Archive for the universe Category
Last night I had a dream that shook me…
It is one of those summer days in Oklahoma when you can see the mirage on the tarmac in front of you, stretching on to the horizon. Lizards and tarantulas are running from one side of the road to the other in an effort to get off of the sun baked road. There is not a cloud in the sky. No chance for shade or cooling rains, just clear blue skies and an oppressive sun that seems determined to pull all moisture from the lands.
I look back into the third row to a man who is telling my grandfather to speed up. He is late for something and agitated.
“Come on, hurry up dammit,” he says to my grandfather, looking at him in the rear-view mirror.
My grandfather looks at him in the mirror and smiles. It is the smile of a demon, something I have never seen on his face before and it terrifies me. My veins freeze, my blood becomes ice as my soul flickers away for a moment. The gas pedal is mashed to the floor and the giant V8 engine explodes with energy as the gas is dumped by the gallon into the carburetor.
I take up a lot of the backseat. I am not a small man. My shoulders more than cover my own seat, giving little room for my grandmother to move around in her own space, but she seems fine with this as she clings to my side. Her hands are in my own now, as she closes her eyes and leans into my arm. She is a small woman, made small by the ravages of time. Her back is bent, and the arthritis has turned her fingers, ever so slightly, to the inside of her hands. Her tears roll down my arm. I am not sure what her tears are for a moment, and I check to see if I am bleeding. (Irrational thought in an irrational dream does not seem out of place.)
“Pull over,” I finally say to my grandfather but he pays no attention to the tiny voice in the backseat. The voice that has just come from my mouth sounds strangely familiar to me, but it is not my own.
I saw myself now as the camera would see me, but this time I am not the 36 year old man sitting beside his frail grandmother, but rather I am the ten year old clinging to her for assurance. There is panic in my eyes and breath is coming faster and faster as terror takes control. That voice that wanted to demand that we pull over was from the mind of a 36 year old former United State Marine, but the voice that had come out, well, that was from the 5th grader who needed his grandfather to hug him.
Again the SUV swerves as my grandfather lists in and out of lucidity. A semi truck carrying crushed cars to a dump is ahead of us for a moment. I can see the cars and I wonder at the lives that they had carried in them for all of those years. Where are those people now, who have they become, are they as scared as I am at this moment?
“I said pull over Grandpa,” this time the voice is right and true, it is my own again and there is command in it. My grandmother looks up and gives me her smile that tells me she is proud and happy of what I have just done. Grandpa looks at me for a moment in the rear-view mirror and then a realization seems to break over his face. He looks at her, suddenly ashamed, and tears well up in his eyes. He turns around in his seat, looking at us instead of in the mirror now, he slows the SUV and pulls to the shoulder.
I open the door as the tires roll to a stop and my feet his the ground with a skid. Pulling my grandmother out from the leather seat I hold her for a moment just to make sure she is steady her and then I reach for the handle on the front door but before I can take hold the SUV roars to life, tires complain as they break free from the tarmac and the world seems to slow around me.
It was at this point that Michael Bay took over directing my dream. In an insane action sequence I race along side the SUV for a moment before I leap onto the shiny chrome back bumper. My grandfather, lost again in his delusions, swerves from lane to lane and back again across the highway, as always in an effort to beat the other drives to the destination. Cars and trucks zoom past me, the drivers, shocked and scared are honking and waving at me as my grandfather races to his goal. Holding onto the car in various ridiculous fashions, a car door handle here, the roof rack there, I make my way from the back of the vehicle to drivers side window with my feet on the nerf bar.
“Stop Grandpa, stop,” I plead with him, one hand on the window and the other holding onto the luggage rack. He looks at me through the window, and for a moment there is nothing there, no memory, not recognition of who I am or even that a person is clinging to the car he is driving, but then, slowly, his eyes soften and his smile returns, my Grandpa wakes up for a moment.
“I can’t, I don’t know how,” he whimpers to me, shaking his head. He is asking for my help, he needs for me to change the situation, but I am stuck there, holding onto the outside of a speeding SUV, lest I fall to my own death. As I look into his eyes for a moment everything is alright again. We are lost in a timeless moment, back on the little acreage where I grew up with him, and he is strong again, younger, and taking care of me instead of weak, feeble and frail with age.
The rev of the engine snaps my attention back to the road and our precarious situation. I look forward on the highway and see a tollbooth racing towards us. It is all cement, glass and steel; unmoving and uncaring that we are about to destroy ourselves as we smash into it at 80 miles per hour in this death trap. I look back to Grandpa and he is lost again, he doesn’t remember that his grandson is clinging to the car, he doesn’t understand that tollbooth is going to kill him in an instant.
In his mind he is driving back to the farm from working at the flour mill in Blackwell. The road is dirt, but recently graded and smooth enough for his daddy’s Chevy. His brothers are with him and they are talking about fighting in Europe again. This thing is going to get out of hand, he thinks to himself as he listens his eldest brother reading the newspaper aloud.
The sound of shearing metal and shattering glass assaults me as we slam into the little air-conditioned room at more than 90 miles per hour. My body is destroyed by a million daggers of glass and metal as the front of the SUV opens a gash in the room. The last sight I see with my own eyes is the generic office wall clock that momentarily hangs on the opposite wall of the booth, 11:40 eternal. It is falling now, in a spastic pirouette of energy as the building around it disintegrates in a cataclysm.
The moment freezes in place; tiny, gleaming shards of glass hang suspended in the air, mixed with perfectly round globes of what has to be my blood. Sound is gone now too, I can no longer hear the road noise, or the engine, or even the sounds of the crash; there is only silence…
The sound of my own whimpers brought me close to waking at this point, but I could not break free from the dream until my wife shook me and held on tight telling me that everything was okay. But, my eyes were open now and the room was dark in the predawn hours… I crawled out of bed, told Abbey to come with me and we went to sit on the porch. I sat there in the muggy darkness, listening to the sounds of a sleeping world, patting my dog as she sat beside me.
The winds were eating away at the remaining moisture in the earth. Sunshine was brilliant and made the days seem to sparkle. The People would need to dance soon to ask for more rain, to offer more tobacco and sing throughout the night for the Cloud People to send down the rains.
In the hills the trees were talking quietly about Grandfather Wind and Grandfather Fire; in a few more days there would be fires if gentle rains did not fall before the coming storms. Lightning and thunder would bring fire to the hills if the gentle rains did not come first. The trees called out to the Cloud People, but no rains fell yet tonight.
Down in the village the People thanked Grandmother Corn for the harvest as they ate their meals. They soon sat around in the star-lit night listening to the Storyteller talk about the Grasshopper People and the Fox. Deep in the night they all went to their beds to sleep before another day on the plains.
After their morning meals some gathered sticks from the hills, thanking the trees for offering fuel for the cooking fires. Some went to the riverbeds, looking for trapped fish in the receding waters. Others went further from the village to visit with the spirits in the canyons, asking if the time was right for a Dance.
The Shaman went to the canyons, sat between the walls of the red stone and tapped a lone beat on his drum. Those few that had gone with him made a small fire, laid sage on the flames and watched the smoke rise, looking for the crows that would carry messages to the Spirit.
“Hey ya ho ya hey yo ho ya,” he sang quietly. The canyons became a funnel for his song and the trees in the hills above sang with him, asking the Cloud People to send the rains soon.
On the clouds there was another village. Above the darkness, where the sun and the moon and the stars always shone was a small village that looked very much like the village down on the grasses. The Cloud People set out each morning to tend to there chores. Collecting the wayward wisps of clouds that had broken free during the night and putting them back with the rest of the cloud. Moisture to moisture.
The chief of the Cloud People sat in his small tent, smoke rising to the sun as he listened for the singing. Faintly, on the wind he could hear a lone man, singing his songs and then with him the chief heard the trees and the grasses as well. They were thirsty.
The chief’s palms began to flow water, like fountains had sprung up from his hands, and his people began to dance.
Later that night as the shaman and his party arrived back in the village the fire was blazing and the tobacco was in the air. The Dance had begun with the setting sun and they whole village was alive with energy; asking that their brothers and sisters on the clouds would come to the this night, and visit them with rains.
The stars began to disappear one by one, clouds formed in the sky where none had been during the daylight hours and now the People could smell the coming rains.
In the hills the trees shook and rolled on the winds, ready to drink in the rains and thank Grandmother Water for her gift.
That night two peoples were joined again.