Lucid Dreamer

I once mentioned to our former town clerk, a very uptight woman, that I had a dream about kissing Marilyn Monroe. "I'm not interested in your dreams," she snipped. The point was not that I had a suggestive dream about Marilyn Monroe, but that I was amazed that her upfront movie star, gorgeous and famous presence didn't match her personal self. Ms. Monroe, in reality wasn't the ditzy blond she played in public. She was intelligent and thoughtful, hence one marriage to Arthur Miller(the lucky guy).

The other night I'm walking through deserted buildings. It looks like a ghost town with only partial walls of the buildings remaining. Further along there's a migrant camp. I walk up the stairs to a school building which is still intact. Peering in the classroom, I see a teacher dressed like a bird. Her face is painted white with red streaks down a long yellow beak. Her students were all costumed as baby birds. I chuckled at the image of the mother bird and her fledglings. In my teaching career, tour of duty #2, I tried to create an atmosphere of caring concern along with a large dose of parental structure, given that many of my students came from disadvantaged home situations.

Then, last night I'm in a bar. The cocktail waitress brings a beer to our table. Many of the details have disappeared with the light of the day, but instead of a tip it was customary to fondle the waitress. OK, let's not get jiggy about the image. All I did was give her a pat on the ass. In my travels overseas, foreign men were much more likely to indulge in politically incorrect and socially frowned upon behavior that US males would shudder to even mention. Ask my ex-wife what it was like to walk in a crowd in Paris.

Dawn and I used to have the once a year dinner with her brother and sister-this is before the sister became an ugly sister. We had dinner at a crowded restaurant downtown. In the press of the crowd, as a joke, I grabbed my brother-law's butt to see what he would do. It was so crowded as the hostess led us to our table, he never suspected me. Imagine the guy looking around wildly at the crowd for a gorgeous woman with a big smile on her face. I miss having that kind of fun.

It snowed again last night. Heavy wet snow mixed with rain. When I let the kids out, both of them stopped dead in their tracks to examine large paw prints in the snow around the house and garage. These were print twice the size of Mandy's. Obviously the large dog or coyote was investigating the smell of a female dog in and around the house, up the drive way and off toward the lane between the corn field and our neighbor's horse corrals. I'll have to talk to the horses about that later.

The local bakery sells Zorba buns. They're puffy light buns mixed with green pepper and cheese. Yesterday afternoon, I perfected the recipe. I am so proud of myself. We had fresh leftover jalapenos in the Summer kitchen which I seeded and finely chopped. Then I cut aged cheddar cheese and some Colby into square chunks about a half inch, added some crumbled feta, chopped some fresh onion, mixed four cups of white flour, two tsp of kosher salt, yeast and fresh whole raw milk, put it all into the Cuisinart and made a large dough ball. It rose two hours on my warm oven before I popped it into a 375 degree oven for 20 minutes. There are a few tricks to the recipe, which I'll mention later if anyone cares.