I don’t usually let myself relax. It’s a serious problem. Sometimes I’m lazy, no doubt. But I’m never, or rarely never, selfishly, indulgently, joyously lazy. But this is what I did today: I cleaned. It’s a Saturday thing. In fact, if I don’t clean on Saturday, it doesn’t feel like Saturday. I clean like a desperate housewife.

I walked Murphy. It’s cold and grizzly outside. The rain popped on my head cold and heavy. The trees are not quite naked. It’s almost but not quite ready to snow.

I came in unable to shake the chill set in my bones. Until my bath where I thawed and melted. I dragged a big blanket to my couch and crawled in, in just my undies, and read a book.

Not much later, I nodded off, Murphy sleeping beside the couch. My cocooning nap, on a grey October Saturday, produced this:

I’m in my childhood park. Actually in the pool. I’ve been let off at the park to fend for myself. I can’t quite make out if I’m the ten year old that used to take swimming lessons or if I am the adult me.

The pool is mostly mine. I’m supposed to meet someone later. I’m in the deep end. Unlike when I was a child there is no panic of breathlessness, there is no frenzy of ego and insecurity. I swim around, happy as clams have been reported to be. Though I’m not altogether clear on what makes a clam happy. I spot a bench, a large park bench, at the bottom of the pool. I go down to investigate. Yes. Definitely a park bench. I catch people’s eyes. I hope they don’t think that I brought it with me. I know that’s not logical. It’s like calling a fart. The caller is the most suspect. I didn’t, of course, bring the bench with me.

There’s a whistle. Is it for me? Is it for the bench? No. The pool people are measuring something. We don’t have to get out of the pool. We just have to go wait by the edge. I have my childhood feelings. No. That’s not right. I have the good pool feelings distilled out of my childhood, without the panic of not being able to breathe, without the panic of insecurity I suffered as a child. And the feeling is very good. It’s a feeling of freedom, which a child has but cannot appreciate. It’s a feeling of curiosity and strength and exhilaration. The whistle blows again and we are allowed to swim once more.

It occurs to me to go tell someone about the bench. Yes, I’m worried they will think it’s my fault. But still, it clearly doesn’t belong, and it begins to bother me, like seeing a cow at a party. I knock at the window. I wonder if I will recognize the person behind the frosted window. But I know inside my dream that time has been bent around. The window opens. No, I don’t know her. She’s a very pretty girl. Latin.

“There’s a park bench submerged in the deep end.” She was not surprised or worried. “Um, I could push it down to the shallow end, so we could remove it,” I suggest hopefully. She acts like she’s not enjoying being bothered and looks out across the pool in a way that lets me know that she thinks it would be smarter to just lift it up and out of the deep end. But it’s heavy. Still, my manhood has been questioned. “I think it would be easier to push it,” I say. “Well, whatever you think is best.” “Could you wait until,” here she quotes a time, but the numbers are gibberish. The 30 hour and 1 minute? I look puzzled. She translates that into a combination of English (with wonky numbers), adding, “et une minute.” That doesn’t help.

It’s only now that I see that she has a piece of paper in her hand. It’s written by someone I know, a girl, M. “Oh, connoces M.?” I ask. M., the girl I know, is Spanish. And the pool woman looks Spanish but she just talked to me in French. I don’t understand her answer. That is, I don’t understand her words, but I do understand that she doesn’t know M. I don’t know why she has a letter from her. I don’t think the letter is for her. I feel like the letter is for me. She doesn’t give it to me.

I leave the pool. As I’m leaving the pool I really want to go try out the diving board. I think this time I might get it. I never really got it as a child. But I feel like I have more power or more grace. As a child I never felt the need to conquer the diving board. But that is my feeling now. Still, I don’t do it. I don’t dive. And presumably, I don’t, after all, recover the submerged bench. I go off to meet M. I understand that M. has promised that she might come meet me in the park. I understand the contrariness of those words “promise” and “might”. But it was like that with M when we were better friends. It was always on her time. I didn’t see M. I lounged about the park for a while, becoming more and more irritated.

I was confused when M. finally did show up. First, she looked old to me. Very old. Perhaps she was only her natural age but I was still feeling like my 10 year old self. Secondly, she was walking side by side with an old grizzled man. And perhaps that man, a stranger, was only a man M’s natural age. I was scared of this old woman and this old man and I ran and hid. I wonder what the child me would think of the things that mostly preoccupy my head.

I wake up. There’s still a chill inside my apartment and I’m overcome with the desire to make pumpkin pie. I don’t really want to eat pumpkin pie. I just want the apartment to smell like pumpkin pie. Hmm? I don’t even have the stuff to make pumpkin pie. I’ll have to get some.

SS