Lately they’ve been so vivid, like the way I dreamed when I was pregnant or had a nicotine patch attached or dropped a square of acid prior to bed (or so I would imagine on the latter.)
Anyway – last night I dreamed that I had this cat, not my soul mate Kitty The Cat that I have in waking life, but another cat… with retarded paws, bless his toes.
In the dream, the poor disabled cat (that honestly, wasn’t much cute so I must’ve accepted him out of pity and commiseration with my own aching feet of late) could hardly walk. I took him by covered wagon to see a surgeon renowned for correcting cleft pallets in third world countries, as though paws and pallets were interchangeable. I got there and he himself had a cleft palette, though uncorrected, and a crazy-long pinky finger on one hand that dangled apart from the rest of his digits like a crooked Redbud sucker. This made me admire him more.
Whatever happened there, I do not recall, but I brought ol’ twisty paws home bandaged and found all the writers with whom (in real life) I spent an amazing week in Taos last summer, waiting for me at my house. One of my fellow writers had painted many groups of canvases, put them on stretchers and hung them all throughout my home. I was touched and pleased… even if the art wasn’t necessarily (or at all) my bag. One painting in particular spoke to me though and I studied it - a heavily textured rendering of a cobalt blue whale. Another most brilliant writer, Mr. Goodnight, was in my kitchen cooking Cornish game hens and in spirited debate over legumes with my Daddy, who said lentils were as gaseous as the Republican party. Mr. Goodnight lit a pipe and waxed poetic about the differences between grain legumes and forage legumes. They were solving the world’s problems.
Then I was frantically preparing for my boss-man, Howard Garrett, to come visit the bandaged-footed cat. He’d called and in his East Texas drawl said he wanted to “meet the lil’ fella.” All I could think of was how disappointed the Dirt Doctor would be that my vegetable garden wasn’t finished, some of my root flares were yet to be exposed and GASP! I bought a house with two Bradford pears and he was going to know I fostered these junk trees! I begged my writer allies to get digging. Suzanne Frank was there, and she used my French silk stockings as garden gloves. It worked for her.
There was a knock at the door and I walked down the ever-long white (but now hung with Josh Ayers originals) hallway to the front door. Instead of Howard, there was an Arabian man and woman who insisted that I get in their black suburban with them. “But Howard… he’s coming,” I told them and after many a harsh barked and harked words spewed from the couple (to which I rudely replied “I don’t speak squirrel,”) the woman showed me a tube of the most lustrous, moist, color saturated lipstick I’d ever seen. My eyes sparkled and I grabbed up that ol’ retarded cat, jumped in the back seat and abandoned not just my writers and family, but my enroute boss-man.
I was pulled from my dream by Bird, swatting my shoulder, saying “Ma-ma” in cadence with every connect of her palm to my skin, Giddian tickling my ribs and Richard standing bedside saying “wake up baby, it’s ten already.”
Well, what the fuck does all that mean? I haven’t slept to ten o’clock since 1999.
So I dreamed…
*I’m certain this helped someone somewhere out there… somehow.
