New York Friends at My Missouri Home

This dream came right after the one about Laura on the school bus.

I had a big cookbook laid out in the backyard, opened to the page where a certain cake recipe began. I went and got Linda to come home and make the cake for me. I spent an interval at my special shed. This was the little shed back where Uncle Bob’s trailer used to be. It was much larger and sort of an open pavilion now — but I had lived there for awhile, it was still one of the places I lived, and it doubled as a sort of party pavilion. 

Many people I have known in Missouri and New York were there, enjoying a sort of M.A.S.H wartime party atmosphere. It was a crude and rustic but wonderful lodge I had made, and these many friends were enjoying it. 

Then Linda followed me to my suburban house, much like Aunt Pat’s house, and she studied the cookbook in the back yard. When I joined her there I saw that she had been leafing through the cookbook in a careless way. Many of the pages had been torn loose from the ring binder. I sent her inside angrily. “I don’t really like your personality very much,” I said. I was amazed that I could say something so bluntly cruel and still expect her to do something nice for me. I said I’d bring the recipe to her, please go in and get started. 

But then I discovered just how badly she’d ruined the cookbook. And the section on desserts was completely missing. Linda or some burglar must’ve stolen it. I was infuriated at the careless wrecking of my cookbook, and puzzled by the theft. I went inside and told Mom what Linda had done. The story seemed less crazy once I had told the story to Mom. It was still a mystery, but no longer something I might be fabricating. 

It still sounded crazy, but it was objective reality. Reality was crazy, not me.