Hi, all,
Daniel-of-2019, here.
I had a dream about
Charlie the other night. It was “unrealistic,” as dreams tend to
be, and all jumbled up, but I was glad to have it. We were all at the
school again, only it was a fantasy-magic school, like Hogwarts, and
we were all in some basement catacomb trying to open a magic box or
treasure chest rumored to have killed anybody who looked inside it,
the Nazis melted in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Anyway, everybody
had their own ideas for how they could open the chest safely, and
they were all expounding on their ideas at once, everybody talking
and nobody listening, except then I noticed Charlie wasn’t talking,
he was just standing off to the side with a very dubious look on his
face. He got up and went to leave. I met him at the door and told him
and said “I’m glad you’re going to survive. I may step out,
too.” And we hugged each other for a very long time and then I woke
up.
Into the dark of my
bedroom I spoke, saying “I guess I did step out of that dream,”
and June mumbled and shifted in her sleep.
I had not dreamed of
Charlie in a long time—I do not dream on him often, and in fact I
seldom dream about anybody I actually know. It felt like spending
time with him. I do not know what, if anything, it means.
As usual, I meet the
upcoming holiday (Brigid) disorganized. I didn’t manage to get in a
post that really expressed the feeling of anticipation in the last
days of January, 2009, just before I began my last year as a student.
It wasn’t a particularly unusual January, all told, but I never
spent very many Januaries on campus, and for most of them I was
rather preoccupied by my own situation and so did not take much
notice of the mood on campus. But that last January I much more sat
back and watched—yearlings milling about, finishing up their
year-and-a-day of zazen meditation and group therapy and unsure what
might happen next; senior students returning from weeks or months
off-campus and greeting friends, re-entering the odd and
oddly-familiar world of the school; graduating novices disappearing
into the Ordeal and the magic trick of nobody else noticing; the
return of the faculty, totally unannounced and then you’d bump into
one of them. The whole place had an aura of waiting, of quickening,
of looking forward to the not-quite-known.
Not that I had no
feelings of my own, and not that I wasn’t busy. I conducted my
first several interviews, lined up several others, and in general
started acting on my plan for my last year in a serious way.
And twice I tried to
sneak up on Charlie and twice failed.
-best, D.
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