Your dreams will tell you

I woke up this morning in tears. I had just dreamed that my beautiful, capable, brave daughter and I were at a grocery store (but not the kind of store I've ever seen, except in the movie The Night We Never Met). She was carrying something to purchase - but she'd just come out of the restroom - and she noticed that people were looking at her arm - and in the dream, her forearm was missing, replaced by metal "bones" and a fake hand that looked and acted real. She casually put her sleeve back down to cover it - consciously casual - just handling the situation. And in the dream, I realized that she could not feel her upper arm - didn't know the sleeve was still up until she saw people looking at the metal.

I am in tears again, writing about this dream. My daughter came home from Afghanistan whole in body - and bruised in mind and soul, but not missing anything essential or integral to who she is. I do not cry over reality. I weep across the waves of fear that I could not watch while she was gone.

And I know that this dream is not just about my daughter. It's about all of my kids. All grown now. All looking at their 20's (or what's left of them), deciding how they want to live. And why. And with whom. And where. And there is nothing to do but see the dangers and possibilities from where I am now, decades older and wiser, but still only one person with one person's vantage point, and wait. If they loose limbs they're the ones who deal with it now. Not me. Being the mom now means, more than ever, seeing without acting. Praying without ceasing.

I had horrible dreams about the kids being in danger after a car accident I was in when they were little. The kids were not hurt in the accident. But in my dreams, terrible things happened. I dreamed then, as now, about what might be. What could be. What I was most afraid of. My dreams told me then what I was most afraid of.

But now there's a difference. Probably it's a good sign that in my dreams, my oldest child and only daughter is handling it. Now, in my dreams, I know my kids are strong. Brave. And ready.

So why am I still crying?

Because wedding pictures are forever

Twenty-eight years ago, when we were planning our wedding (and I do mean "we" - we were both in school, but on opposite corners of the country, and since we couldn't be in the same room, we did a lot of planning for when we could be) I got a good bit of advice from our pastor's wife.

"Pick a good photographer," she said. "When it's all over, what you'll have left is the man and the pictures. You got a good man. Get a good photographer."

Of course, this was the same woman who must've been a bit ... uh ... relentless? fussy? in her youth. She also once told me that on her wedding day, while she was getting dressed for the ceremony, she suddenly realized that she was missing either something old, something new, something borrowed or something blue. I don't recall which thing she was missing, but it was one of those. So someone brought her something, but she was merely confused by it.

She asked the giver, "What am I supposed to do with that?"

To which, the giver replied (through clenched teeth), "Why don't you eat it?"

Wedding days can be a bit frazzling.

Even for the pastor's wives whose reputations later become all about the kind serenity and the calm and all of that. But I digress.

We did get a good photographer for our wedding in the summer of 1983. Two, actually. One for the "pre-bridals" done for a picture in the paper (that's what this picture here is from - and we tamed the daisy head maisie flowers before the wedding day so they didn't look like they were sprouting out of my head), and also a team for the day itself.

On the day itself, this guy and his mother were the two left out of the team of three of their photography business, because his dad had passed away. And a truer team you never saw than those two. She arranged the people, and he took the picture, and he only took one with each arrangement. No kidding. One take was all he needed. And the album is beautiful.

And permanent.

The album is permanent.

Our pastor's wife was right. I have the man and the photos. I still wish I'd had my hair and nails done that day or the day before. Right there, in that permanent album of permanent pictures, pictures of such high quality that they will be here until kingdom come, is a record of everyone's appearance on that day of days - including the mother of the bride.

And this is where my thoughts have traveled of late. My mom looks good in all the wedding albums of all her kids - even the photos taken in the early 70's, with the ubiquitous chignon - the extra hair with a braid around the base of it, that lived on a white Styrofoam head on her bedroom dresser when she (my mom) wasn't all dressed up and wearing it. Back in those days, people thought that my mom, my sisters (8 and 10 years older than I am, and all shorter than I am), and I were all sisters. My mother looked really young for a really long time.

But all her kids were married by the time she was my age. This means, in case you're not following, that I will be older in the wedding albums of my children than she was in her kids' wedding albums. When the wedding days come, I mean. Okay, if the days come. But I'm telling you, I see winking and blinking lights over there on the ocean's horizon and this boat isn't showing any signs of stopping out here at sea, and those lights might not be what I think they are, but they might be, and if I don't lose some weight and get a more flattering hairstyle soon, I'll be caught forever in wedding photos in the very un-pretty appearance I seem to have taken on lately, and when my kids have their spouses and their photo albums, there I will be. In this condition. Because wedding pictures are forever.

50 Years Ago -- a $50 Bet -- and a story using 50 words! I do! I like Green Eggs and Ham!

I just found out about this! Did you know?

According to WKRC...

It was 50 years ago today that a publisher's bet turned into a children's classic.

Bennett Cerf bet Theodor Geisel, also known as Dr. Seuss, 50 dollars that he couldn't write a book using only 50 words.

The result of the bet... Doctor Seuss's "Green Eggs and Ham."

"I do not like green eggs and ham, I do not like them Sam I am."

By the way, of the 50 words in the book, 49 of them are mono-syllabic.

The one exception is the word: 'anywhere'.

If you can't recall all the other words in "Green Eggs and Ham", here's the list:

Some other beginning's end

Okay ... I know ... it's a bit over-played. But it's perfect for this time of the year. We can see the another beginning's end from here. Right now, outside my window, I can hear a chainsaw biting into some logs. I can see the hay that was too poor to bale, lying brown against the greener field, and smell ripening blackberries. Summer is at the height of its aerobic workout. The sweat is rolling off, and the air is panting hard in rhythm, and everyone knows that the next part in the routine is the cool down.

I know that it's easy - and completely honest - for mommies to feel pensive when the summer starts to listen for the next song. I understand the sentiment. I do. After all, every new beginning is some other beginning's end. And so we grieve. At least a little, we grieve over the end of a beginning. I think this must be one good thing about celebrations for transition times. If you throw a party when your son is weaned, or give your daughter a Quinceañera, everyone's celebration can help the mommy a bit. She can weep and she will be understood.

But at the end of summer I am never far from grade school and new pencils and unopened packets of paper. The light at this time of the year reminds me of new clothes on a sewing machine. My own breath quickens with the increasing breathlessness of the air as the song's beat grows stronger.I know, you see. I know what's coming next. I know that when the air mellows, and the colors - colors even now beginning to fade from the outmost edges of the summer's juicy, lush glow - after this song - it will be after this song - the breathing will smooth out. We will stretch. We will cool down. We will lie still. We will find "corpse pose" again, and with the colors in the leaves, we will recede into thoughts again. School. Writing. Thinking. The scent of piles of leaves and sundried evergreen needles in the dust. Here it comes. It's after this next song.

• 1. Finish and submit a completed PLA Portfolio
• 2. Take three CLEP tests and don't put it off any longer
• 3. Online: LITERARY AND CRITICAL THEORY

LIT 321E, 3 crs.
David Plotkin
This course examines the history of literary theory while focusing on significant contemporary approaches to literary interpretation. Students will explore the relationship between literature and various other critical approaches, such as in philosophy, linguistics, political-economy, historicism, post-colonial theory, psychoanalysis, and gender studies. Core requirement for major.

• 4. Weekend: THE LITERATURE OF RESISTANCE

LIT 352A or CLS 352A, 3 crs.
Perrin Kerns
This course focuses on literature from around the world that testifies to political or social injustices, and, through the act of testifying, poses some form of resistance. In reading fiction, nonfiction, drama, and poetry, students will look atmany of the issues that surround the act of bearing witness: the erasure of identity and the break of narrative sequences that adheres in surviving and/or observing traumatic historical events, and the healing (both cultural and individual) that can come through bearing witness. A World & Ethnic Literature course.

• 5. (DANG it!!) I just figured out that the Philosophy course I wanted has a prerequisite I haven't taken. #5 ... to be determined.

Here it comes ...

How to be Alone