I put off making the call until I’ve sorted through everything. I decide to call my father to pick me up from my current location, and amidst my things, I find my old pink razor phone. I’m in a flea market/antique store, and I spread all of my things across this mattress to try to decide what I should keep and what I should leave behind/donate. As I’ve walked, I’ve accumulated more stuff, and it has become quite heavy. In the dream, I arrive at the crossroads of Little Creek Road and Hampton, and I stop to repack my stuff. It’s about seven miles or so, along busy streets, but for some reason, I walk this route often. So I began the long walk home (to my parents’ house), which is a walk that I take often in my dreams. She walked away as I was speaking to her, and she said, “I have no desire to drink tea with her.” I was sharing an office with Mari and some other people from the old days, and Mari was acting horribly towards me. I had left ODU and my office there without my car as I was quite upset. Last night I had a very strange dream: I was walking down Hampton Boulevard with a backpack. We are sailors who wake when the moon intrudes the smoky tavern of dreams, wake to find a name on an arm or our bodies bruised by sun or the pressure of a hand, wake with the map of night on our skin, traced like moss-stained stone.” ~ Anne Michaels, The Passionate World Chobe Pier at Sunset, Botswana, Africa (via ) It’s too bad that a TARDIS cannot truly move people from one time to the next, skipping all of the angst in between, but of course, if that were so, how would we ever learn? “All night love draws its heavy drape of scent against the sea and we wake with the allure of earth in our lungs, hungry for bread and oranges. I do not envy teens and that raging imbroglio that is adolescence. Overnight they become omniscient, simply because they are teenagers. Overnight you become stupid simply because you are the parent. It’s as if their hormones build to explosive levels between 11 and 13, and then all hell breaks loose. She won science fairs, literary contests, you name it. He would see it and call my mother as he was bursting with pride. My Uncle Nick used to comment all of the time how Alexis’s name was on the marquis of her middle school every other week. She was still sweet and smart and had not yet decided that she wanted to be neither as that was just too predictable. That is so hard to imagine, mostly because she is a contemporary of my daughter, but also because I remember when Alexis was 12. We won’t discuss my teen years, in which I was a terror, as most teens are.Ī friend of Alexis’s who is a few years older, has a daughter who is 12. Of course, the big drawback to being an only child is that your parents focus entirely on you-good or bad, though to be quite honest, I was a very good child. Perhaps that’s why being an only child did not bother me except upon those rare occasions when I felt I needed an older sibling, never a younger one, and since older was impossible, I remained an only. I have always been this contradictory: While I loved being around groups of people and talking for hours, I also valued the time I spent alone, reading or writing. I love having the kids home, but I also love my silence, love hearing nothing but my playlist in the background, the tick of the clock, and the occasional sound of puppy paws on hardwood floors. Everyone left for Busch Gardens this morning, and they are not expected back until this evening sometime. But what a time paying it.Lone Gull at Sunset (via )* “They say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.” ~ Andy Warhol You have to live it and it comes with a price. It’s not that you want to do it, it’s that you have to do it. It expresses so much about the burning need for art – the mystery of the passion to create. ‘Why do you want to dance?’ he asks, and she answers, ‘Why do you want to live?’ The look on his face is extraordinary.’ Over the years, I’ve thought a lot about that exchange. It all comes down to that wonderful exchange early in the film when Anton Walbrook confronts Moira Shearer at a cocktail party. What keeps nourishing me over the years is the spell the film casts, how it weaves the mystery of the obsession of creativity, of the creative drive. It’s one of the true miracles of film history. It’s about the joy and exuberance of film-making itself. I wouldn’t know how to begin to explain what this film has meant to me over the years. “My father took me to see this film in 1950, when I was eight years old.
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