Ponderables

Perusing author Jackie Morris's latest blog entry this morning (there's always something visually and/or spiritually tasty to be found therein), I took a go at answering the question she posed:  "Why do you read?"

Here was my answer:  "Reading is like having the world handed to you on a plate.  It's a way to experience life in another's head, in another's words.  It's better than films because you create the video yourself in your own imagination.  It's secret and special because it all happens inside your head.  It's a chance to hear a voice that may be long dead, to share the ideas with persons from another time, place, culture, century. You don't need electricity to work a book, to make it's pages turn, to make the words come alive.  All you need is light enough to read by."

In that odd way the world has, my verification word for publishing that comment was "enabl."

I awoke this morning from a dream where I was not only in a situation, but talked to others about it throughout the dream as it twisted and meandered from scene to scene, as dreams will.  The dream began with the situation I was in, which was this:  My mother and I were driving in a car.  She was in the driver's seat, and I was in the back seat behind her.  Quite suddenly, a red "DitchWitch" pickup overtook us and forced us off the road to the side.  The driver cried "Look out" and looked upwards.  I looked up out the window and saw that there was a helicopter body falling, spinning and rolling slowly, it's rotors smashed and useless.  Falling beside it was a piece of sheet metal painted blue, as though it might be part of the skin of an airplane.  Because the man in the pickup had forced us off the road, the helicopter body missed us when it crashed to the ground, and only the piece of sheet metal hit the roof of the car.  The car was damaged, but we were completely unharmed.  Because the man in the pickup had forced us off the road, we were saved from what would have been certain death.  The man in the pickup did not stop, but drove on.

For the benefit of my readers who are not familiar with DitchWitch, it's the trademark of a  company that makes trenching machines of various sizes and shapes, such as might be used for laying underground pipe.  The pickup was red in color, and had the company name and logo on it -- a red DitchWitch pickup.  This was evidently a very important detail, because as I recounted the experience several times during the dream, always using the phrase "a red DitchWitch pickup forced us off the road."

I am not one for analyzing dreams. I don't feel a need to work out what the dream "means," or try to divine its "message."   I look at them as one might look at a beach one walks upon after a storm, when one keeps an eye out to see if anything interesting has washed up on the shores of consciousness.   These images and dream stories have a way of ending up in my writing -- like bits of a collage.

Now that I have sat down to work at the computer, the grey kitty is playing her little game -- she jumps up on the desk beside me, walks onto me, kneads a little, walks across to the other side.  She wants to be petted, of course, but she has to walk back and forth across me several times before she will settle down.  If I start typing, she will walk off in a huff, and the whole thing starts again.  Since I work from a recliner, she insists on walking across a rather sensitive area midway between my shoulders and waist. . .  Her aim is to end up lying against me.

Lately, she has started kneading the inside of my arm just below my left elbow.  This has become a pretty popular kneading area.  The black one has started lying in the furrow between me and the back of the couch and kneading this same area.  Every now and again, the white one wants to kneed my outstretched left arm while I'm in bed.  Of course, when I'm at my computer, I'm mousing with my right hand, and when I'm watching TV, I use the remote with my right hand. And because of the side of the bed I lie on, the kitty's half is on my left.  Still there are other parts of me available for kneading in all cases,  yet all three are selecting this one small area of me to energetically massage.  The white kitty, and poor dear Jett before him, have perennially favored that arm, since Jett slept beside my pillow and the white one sleeps at my side ( he's my self appointed wingman. . .), but the other two were never kneaders until just the last couple of months.  However, cats are masters of inscrutability, and it's very likely quantum physics is involved somehow.  It usually is.

The concrete walkway to the back gate was damp  and the ground was muddy when I looked out the back door this morning, so sometime during the night it rained.  Don't know how much though.  Still, I'm thankful for whatever we got.