These Dreams

I typically do not remember my dreams. This is somewhat unusual, and I am reminded of it whenever I'm scanning Facebook updates and come across someone relating to the entire internet that during a blissful REM event he or she bested Han Solo in a game of naked high stakes poker, but the Millennium Falcon turned out to be a pizza delivery truck they crashed in college. In recent months, my protracted battles with insomnia have negated any concerns over my lack of memory.

My mother used to have wonderful dreams. She also delighted in telling people about them. There was one where she was cooking Thanksgiving dinner for our entire family but the turkey caught fire so she made everyone eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches instead. My favorite by far was the night that she dreamt she was being chased by robbers. After a vigorous chase they cornered her, and she decided to fight. In the blackest depths of night, my father was sent sprawling onto the floor by the right hook of a diminutive, sleeping woman beating the stuffing out of her shadowy pursuers. The entire household was awakened by peals of laughter when she awoke and bore stunned witness to what she had wrought.

Last night, I successfully dropped into a blissful slumber without medication, alcohol, or as a result of extreme sleep deprivation. Last night, I dreamed a dream worthy of my mother. I was swimming in the ocean, a wholly relaxing experience under normal circumstances to be sure, and suddenly became aware that I was about to be the victim of a shark attack. I spotted the dorsal fin speeding toward me, cutting a menacing path through the waves. It dropped under the surface preparing to strike. I decided to strike first. My fist flew out in a desperate attempt to hit the creature on the snout, the mythical Achilles' Heel of the shark.

I too, awoke to the awful crunching of skin and bone making hard contact with another surface.

Before I finish my story, please note that I am not currently in prison nor sleeping in a hotel. There have been no calls for my head on spike. And my children still look at me with love in their eyes.

But also know this: Leah and I have an ongoing battle over of boxes of Wegmans Granola. They are yummy, delicious, and every last crumb is worth any amount of abuse for eating the entire box. Also, in keeping with the age old tactic of providing less of something good and charging money for it, the boxes are exceptionally small.

At breakfast this morning I took out a box of Granola and sat down to eat with the boys. Leah was getting ready for work, making herself pretty yet professional (or should it be the other way round?). She had, in her dietary wisdom, purchased a low-fat version of our beloved cereal last week. One so foul that we both agreed it would never again be allowed through our doors. I emptied my box of Granola into the bowl, and then strode to the back door to place the box in our recycling pile. We don't use a bin, per se, because every time we attempt it, the collection company men pick it up along with all our bottles and cans and recycle it. More than a few frigid mornings this winter have found me pacing in our front yard, watching my profanity infused breath disperse into the air, cursing the garbage men of the apocalypse.

Tossing in the properly collapsed cardboard, I took notice that at some point in the last few days, Leah must have fallen on the sword and finished the box of undesirables. Better she than I. I sat down at the table, poured out the milk, and tucked in. Yet with the first bite, the smallest crumble of oats, the merest scraping of a raisin against my tongue, I knew something to be very, very wrong. She'd switched the boxes.

I swallowed the bite. I stood. I walked back to the bathroom and slowly opened the door. The look of complete innocence that emanated from my beautiful wife said everything. That treacherous woman already knew. Her laughter echoed down through history. Girls rule, boys drool.

So I ask you, if while in the grip of Morpheus, thinking myself in imminent danger I accidently sent a haymaker her way, would I suffer eternal karmic retribution?

As fate would have it, we may never know. In my heroic efforts to dissuade the predator from making a meal of me, I punched through three slats of the headboard.

Books

“Do something with the boys’ room, please. It’s filthy again.”

Sitting on the carpeted floor, the repetition of collecting small treasures that have somehow found their way into every crevice and corner strikes me as amusing today. Lego pieces lie like body parts after an accident. Books and papers assemble themselves into piles in an effort to gain the upper hand in catching the eye of an engrossed reader, granting new life and a temporary position of grandeur. It is survival of the fittest in the microcosm of the young male’s bedroom.

I slowly and deliberately charge headlong into my task. The multi-colored plastic toy bins are my primary defense against the chaos, and they quickly gain the advantage. The lowlands of the bedroom are mine, captured for the glory of dust control. Looming in the distance, the silent mountain stands. A bookshelf. Five tiers of conglomeration, arranged in nothingness.

I pause, in deep contemplation and strategy. There is no sense to make of the arrays on each shelf. Best to start fresh. I pull the first stack away and begin to sort.

Cutting though the overgrowth, I uncover titles with no memory of ever being opened. I find favorites from last month, and from years ago, when two little boys used to squeeze themselves into my lap anticipating another journey to literary kingdoms as distant as their imaginations could push. I pull out bookmarks of every shape and size – playing cards, rubber bands, and Legos (but only the flat ones, Daddy).

There are magazines. Folded, crinkled and stuffed into cracks, yet just as valuable as when they pristinely sat unread on the dining room table, fresh from their journey. Years of archived evidence proving evening after evening of time spent with Grandma solving puzzles on the front porch, horded into stacks of memories.

There are the remnants. The ones who were loved too much. Their sad, torn pages still trying to stay relevant and desired. Covers long since gone, stories now incomplete and unreadable, they are the innocent victims of voracious readers. It is an honorable death.

And there are the young ones with their fresh corners and shiny bindings, gloating victoriously from their position of favor. They too will be cast aside one day, only too late to realize that it is not love, but infatuation. Oh, there will be those lucky few who survive, but it is too soon to tell who will make that future cut.

I sort through them all. And I remember. I am sitting on a brown couch in a beige room reading aloud to two infants who cannot even hold a book. But the sound of my voice and the simple, rhymed words of Dr. Geisel provide a comfort. I am lying on a bed, surrounded by little boys and blankets. The Sidewalk has just Ended, but the laughter goes on and on. I am sitting on the floor, unemployed, wondering if I will ever be able to provide for my family again, yet the only desire my children have is to hear the next chapter.

I can trace our lives through the stories on their shelves.

But now their time has come. We are moving on. It is not the tales of Purple Crayons that hold our fancies. It is the high adventure of Tintin, the suspense of Hardy Boys, the journeys from the Magic Treehouse, the saga of Star Wars, the magic of the Potter boy, and the universe of Narnia. Less and less are they needing a story to be read.

And as I pile up those books that will travel away, a string pulls at my heart in the realization that never again will I read Dr. Seuss to my children. But because I did, perhaps one day they will do the same.