25 March 2007
Home, and past the postprandial cocoa. Now the ticking clock and the ambient music just audible.

We traveled. Yesterday morning we shut the cats inside for overnight with food and water and clean litterboxes. I drove the XL minivan--Sally and Apple leaped in sans leashes, panting with happy, BrotherB confused by deviation from routine, but with a vague understanding of Journey.

On the way out of town I stopped at the shop: Here's cash for the change box, coffee beans for the break room, pay yourself from the till and if we sell nothing today I'll make it up to you on Monday. Thanks!

***

I'm home now--we're home--the three-and-a-half hours on the highway flew past as I reran in my head the scenario, the Fabulous Happening, I had anticipated--which I always anticipate, and which for once actually came to pass.

(interruption)

26 March 2007
During the first hour of the drive I listened to a tape cassette employeeRory loaned me, of the Truth of 9/11, of the New World Order, of the governmental stockpiling of viruses. I listened to both sides of the tape (nothing new) and as usual despaired. Then I found a Catholic radio station broadcasting out of the tiny mountain town of Greenville and they were saying the rosary, so for the final hour off driving I said the rosary along with the radio: opiate of the people, baby.

When we arrived in the city limits I stopped for some groceries at the health food supermarket, and then we checked in at the Matador Motel, room 47, gray-haired woman and her small Down syndrome brother and their two dogs. I recommend the Matador, a down-at-heel establishment with a Spanish revival motif. No perfumes, no air fresheners, no disinfectant scents. Just clean. And they like dogs.

I telephoned Jesse and he gave me directions to the property he shares with a kind of communal group. We drove over and he gave us the Grand Tour. We saw the results of his gardening labors, the great huge artichoke plant and burdock, broccoli bolting already and yellow-and-black-blossoming favas, anxious crape myrtle coming back from the dead. And more, and more.

(interruption)

28 March 2007
The dream, what year was it I dreamed it?, maybe '78 or -9, my peak dreaming years, the apocalytic dream wherein my family comprised my little boys and John then-housemate. First John and I entered a shed at the edge of a farmplace, the two of us standing shut into the dim outbuilding with a German shepherd dog that suddenly attacked us, snarling, and we fled out the door, then walked glumly a dusty road, all four of us, I think, and then I left them all. I took off on a tangent of my own, found myself seated on a bus that made its way into an urban war zone. I've written up this dream before and can refer back, but anyway the wartorn streets, I'm running from cover to cover, from bashed wall to rubble pile. I'm searching frantically for my lost daughter, and her name was ..., her name was ... And I made my way down halls of ruined apartment buildings where squatters lived in secret, it took ages, my search, weeks, but finally I did find her, and rushed to embrace her, lifting her up into my arms in almost a swoon of relief. Her name was Dawn Spirit, and in almost the instant of my embracing I was returned to the bright dry backroad, where I walked with my sons and lover, all happy now, and the German shepherd dog smiling alongside.

So now 30 years and more past that vivid dream I found myself in my waking life walking last Sunday noon in a beautiful city, talking (just prior to leaving) with my grown younger son, having watched him perform in a play the night before, blaze of talent he is. We stood at the wrought-iron-bounded outskirt of a little park. Two figures approached us on the macadam'd trail, tall blur and smaller blur at the edge of my vision. I talk and gesture, incorrigible raconteuse, when I notice my son's expression shifting toward the figures, changing from a bland face of polite time-biding to one of startled recognition,

and he says, "Oh, hi." And I turn and the blurs take on human shapes, and then feminine ones, and then become a woman and a little girl. Finally the woman's face after a moment more assembles itself into the lovely one of my daughter-in-law, and if this is so, then this person with her, this tall now-round-countenanced child of between four and five years, whom I haven't seen since she toddled, this would make this child my granddaughter, and at the instant of this realization my body before I can hesitate lunges for her and grabs her up into my arms, I spin crooning and kissing, my heart pressed to hers and huge love bursting, and even though I have terrified the little girl, my grandchild, who struggles after her first stunned surprise out of my arms to cling behind her mother out of sight, I know with a flood of recognition the remembered relief and gratitude and sense of completion, the remembered dream embrace from years before, I know it as some milestone passed, as of the end of exile, trial survived. Spirit's dawn.