08.02.05 - 10:38 a.m.

I had a suprisingly vivid, rather sad dream in the twenty twilight minutes between the alarm and full waking. I was attending a weaving/quilting convention in an outdoor amphitheater that still had the structure of a building - rather like the old parking garage under Smith Hall, with its low ceiling and marching rows of load bearing columns defining cave-like rooms, without the intervention of walls. Garrison Keillor was the keynote speaker, although he looked more like my 8th grade advanced math teacher from Nitro, the fundamentalist Christian who liked to lecture the class (during Holy Week, natch) about the Great Error afflicting the contemporary Christian calendar. (Essentially, he argued that "Good Friday" could not, under any circumstances, be the actual day of the crucifiction because Friday-Saturday-Sunday was really only two days, not three. Or something like that. I tended to ignore that rant. I was too busy crushing on one of the high school geeks in the class, the one who bought candy cigarettes at the Rite Aid during our break and "smoked" them as we walked back, blowing a cloud of powdered sugar from the paper-wrapped candy. Mr. Math Teacher (...was it Mr. Wilkes?) ignored the fact that Jesus was probably also not actually on December 25 that Easter moves about every year anyway, so we aren't very accurate with the timeline in any case.)

Hundreds of people were attending, and - like me - many of the attendees had their arms full of rugs and quilts and blankets. In the dream, I carried more rugs and quilts and blankets than I could ever have managed, a great, cartoonish, vision-obscuring mound, and struggled through the sea of people until I found a seat close to the front. I was relieved to have a spot, relieved to drop the armload, and sat down in a blue plastic chair three or four rows from the front, but well off to the speaker's right flank.

I knew that I was supposed to meet someone there, though, so I stood up and scanned the crowd. I wasn't sure who I planned to meet there, but something caught my eye and I wove my way backward through the crowd. Eventually, I ended up in a sparsely occupied group of seats in the very back, shadowed by the wide stairwell that bisected the back quarter of the room. Slacker's quarters. There I found an old childhood friend - my best childhood friend in many ways - who died at sixteen of complications from leukemia a few years after I moved away. We sat down together and strangely enough, there was no awkwardness. She smiled at me and gave me a present - a book of quilt patterns mimicking the stars in the night sky. "Night sky over ritter park" - eight brilliant, folksy stars on a field of blue shining down on rolling, stylized hills.)

I expected more, I think, and maybe I was a bit disappointed to receive a book instead of a finished piece, but I was ashamed of my disappointment, too. She owed me nothing, and yet I had these expectations... I had a finished piece for her, a rug, not a quilt, but I'd left it at my seat near the front of the amptheater and the lecture started or the crowd swelled or I was just reluctant to leave her lest she disappear before I could retrieve it. And I was worried that she wouldn't know that I'd always intended to give her that rug, that she would think it was an afterthought, an extra, a response to her own present and not a consciously chosen and constructed gift. I was worried that she would think I'd forgotten her.

Garrison Keillor/math teacher, the keynote speaker, cleared his throat to speak. The noisy, chatty crowd grew still, ready to listen, but Garrison Keillor/math teacher managed just one sentence about quilts and the speech ended as abruptly as it began. He abandoned the lecturn, much to the disappointment of the now restive crowd. He couldn't come up with more to say? We came all this way for that?

And then I woke up.