At first I was on a large, rambling farm, possibly post-apocalyptic. Sort of a cross between Mad Max and Little House on the Prairie, minus Michael Landon. A number of other writers were present, and we were trying to get the farm equipment working. Lots of bits of business, as they say in the theatre, until I was exeunt, pursued by pickup trucks.
After that Mother of the Child and I were staying, separately, in a big old seaside hotel. It was pretty much the Inn at Spanish Head, filtered through dream architecture, including the spectacular views of the Pacific Ocean. She and I were trying to organize a party, the logistics of which kept slipping away from me in dream-logic fashion. We had a room, but not a time. Then we had a time, but not a room. Then we'd lost the guest list. That sort of thing.
I was called in to sit down to dinner with some visiting friends in a gorgeous dining room overlooking the ocean. My dinner guests were an older African-American woman and her three sons, a sullen teen-ager in dreads and giant t-short, and a pair of twins about
the_child's age dressed like kids in her class. Despite the invitation, I knew none of them. The mother was dressed traditionally in kente cloth with cowrie jewelry, much like the Yoruba women of my youth in Nigeria, and kept speaking to me softly, in a good-humored tone, in a language I absolutely could not follow, but suspected within the dream was Gullah. She would occasionally say something to her children, and the twins — very Americanized &mdashl chattered away at me like any ordinary American kids would. I kept wondering what the older boy wanted as he picked at his food, but he never would look at me....
What does it all mean? Heck if I know. Survival, competence, transition, acceptance, family, race, alienation, familiarity — enough themes here to fill a book.
