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the archive(s):
issue no. 3:
Three Dreams, One Trip / JD Smith
If man is, as the pagans said, merely dreams and dust, I would have trouble telling the difference. More typical is the sleeping experience of a friend of mine, who drives lawnmowers over multicolored hams during Mass, in Croatian. But he will have to render his own account. My consolation prize for plain dreams, Amish settlements in the land of Nod, is making sense of them
Two that recurred for years involved school‹terra cognita‹but altered, as after an earthquake. In the first, my final undergraduate term finds me, as in life, on the cusp between graduating magna or summa, as if eternity or potential employers would take note. I was also, as in life, addicted to both politics and poetry, believing that success in either, or anything, would make me loved.
But in a departure from the past, my progress and egress are stayed. A math class still loomed over me, the first since tenth-grade geometry, when every triangle, bristling with cosines and proofs, was aimed at my self-esteem‹a small, shaky target.
My fears, though, made no impression on my advisors.
Before this drama, or fraction of a drama, could resolve itself, I would wake up, though not with a start, or sweating. By the time I had smoothed a blanket, or poured a glass of water, my mathematical problems had turned to ash like the scrolls of Alexandria, or simply dissolved, pictures shaken from an Etch-a-Sketch.
The second dream, if even less eventful, was stranger. After graduating from college, in spite of my small mathematics, I found myself in high school again. Not as a seventeen-year-old, but as my superannuated self, as old as the actors who play high-schoolers. But I wasn't acting, only repeating my senior year. Perhaps it was to go out for soccer, as the hyperthyroid and racist coach thought I should have, or to take seconds of the sauerkraut (with caraway seeds) we had made in microbiology.
At any rate, the purpose wasn't to pad my transcript with more of the achievements and overachievements that had given me the opportunity, above all, to repeat the process as a scholarship student in college and again in graduate school, my future and immediate well-being held hostage to tests, term papers, and eventually degrees. The latter led to temporary jobs that included sorting redeemed coupons, shoveling dog biscuits in a warehouse, and cleaning postal meters.
This may have been the point of the whole exercise‹trying academic life one more time and finally getting it right, stepping out of the endless cycle of terms and grades. This final draft of high school only required me to stand around in the halls. As in the first dream, I didn't look for a classroom and didn't care. Nor did I make what would have been pedophilic advances on young girls. I simply took up a few square feet and made small talk with my colleagues.
These two dreams recurred like an irregular, subconscious pulse until I drove them away, or drove away from them. Between temp assignments, I signed on for what is arguably the longest valet parking job in recorded history: taking my mother's 1979 Mustang, the car in which I learned to drive and, much later, the only car in which I've had sex, from Aurora, Illinois to Sun City, Arizona, by way of Houston.
The vast majority of the human brain may go unused, but there is only a finite number of mental parking spaces available at any time; my academic dreams were blocked out of them by ten days of phenomena completely untouched by my education. My degrees had no effect on a Waffle House in Little Rock, where black and white people actually talked to each other, a rarity in the North. My terms on the dean's list did nothing to or for the first pedestrians I saw in Texarkana, Texas: a work crew of inmates in yellow jumpsuits, picking up roadside trash.
After midnight, sampling the infinite spaces on Interstate 10 between San Antonio and Ozona, I observed that my scholarships and assistantships neither threatened nor fed the mule deer that outnumbered cars. They barely looked up at the Mustang before they went back to browsing the scrub for some improbable nutrition.
My notions on international relations would not have gotten me a free side of grits or hash browns at the Eloy, Arizona Waffle House. I paid for my cheese omelet like anyone else, with anonymous cash, whose fibers take up cocaine but not learning. Except for a sign prohibiting firearms, this restaurant was identical to its Little Rock counterpart. My SAT and GRE, and their alphabet-soup brethren, had no bearing on this.
I was relieved, maybe healed, by my insignificance as one traveler in only one region of a country in a vaster world. If it's lonely at the top‹if there is a top‹the lower stories are downright gregarious. A grain of sand is rarely found alone.
Joining this huge sodality was apparently what I had been afraid of. This fear of merging into the anonymous flow of life and death, as if sitting out were an option, had compelled me to take on grade-point averages and academic titles as an immunization against the common lot.
Even more frightening was the very real possibility of being a leader in no field, as most are not. I might finally have to acknowledge my limitations and determine what size of fish I was, in what size of pond. The process would present interesting challenges for a former child prodigy, in his thirty-third year, much as it would for anyone else. How I met these challenges would not matter to a road-runner or a coyote. Nature offered forgiveness in perhaps its highest form, indifference.
I parked the Mustang in my parents' garage in Sun City and unhooked the battery cable. No longer a child, having put away childish things, I flew the next day from Phoenix to Chicago, and to a third dream.
Like the long drive, the dream occurred once, made its point, and was done. In it I am second-in-command of a submarine, a strange job for a claustrophobe. As I near the dock the chief petty officer, Sean Connery, waves me on with a closed red umbrella, the kind used by tour guides to gather their flocks. In passing I wonder why a red umbrella, and my education offers no answer but why not a red umbrella? Weighed down by speculation and a duffel bag, I double-time to reach CPO Connery, who explains, "There's no emergency‹I just like to do that sometimes."
I don't know the commanding officer, the vessel's name, or the course. I only know that I take my station, and the voyage is underway.
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