There is nothing more boring than other people's dreams...

[Mark Thibodeau]

...and yet I feel compelled to share this one with you folks.

LAST NIGHT'S DREAM
Monday June 1

Me and dad, dead lo these past ten years, are in an old black car. I think
it's an Eldorado. He's driving. We pass the customs building that leads to
a bridge across the river to Maine, USA, and watch in our mirrors as
some ragged, bearded jackass steals a box full of valuables from the trunk
of our car while we idle at a red light.

We take chase, my father in the car, peeling out in a dangerous maneuver no
doubt learned decades ago in the military, and myself on foot.

I tend to think of every city as an extension, an extrapolation, of the
small town where I grew up. Most differences are really just a matter of
size. In every city where I've spent any time, I've eventually been able to
figure out the lay by  instinctively organizing things into orders of
magnitude.

Small, half-hidden corners of rooftop tar paper, vent exhausts and rusted
out black iron back stairways leading to lonely doorways -- home to
wretched handfuls at most -- stand in for vast tenements, abandoned to the
countless abandoned. The lone hilltop cathedral becomes a vast complex of
titanic, monuments, buzzing with systolic and diastolic flows of humanity,
a pulse of declarative worship in honor of sports, or the arts, or
commerce, or all three, trading out one form of temporary eternity for
another; looming and teetering nervously in more ways than one, forever
promising a collapse impossible to avoid and still yet to take place.

A beautiful girl -- whom I do not recognize and cannot conjure now -- joins
me and we cross another bridge, this one over the hydroelectric dam that
powers much of the city. We walk past the middle school we both attended,
right next to the belching mill, huge in its brown and beige bulk crowned
by silvery smokestacks, that is the cancerous heart of town. Then we walk
up one of the streets populated by those who specialize in trade --
clothing boutiques, restaurants, electronics, furniture, media... and
banks, of course.

We take a left turn, walk by city hall, the postal building, the fire hall
and other civic concerns, before passing into a part of town where fewer
people seem willing to commit to illusions. A two screen movie theater, a
bowling alley, a tavern, a pub, a pool hall. We turn again, lest we find
ourselves wandering the wasteland of auto dealerships, woodlots, and
half-empty commercial parks, and find ourselves approaching what some still
reflexively call "the old part of town".

Buildings of a distinctly sour vintage hug up close to the sidewalks, and
even closer to each other, dark burgundies, greens, the kinds of blues you
only see in prewar neighborhoods, where the postwar dividend never quite
sank in, somewhere beyond the limits of wealth's much-ballyhoo'd capillary
action. Wood, gone grey, worm-eaten, half-rotten. Bricks the color of old
blood. Windows with glass cracked, broken or so old its begun to sag and
warp, behind which, more often than not, you can see nothing. Lights off,
businesses closed, either for the day or permanently. We decide to double
back before the haunted sensation we were feeling became too difficult to
shake, and to see what was what in the center of town proper.

Walking along a vaguely rainbow shaped rise and fall of a road, overpassing
a wide strap of tracks leading to what was once a very active train yard
visible just a couple miles distant alongside the river separating two
nations, we reach the apex and I remark to my companion that from here,
just beyond the wire fence keeping people off the tracks and a closed in
yard strewn with patio furniture, sun-bleached plastic toys, months' worth
of empty beer bottles and wildly overgrown weeds, we can see into the back
courtyard of what was once the most populous apartment building in town. I
even point out the window to the tiny fifth floor walk up cold water
efficiency where my grandfather once lived -- nothing more than a bed, a
sink and a door -- before he met the woman with whom he would sire ten
children, the penultimate of whom would eventually become my mother.

As evening turns purple, we at last find ourselves approaching the center
of town, just a bit downhill from the cathedral. We both remark on how
precarious a recent addition to the cathedral seems, despite its gaudy,
square solidity; how dangerous, like some vast, ornately filigreed gold
ingot perched atop a foundation of woven straw. We talk of its so-called
"design failures", glib, but I am silently unable to deny the beauty of
those few portions accidentally imbued with whatever in architecture passes
for grace.

Who knows? Maybe it's just a byproduct of having to tilt one's head
back, and look up.

As I approach a small, milling crowd congregating around the golden light
and glass doors of a popular evening spot, I notice that my walking
companion has disappeared. Nevertheless, I am warmly greeted by the owner,
who looks almost exactly like Jackie Gleason in his prime. His arm
outstretched, he pushes open the door and beckons me in, where I spot my
father, dead lo these past ten years. I thank Jackie, and enter.

Then I wake up.