Back to Missourian Then Back to My Own Manhattan

Will just give highlights of last night’s dream. I was staying at home again for a few months in the summer. Once again got my old job back at the Missourian, Monday through Wednesday. As usual in this dream, the first two weeks I get almost nothing written for the newspaper, but Bill Miller, publisher and boss, is tolerant, letting me get my groove back.

I drive to Union (my former news beat), try to re-establish contacts, get some news — but no news ever seems to come my way. The main problem is (still talking about this recurring dream generally) is that I never have any ambition to report the news. I start missing work, usually find some better job (as I did in last night’s dream) and then forget to even go into work. Last night I found myself missing a couple weeks of Missourian work before I even realized it. And by then I was back in New York.

Being back in New York was wonderful. Rob and Celia had an interesting little place down in my own version of lower Manhattan. This recurring landscape is an amalgam of various real places, but I haven’t yet put my finger on the sources. Suffice to say it’s a thrill every time I’m in this place and every time I remember it afterwards. It’s a place as real as my memories of my actual first years in New York in the late 80s, but fresher. And why shouldn’t it be.  A dream’s just something in the mind, same as a memory. In a way, this particular dream is better. It’s got best qualities of the memory, bug magnified. I’m always interacting with Rob and his actor friends, sometimes taking acting roles. And sometimes I have a girlfriend.

Last night I was alone in the east-side version of this area, just back from Missouri. And full of the gladness of being back in one of the parts of my New York I long for most.

There was a large meadow, an undeveloped block or two, in which people were scattered about flying kites, talking, ordinary park-day things like that. I came across Rob by surprise. He was giving a performance at the place where I stopped for lunch, a gigantic old house or public building. He was playing an 18 year old in shorts, with red hair, was was still obsessed with skateboards and the like. He spoke with a subtle lisp, giving the boy an additional note of incomplete development. The makeup and dress and the way Rob flattened out his upper lip made him believably a different person, and believably young. This made-up kid was fascinating.

Rob was rehearsing, not giving a final performance. In his breaks we would talk, a couple of minues each time. He was very wound up into his character and didn’t listen well. Mostly I used these minutes to compliment Rob’s acting. But I inserted a couple of sentences on how transcendent it was, being back the city with its parklike spaces and its population of peole who all seemed somehow related — and Rob’s attention drifted. It had to. He could only peek out from his character a little.

There were other scenes and incidents. Have to get some work done, though.