to her. One day, I happened to pass the witch house and I stopped in front. “See that house?” I said to no one. “A witch lives there.” I could see my Mom jogging up to the door, talking with Mrs. Morton’s daughter. But then my daydream took a turn, and I pictured her falling in the dead yard.

They told me she died of cardiac arrhythmia, but it didn’t make any sense to me. “Heart attacks happen to fat cigar-smoking men,” I thought, “not to my mom.” I needed someone to blame; I needed to destroy something, to connect a punch. I knew it was wrong as I was doing it. I knew Mom would scold me for it. I knew it wouldn’t help. But as the rock was leaving my hand, I was also hoping that maybe after I got scolded and shamed, she would be back in my bedroom, rubbing my back and telling me she loved me.

It landed with a disappointing thud a foot shy of a window. I was looking around for another rock and as soon as I found one, the porch light came on. The door opened. It was the daughter. It was a cool May evening, not fully dark yet. The air was thick and misty. Around the porch light I could see a foggy halo.