I ran into Adair, said I picked up her book. Asked her, Heig? I remember she was in my class with Jim Heig at College of Marin, but he was such a hardnose. She explains, yeah, her husband. I’m flabbergasted. She said the rest of the Daleys reacted that way too. She never said she was still with him. I didn’t ask.
In the dream, we were in a room of dark recessed shadows. There were bars, the kind the kids played on nearby like a jungle gym. She gave me advice on how to go about putting a book together which I’ve long since forgotten. I wanted to ask her if she used a computer or if she wrote it out on the typewriter, and did she get help.
The conversation was a little mismatched. She was telling me what she thought I wanted to hear which was how to, and I wanted to tell her about my project but I didn’t have a copy of my book. She wanted to know if I found her workbook helpful and I saiid that I did but I had only just read part of it and so I said yes.
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The first time I remember Adair was in second or third grade. She and Adrian are fraternal twins and the worst tomboys the school had ever seen. They wore red cowboy boots with their dresses long before it became popular. Adrian wore a sheriff‘s star, and a two-gun holster over her skirt. She was packing caps.
They always got lots of gold stars on their progress charts. I counted 13 or more and I had just received my first or second silver star. Silver, red, green. I remember wondering how both of them could rack up so many stars. I just entered the club and I thought I could reach for the stars too. So with the wonder of it all also came the first concept of understanding how the system worked and maybe I could get more. But I came to the realization that I could never catch up. I felt even more desolate than before. I felt proud.I felt despondent.
I remember the chart was by the playground door. I remember them both checking out their star status, so fiercely competitive with each other. Wasn’t Adrian the more boisterous one who was ahead, or was she determined to catch up? And now, what is Adair up to? Her sister, Adrian is so different. We spent nine years in the same school together. Often in the same class until high school and then I lost contact.
Briefly I ran into Adair, then she got married to Jim and went on a cycling tour of Europe, came back, divorced him and I never heard from her again. She never outgrew her tomboy stance. Perhaps this is why Jim, who was gay, was attracted to her. I thought she would hook up with a woman. I’m sure it was strange watching Adrian change from tomboy to a frilly fem female, complete with lipstick in high school. Adair kept her gruffness perhaps to hide from the world that she was an overly sensitive soul. Being twins in a family like hers, was a refuge.
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Here I am deviating like mad away from my dream journal. Memory, like sleep. The phone shattered most of my images. I woke up with a feeling of pushing up a wedge or chevron made of colored lights, the width of a body. We pushed it up through the air. It was dark, and it felt good to do that and those jeweled white stars. I have no idea what the dream fragment means.
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