July 10, 2007
Tuesday

I have decided that nostalgia itself is a kind of love. From time to time it dictates that I absolutely must have avocado and crab for lunch.
           — Sigrid Nunez, b. 1940s
               American fiction writer
               from her novel, The Last of Her Kind

I woke this morning from a dream that was both vivid and puzzling. Readers of this space know that I pay attention to my dreams as a way of what Frederick Buechner calls listening to my life. I ask myself what my subconscious is trying to tell me about my present situation, since even when I dream about recognizable people, the message is less often about who they are and more about what they represent to me.

This morning’s dream was vivid in that I knew I was having dinner and then walking somewhere and talking with a young man. His face was not entirely clear, but he was tall, slim, dark, and wearing a long-sleeved white shirt with the cuffs turned back.  I was wearing a coral long-sleeved voile overshirt, open over a white t-shirt with a ruffled neck. I could hear his voice, and mine in reply, but not the words we were saying.

I took my companion to be a young friend of recent acquaintance, one whom I last saw and talked to more than a month ago.  The coral shirt is an actual one now hanging in my closet, one I haven’t worn in a long time and which was the last thing I touched last night, wondering if I should take it with me on this weekend’s Gallivant to an art installation in New York.

The dream was puzzling in that I felt a certain anxiety as I came fully awake and went about the business of making coffee and setting myself up for the day. I thought I had a clear idea of what I wanted to do today. Yesterday I reviewed and organized my general fiction fragments, those products of practice sessions and workshop exercises and freewrites that are too compelling (or that I worked so hard on) to discard and are filed away for another time. I found a character who interested me when she first started speaking and whose voice I wanted to hear again. I put the pages with that material out on my writing table, intending to get right to it.

But the anxiety kept itching at me. What had my friend and I been talking about? Why was I feeling that something was getting away from me, that I wasn’t paying enough attention to something? I looked at the elements of the dream: food (there is an eating scene or a reference to food in every piece of fiction I write, whether there needs to be or not), sharing food prepared by others, movement (the walking), words I cannot hear clearly spoken by a person of the opposite sex whom I know (that is, this is not a dark stranger) and from whom I am not estranged, and color (soft coral and bright white).

Instead of getting right to the task I’d set for today, I opened the notebook I kept this time last year (one of my favorite writing exercises is determining what a character was doing a year ago, what she’ll be doing a year from now). And I came upon the passage quoted above, from a novel I didn’t really like and that I stopped reading when I learned that I was not assigned to the author’s workshop at Bread Loaf. The character has remembered fondly a woman she worked for at a fashion magazine, one whose favorite lunch was avocado and crab. She has also remembered the coffee and pastry she bought every day, mostly out of habit and not real desire for the food, from the cart that came around at break time.

Below I’d written a “W.A.” (“Write About,” a note to myself to pursue a line of thinking that something has triggered). “W.A.: the coffee ice cream I was served once at Malka Silver’s house; the Pecan Spins Drake’s Cakes I bought every single morning at Duke U. in 1972.”

All morning, then, while I was trying to attend to the tasks I’d set for the day, the anxiety about the dream kept pecking at me. After a while I gave up, and, unable to find any evidence that I actually did the W.A. about the ice cream and the pecan cakes, I turned to that. But how can you do a W.A. about food without actually having the food? By noon I was at the Giant, buying a pint of coffee ice cream, a box of Drake’s Cakes, and the hamburger buns and a fresh tomato that Ron had requested. I stopped at the deli to scoop up a sample of the broccoli salad. They weren’t busy, and the clerk asked if he could get me something. I looked into the case and suddenly, gripped by nostalgia for the days when I ate ice cream at Malka Silver’s house, I bought a container of ham salad, something my mother made in those days usually from leftover Easter dinner, and something which I certainly wouldn’t have been served from the Silvers’ kosher kitchen.

At home I put everything away, made a ham salad sandwich, and sat down to read the paper. My eye fell on the sports section, something I usually pay little attention to. A picture and headline caught my eye. The Hummelstown Legion team is having another successful season. Spencer P. hit a home run with two on.

They were playing hot last year, too. And suddenly it hit me. The dream was not about my new young friend, but an old one, tall, slim, dark, Spencer’s uncle, part of a time in my life gone forever but fondly remembered.

The team is playing tonight, and Ill be there. Wearing my coral voile shirt over a white T with a ruffled neck. The coffee ice cream, and the W.A., will come later.