Monthly Archives: August 2008

Dreaming is Free is Song Lyric Thursday


When I met you in the restaurant
You could tell I was no debutante
You asked me what’s my pleasure
A movie or a measure?
I’ll have a cup of tea and tell you of my dreaming
Dreaming is free
I don’t want to live on charity
Pleasure’s real or is it fantasy?
Reel to reel is living rarity
People stop and stare at me We just walk on by – we just keep on dreaming
Feet feet, walking a two mile
Meet meet, meet me at the turnstile
I never met him, I’ll never forget him

Dream dream, even for a little while
Dream dream, filling up an idle hour
Fade away, radiate

I sit by and watch the river flow
I sit by and watch the traffic go
Imagine something of your very own
Something you can have and hold

I’d build a road in gold just to have some dreaming
Dreaming is free
Dreaming
Dreaming is free
Dreaming
Dreaming is free

I have this recurring dream in which my purse is stolen and I am chasing the party responsible to retrieve it. Well, this is sort of what happens. In the early days of this dream, the purse is just lost and I spend what feels like hours looking all over places that feel like places I know and yet they look completely different.

Like university.

I wander the streets and buildings of what is supposed to be Iowa City but isn’t and yet I think it is – and isn’t – at the same time.

I have also wandered a representative of the middle school I worked at the longest too.

But lately the dream has evolved to the point where I haven’t misplaced the purse but it has been stolen and I chase the thief through a mall. A funhouse version of a mall that actually crops up as a dream setting a lot. (I think sometimes I recycle sets but have no idea why.)

I am worried in the dream because all my credit cards and money and identification is in my purse. Why would I carry all that, you might ask. Because I have. Moving up here I had to keep all the important documents on me to ensure nothing got misplaced or left behind in a hotel. Any trip we take across the border requires a multitude of documents so we can get back in as we await finalization of our residency. Documents loom large in my life.

But money and credit cards?

I’ll get back to that.

So I finally have the woman who has my purse within my sights and she knows I am close on her heels. The bag is a dark leather with a longer shoulder strap and is floppy. You know, the kind that only stands upright because it is crammed with crap. Usually junk that belongs to everyone but the owner of the bag. That is the way of motherhood.

I grab the women by the shoulder and spin her around. She is shorter than I am. Blond short hair, the kind that kicks up in curls at the nape of the neck and at the ears. It looks frosted actually. I don’t recognize her. I wrench the bag from her shoulder and she fights to keep it, but I easily take it from her and knock her down.

I am so angry with this person and I just start to whale on her.

She rolls around, protesting that she needs the things in the purse but I don’t.

I don’t know what she is talking about because everything in the bag is mine.

I grab a hand full of her upper arm. She is extremely overweight. I pinch and twist it. She howls. Still insisting that I don’t need the purse.

That’s when a man snatches it up from the ground where it is laying and runs off with it.

That’s where I woke up.

Aside from the ever annoying spider dream (I spend a lot of time fending off noxious critters – usually big furry spiders), this purse dream is the most consistent in my rotation. I dream in color. There is often a soundtrack and I usually am at least partially – if not fully – aware that I am dreaming. Sometimes I am even a character and a spectator. It never seems odd.

I have told Rob about the dreams and mentioned the purse one with the new details. He wondered what I thought it meant and I really hadn’t any clue.

However, thinking about it for a few days I came to a few conclusions.

The purse is my identity and my baggage. That is obvious. The fat woman is my body image troubles which I clearly need to let go of. The fact that she told me I don’t need the “baggage” or the “identity” makes sense as I am not even the person I was a year ago let alone the woman I was prior to that.

The money and credit cards?

I am putting too much emphasis on the pay off end of my writing. I shouldn’t be worrying about that. Financially we are fine and I am putting too much pressure on myself and probably stifling my muse in the process.

So let’s see if the dream recurs now, shall we?

The Americans have Landed – Updated


That’s not a phrase that any Canadian wants to hear.

When we were pouring cement two weekends ago, Best Man was regaling us with his golf exploits (Best Man frequently takes the summer afternoons off to “network” on the green) and mentioned seeing military jets , CF-18’s, flying overhead.

There was an air show in Edmonton because ordinarily, we wouldn’t see military aircraft up here, and of course the conversation turned to America and it’s lust for the oil sands just to our north.

“You sure it wasn’t the Americans coming to secure the oil sands?” my husband asked him.

Best Man just laughed.

It’s not really a joke. Canadians are pretty sure the day will come when the U.S. redirects its might north and simply takes from Canada what it now coerces from them via treaties and secret agreements.

However the only Americans landing today were BabyDaughter and I. The final piece of the immigration puzzle is an interview and handing over yet another photo for our permanent residency cards*.

MidKid had heard that the interview could get intimate and picky.

“What color is your husband’s toothbrush?”

I could draw a map of his “identifying marks” more easily than recall that.**

I do know that some couples are called upon to “prove” the legitimacy of their union but short of setting up a camera in the bedroom (which Rob nixed and wouldn’t do us justice anyway), how do you prove you are truly married in all senses of the word?

If that were to have been an issue, it would have come up before now anyway.

The interview mainly consists of the following:

Are you a criminal?

Do you actually live here?

Do you have the $490 dollars?

Welcome to Canada.*

 

*So we are now officially permanent residents of Canada with all the rights minus two (voting and running for public office). I was handed a document that entitles us to live here but not doesn’t grant us reentry should we leave before the PR cards arrive.

Why would we leave? I hate that my mind goes there but I had to ask the woman what would happen should I be needed to go back to the states because I have an elderly/dying father.

“You would have to go to the Canadian Embassy to get a travel permit for reentry.”

Oh. No problem. It’s a mere three-ish hours away from my folks’ home being located in Chicago.

For the next five weeks then I’ll just hope my dad doesn’t get worse or die. Like the good old days when my late husband was in the nursing home and then hospice. I just uber-planned. I had lesson plans months in advance and a weeks worth of emergency sub plans. I sometimes wonder now if I am not a bit too contingency oriented. Always knowing where the exits are located and what to do after evacuating. Side effects.

**I was not called upon to prove intimate knowledge of my husband. Though I was prepared to do so.

Retiring to the Island


Thursday night last, Rob and I attended a retirement gathering for a friend of his from work. The gentleman and his wife are relocating to Vancouver Island, a place I have longed to visit but haven’t made it to yet. Perhaps this is because I fear that I won’t want to leave?

Rob’s friend and his wife are not a lot older than Rob and I. Not more than ten years. In certain respects though they are more his contemporaries than mine due to the adult children and grandchildren (no neither of the girls is in the “family” way but it is something we have braced for – Rob more than me as he has a real horror about it which is funny in someone who made his own mother a grandma at 41).

We talk a lot about the retirement. But in generalities. We have no idea where. Or what he will be doing (me being a writer seems decided). It’s not realistic to think we will do the traveling and hobby thing. Our generation will be the first to not retire that way. Not many retirees will have a high schooler and then university to factor in as we will, but there are more of us than one would think.

I watched more than I spoke at the gathering. Later Rob asked me if I had survived not knowing anyone and honestly I didn’t find it much of a trial. I have spent a year not really knowing anyone and before that I had spent about 3 years being a visible ghost. I am quite comfortable in my role as wall flora.

No one expected me to talk anyway. One woman gave me hard looks when she thought I wasn’t looking. Another dismissed me once she discovered I didn’t have a job and just talked to Rob. The host’s son and his wife were quite nice and of course Best Man was there.

Best Man was just that a year plus ago at our wedding. He is about the age of my late husband, a French-Canadian with a wicked sense of humor, he spent the night before our wedding fighting off the attention of Rob’s mother and ElderDaughter. Were it not too personal I would launch into the awkward tale of how Rob’s Best Man and his oldest daughter hooked up for a time, but enough has been said.

Fortunately, we still have Best Man in our life. Sometimes things don’t work out and yet they still do.

Best Man lamented that he is not the story-teller that his dad and younger brother were not being gifted with the gene necessary.

“I got the hamburger eating gene.”

He really does have the gene. Actually, both. And he went on to tell the tale of nearly rolling a golf cart off the side of a mountain while Rob and his brother-in-law watched to see which way he would tip before intervening.

As we were leaving the host couple reminded us that we are always welcome to visit them. Funny but we have more standing invitations awaiting us on Vancouver Island than anywhere else.

A sign perhaps.