Dream: Pudge and the dead people

I was in one of the infinite, mystical houses that appear in my dreams. The front door had been opened carelessly, and I was afraid that Pudge had escaped. I might have reassured myself by searching the house and finding her, but it seemed too overwhelming a task. When I thought about looking for her outside, I would open the door and see a landscape blasted by hurricane-strength winds and rain that I couldn’t face. It broke my heart to think of my poor tortoiseshell baby out there. It would occur to me that perhaps she had escaped just then, each time I opened the door to look. It was an ironic cycle of indecision and fear.

I don’t know if this was in the same house, but I found a room in which various people, perhaps a large family, stood against a wall, each with his or her head cocked oddly sideways onto a frame projecting from the wall. It was a horrible sight. They appeared to have been murdered, with their bodies on display in this macabre way.

Then I saw one of them move slightly, and that was even more terrible and horrifying than had they remained still and clearly dead.

Holiday weekend: Cream the egg

Backyard birdwatching

I wanted to spend most of this past weekend outdoors, but the weather forecasters did an about-face Saturday afternoon with a prediction of rain. It never warmed up by the lake, but clouds covered the sky by late afternoon. In the evening the rains came.

After performing triage housework, I spent a little time in the Flamingo garden. The first time I went out I spotted a tiny grayish bird with a light breast, which made wish I knew my passerines better. I can't swear to an eye ring, but it may have been a blue-gray gnatcatcher—it reminded me of a wren.

While I was out, a male northern cardinal landed on one of the black lawn chairs, which set off his red beautifully. While northern cardinals are common here and I hear males calling frequently, I rarely see the whole bird out in the open in all his glory.

What startled me most was a male American redstart in the shrubbery in front of me. Although I've seen redstarts among the trees on Wooded Isle, I didn't expect to see one so close and so clearly on a bit of ground off 55th Street.

When I came out later, a male northern cardinal chased a female right in front of me. Ah, love. Then I spotted a gorgeous male common yellowthroat flitting around in the shrubs. When they came closer, I saw that the little figures bobbing for insects in the grass were female yellowthroats.

I must work harder to obtain a DSLR camera.

The glimpse of the mystery bird (blue-gray gnatcatcher?) and my observations of the redstart and the yellowthroats reminded me that even a micro-habitat as small as The Flamingo's garden is still a habitat. Combined with Burnham Park across the street and Jackson Park with its Wooded Isle, it offers both migrants and residents a rich source of protein and a place to perch and rest. And a place for me to stay a little connected to the natural world, even when I don't feel very well.

At about 10:30 Saturday night, a single, blinding flash of lightning was followed by a single, terrifying clap of thunder. Somehow it seemed the perfect end to the day—a reminder that nature has not yet been vanquished.

Dream: Tripping the light fantastic

I found myself on stage and wearing a long hoop skirt. The play I was in may have been about Cinderella. I didn't know anything about it, nor did I know my part or blocking. I sensed that my role was minor but important. I don't know how I got through it, or if I did. Others may have spoken in my place.

For the ovation, the minor players were supposed to run on stage through a side tunnel and the principals through a main, forward-facing tunnel. I didn't know where or when to go, and everyone was too preoccupied with lining up or talking (backstage?) to tell me. It was almost like I wasn't there or was invisible.

Finally, I got the impression that I was to come down the main tunnel ahead of the principals. I was so happy that I planned to throw up my hands and blow a kiss to the world, which is far more demonstrative than I usually am. I may have realized that I was bidding farewell to something, perhaps high school.

There was still confusion everywhere, so I came out behind the principals. By that time, the house lights were up, and almost the entire audience had cleared out. The few lingerers, those who had been trapped in the front didn't notice me. I was crushed with disappointment, all my joy instantly evaporated.

A friend found me. To get off the stage, we had to climb down through store racks of clothing. She chattered about a hockey game loss that didn't interest me. I felt like I had been abruptly plunged back into the mundane world without exulting in any of the glory of the spotlight. She didn't understand my tears or growing depression. I would never appear again on stage. I'd experienced the anticlimax of my life before it had even begun.

Dream: The castle, the lion, and the moat

I was staying with my cousin, who was living in a castle or chateau. It was like nothing I'd seen.

The family pet was a 300-pound Asiatic lion, which at first did not appear strange. He seemed very devoted to me, following me and sleeping with me like a house cat. One day he tried to crawl on top of me. Trapped, I remembered being told that he had mauled and seriously injured a man. I was afraid to move.

The castle had an underground yet open moat. For fun, the family picnicked and floated on it on a barge. This seemed intriguing to me, given its underground but exposed location and look, but I couldn't or wasn't allowed to go with them. I may have tried to get into the water, but usually I was left with the lion. The less I trusted him, the more untrustworthy he was. He seemed to suspect my suspicions.

Review: The Best of Slate

The Best of Slate: A 10th Anniversary Anthology edited by David Plotz, introduction by Jacob Weisberg, foreword by Michael Kinsley. New York: Atlas Books, 2006. 304 pages.

First, I should note that I have no idea why I bought The Best of Slate: A 10th Anniversary Anthology. I didn't know what Slate was, although I recently discovered that I joined the site in January 2008. I suspect I acquired the book because I'm fond of anthologies—usually collections of good or sometimes great stories built around a theme, a one-stop shop. In short,without knowing what Slate is, I wanted to read the best of its first decade.

As I learned from Michael Kinsley's foreword, Slate began at Microsoft as an online magazine (currently owned by the Washington Post). I had in my hands a print tribute to an online publication—a way to package and sell tangible copies of electronically published words. More simply put, The Best of Slate is an opportunity to cash in on the site's popularity, to sell books, and to get book buyers to the site.

Long-time fans of Slate may appreciate seeing articles they remember in print and having a piece of a favorite Web site in their hands. As a relative newcomer, though, I am disappointed if the articles selected by editor David Plotz truly are the best work Slate has produced in 10 years.

The first article, "Airline English" by Cullen Murphy, enlightens the reader with the obvious; airline terms such as "craft," "crew," "captain," "first officer," "deck," "cabin," "bulkhead," and "hold" are derived from long-established shipping industry lingo (oddly, "pilot" didn't make the list). If there is anyone left who hasn't realized this, I'd be amazed. "Watching Couples Go By," in which we discover that men like women for physical comfort and conversation and to fill his need to be needed is another space filler, but was undoubtedly included in the collection to honor its author Herbert Stein, who passed away.

I found some common ground if not insight in Seth Stevenson's "Extroverted Like Me"; at least I recognized the emotionally numbing effects of antidepressants and the disturbing manifestations of withdrawal. Another personal essay, "Daddy Gets His Brain Back" by Michael Lewis, humorously recounts the disorientation the author feels after a head injury ("I remember that if I don't hand in my book in six weeks, I'm [expletive]"), but ends on a flat note. "The Breakfast Table" features biting repartee between husband Timothy Noah and wife Marjorie Williams about the trivial (the posterior of Jennifer Lopez) and serious (the circumvention of Clinton's attorney-client privilege and the social taboos around discussing racism, which is also addressed in "Racist Like Me" by Debra Dickerson).

A handful of articles provide useful background, such as "The Pledge of Allegiance" by David Greenberg, and relevant (if not original) commentary ("Fifty/Fifty Forever" by Mickey Kaus). From "What Did Bush Know?" (Fred Kaplan), we learn how 93 pages of intelligence information, caveats, and footnotes were distilled into only one page for the president's benefit, while "The Misunderestimated Man" (Jacob Weisberg) hints at the president's personal flaws that made this shortcut necessary. In "Unfairenheit 9/11," Christopher Hitchens rants about Michael Moore rather than his movie, disingenuously using the same dodgy tactics of which he accuses Moore.

As a whole, The Best of Slate is disappointing. For example, the introduction to 2001 notes that, "Slate produced some of its smartest, and most moving, work in the days and months after the Sept. 11 attacks." Yet the only piece about the attacks, "An Unlikely Hero" by Rebecca Liss, appears (toward the end of the 2002 chapter), and it is neither smart nor particularly moving despite the subject. Liss turns what could have been a compelling account of a painstaking rescue into a flat, spare story short on details or interest and focused more on why the media missed out on hero Dave Karnes (Liss reasons that, because Karnes wasn't a police officer or firefighter, those organizations didn't "make room" for him). When the subjects are solid, the writing is too often pedestrian.

If articles like the self-serving "Full Disclosure" by Henry Blodgett or "Not Dead at All" by Harriet McBride Johnson, who believes that liquid replacement of most of a functioning brain indicates a mere "disability," represent The Best of Slate, I'd be afraid to see its worst. It's like much of what appears on the Internet—it's adequate as a time waster during, say, lunch, but not worth keeping or remembering.

Sunday, 18 May 2008.
© 2008 by Diane L. Schirf.

Harassed

I've been getting lots of phone calls from (212) 448-5501 (caller ID says, "New York Call"), including four today. From looking around online, I gather that this is a shady reputable survey organization, http://www.srbi.com/Home.html, that has been calling countless people countless times at odd hours, hanging up without leaving messages, and being otherwise weird. For me, this week's countless calls, including the four today, border on harassment. Whoever you are, every time you call me I'm contacting the DNC Registry. Keep it up, and I'll up the ante.

Dream: Planes and trains

These are bits from several dreams.

I found out that our community in Maryland has a plane and had a vision, similar to one I've had before, of flying in sunshine over acres of green. I saw one of the flight attendants interviewed. She seemed to love the job, and I envied her. A voice reminded me that the plane was flown only a couple of times a week and that the attendants were hourly employees. Suddenly the significance of this sank in, and I could see vividly that no work meant no money and no control. Still I could not get the feeling of soaring, somehow silently, over the green woods and fields and hills out of my head.

I was holding an improbable-looking lion cub, all head and mane (?) and very little body. Although its teeth were sharp and its jaws strong, its bites didn't do much harm. I was training it not to bite at all so that it wouldn't as an adult. It had a preternatural intelligence and understanding, and continued to nip.

I saw a small white alligator below. Two large, broad, red-and-black lizards approached it, and I thought that it might attack them.

The next thing I knew the alligator was dead, with its right rear leg cleanly cut off. Then I realized it was dead because its head had been cut off, too. I missed what had happened, but I said to the lion cub, "This must be the first time that anyone has seen lizards engage in tool use!" I realized immediately how insane that sounded.

Meanwhile, the alligator lay there, bloodless, the cross section of its stumps looking white and solid like a mutilated monster in a movie I'd once seen.

I was waiting for a train to arrive from the UK. Five or six tracks ended in the grass, with no stops. I knew that I was responsible for keeping the waiting people from standing near the tracks. I saw a friend sitting on a concrete bench next to the tracks, which now appeared to be in a station. I didn't want to tell her to move.

We didn't know which track the train would arrive on, but when the next train came in the old-fashioned steam engine separated and flew off a dock into water.

Dream: Hamster eyes

I don't know if this was one dream or several, or if I am placing the events in the correct order.

I was with my parents at a diner when I noticed water lapping under the door. Even if the diner were on the shore, I sensed that we should leave immediately. I was frightened by what it seemed to mean. No one else reacted.

My dad was driving a van, and I was sitting all the way in the back. I noticed that I could see lights ahead, but little of the road, and that my dad was driving on the left (wrong) side. Thinking that the lights were headlights, he had turned on the van's headlights. I looked out the back window and saw the largest, blackest storm imaginable filling the sky. With a sense of apocalypse, I realized the lights weren't headlights, but something more dreadful. I turned back to tell Dad to move to the correct side of the road, but his head had fallen back and was lolling helplessly. My mother was senseless, and I didn't think I could crawl to the front of the van in time to apply the brakes.

I was walking a hamster on a leash. A couple of boys admired it and said, "It would be a shame if it got away—you'd never get it back." On cue, the hamster escaped, and I was distraught because a hamster wouldn't have the intelligence to find its way home and would be just another rodent on the streets. It would run off and never look back.

When I returned home, I saw an enormous cage located off one room. I wondered why I hadn't used that space to keep a large, charismatic animal, like the horses I could see across the way. The cage was littered with things like aluminum recyclables. It didn't seem to be a good home for a hamster.

I filled a basin with water and suddenly felt a sense that the hamster was in it, under the water. I couldn't feel anything, but when I emptied the basin the hamster was somehow on the bottom, lying on its stomach, all four feet splayed out, shivering. Its eyes were looking up at me reproachfully. Relieved, yet frightened that it could still die, I started stroking it dry and saying rhetorically, "Are you all right?" It looked at me sadly, huge eyes fixed on mine, and said, "I'm so cold and so tired." I kept stroking it and praying that it wouldn't die.

I was sitting somewhere in Cincinnati when I felt movement, as though I were on a train. I looked down and found I was flying over the city with nothing supporting me that I could see. A little girl ran out in front of me; I was shocked to see nothing under her feet. She was running on air just as I was sitting on it, even as we flew forward. Around and underneath us, planes, balloons, and weird flying vehicles rolled over and seemed to taunt us.

The mother told the little girl not to go too far, but she must have run off the invisible edge of the invisible flying train because she fell. I was horrified and thought irrationally that I should go after her, but I saw her land safely on a huge, colorful mattress below.

I got off when I saw a tram, like those at amusement parks and zoos. It was decorated with a jungle theme. I was about to get into the first care when a stern man in safari kit scowled at me from the second car. I understood that he was the driver and that all the trams, including his, were full (despite the empty first car). I worried about how I would get back and how the mother would find the little girl.