Dream and Meditation
8/9
Dream of muchita, after getting up to let the dog out at 5:52 a. m.
I have been at a dinner with cousins Clara and Bill and Aunt Louise, their mother, who died some years ago now. Aunt Louise was talking to another woman about the house in Wildwood on 301 that Uncle Burton had built. “I haven’t been in that house for [x years],” the woman says.
And I am walking south to north on that block of childhood 301 from the corner across from the little store on the south end to the corner by the Manns’ house that I walk again and again in my dreams. From the little store I don’t remember what, maybe a house on the corner, until Talmadge Cochran’s house, then Uncle Burton’s house (that became “The Skunk’s Nest,” a restaurant, after Aunt Louise sold it), the vacant lot where I used to cut across to our house on the next street, the little frame house where the child molester lived, the corner, around the front of the Manns’ house to our house.
Only there is a big amphitheater where the vacant lot was. Opryland, I think to myself. It was dark, but now I am cutting through open, airy stores—tourist stores like the ones at the beach. It is day, bright sun outside, and the stores are full of people. A youngish man with short, dark hair just flecked with gray pushes a shopping basket right in front of me into a group of friends, maybe family.
“Muchita!” he says with heavy stress on the “ta,” like a native speaker of Spanish putting on an Anglo accent to amuse his friends. They laugh. I slip around them and through the store, which is full of people—I notice the women—who look hispanic but who are speaking unaccented English.
Finally, I am slipping through the crowds, trying to get home.
The previous eve, before coming home after waiting to collect humanities finals, I go out on campus for my birdwatch, just as it is getting dark. It used to be broad daylight at nine when I went out; now it is getting dark at eight. All the better. Instead of going directly to the pond, I turn toward the south end of campus, around the L Building. The mockingbirds are singing a liquid, bubbling wren-like song, but much louder than wrens. A brown thrasher flies into a little tree. I continue on by the little gazebo (the size and shape of my knock-down cabin design) to the physical plant at the south end of campus near Eisenhower parkway. The small trees around the physical plant and the temporary science labs make me think of the stunted trees near the beach in the salt and wind, trees ten to fifteen feet high with light colored bark. They are cherry trees, I find out later.
I turn from the physical plant building, looking into the dark thicket behind it, and walk back north across the Ivey Drive parking lot where overweight young women are walking to their cars from classes, chatting, and driving out. I walk on back northward into the pine park by the pond.
I almost hate to approach the open ground by the pond, where I will be conspicuous. I can stand in the gathering dark, anonymous and unnoticed, the chorus of cicadas surrounding and drilling through me. Eventually I move on to the pond, and dozens of creatures push ripples and wakes away from the edge and into the shallow water and weeds, fleeing from me.
I sit for some minutes at a picnic table. I see no birds, so I train my binoculars on the ripples. I get a good look at the ripples but cannot see what creatures are making them, fish, frog, or insect. The walkers and joggers are still out on the trail across from the pond, sometimes greeting each other and laughing, but I am alone on my side.
When I turn to go back to the office, it is dark enough for the lights to be on, and the doorways of Buildings H, K, and C glow like oases in the night. I have the feeling again of being glad that I am out here with the wild things, not in there with those artificially pampered creatures. I lose track of the oppressive heat and humidity. The insects din through me and I seem to blend into the darkness. A mosquito sings in my ear. I do not want to move. I see myself, feel myself taking root there in the darkness in the pines by the pond.
Is this the experience that sent me to the beach in my dream? It comes close to the place I have wanted to get to most of my life. Salt Springs, Crescent Beach, Wilmot Gardens at UF, the Berry College woods and trails, Piedmont NWR, maybe Bond Swamp. Would being there, sleeping there, staying there for a few days, actually recreate me? My very brief experience at Piedmont suggests that, yes, it could. Or would I have to die there?
For a few moments I am, or am almost, where I want to be. Alone. Why did I ever think I wanted companions?
I find myself looking forward to cold weather and shortening days, to the year’s turning point, to the stillness, the silence, the friendly dark. Why does the beauty of the season have to be fouled with the screaming, clawing hysteria of Christmas? It leaves only January when the dark is still friendly and the nights are still long. Do I only imagine that January days have the clearest light of the year?
I climb up from the pines across the little trench dug by workmen that day, through the thicket of river birches between H and K where the warblers gather spring and fall and am swept to the stunted trees of the coast again. I trudge up around C and up the steps on the south side where the catbird had perched for a moment, weeks ago, on up to M and inside, keying through locked doors, putting the binoculars away, eyepiece cover, objective lens covers out of my pockets, closing the extension, back into the case, like someone going through a bedtime ritual. Picking up the book bag, turning off the lights, sleepwalking out of the office, through the hall and lobby, out into the almost dark where globed lights glow in rows marching away to the end of the parking lot, giving some comfort after all, and the SUV I had noticed with its back window down—a feature that lets air circulate throughout the car—turns out to be a Toyota 4runner.