Sometimes I dream. For example, when I was thirteen, I dreamt there was a man walking on the moon, and that man was me. It was a black and white kind of day and I was at the lake, at my Uncle’s cottage. Everyone there was watching this portable plastic television as the events of the day played out on its eleven-inch screen. The rabbit ears had been finely adjusted and the picture was a wonderland of little static and almost invisible ghosts.
It was white hot outside but inside it was dark and cool. Everyone was literally glued to the screen but me. Somehow I had broken the bond, and I was busy watching a silver motor boat on the sparkling blue cove. The boat had a jet-black seventy-five horsepower Merc which cut through the water like a razor’s edge. How I loved that high and mighty engine!
I knew Joey was at the throttle. He swung the boat quickly toward the shore and then swung it back again, as the skier being pulled broke through the wake and let go of the rope, gliding on water like Jesus Christ on slalom, until she pulled one foot out of a boot and then the next and began walking on the shore. Jane was good.
“You’re going to miss it,” my mother said over the static of mission control. I turned to the screen and there I was, one bulky white boot floating onto something shadowy and gigantic. After staring at it for years, I was finally on it. My words would be widely misquoted of course but that’s nothing new. It’s all part of the show. So the first words ever spoken by a man on the moon I hereby report for the very first time: “Sometimes I dream.”
No comments:
Post a Comment