idou

Woke from my dream this morning as two of my dark chocolate truffles were rolling past my feet down the ship’s tilting gray deck. Turning to go after them because one does not waste a chocolate, suddenly I was awake and trying to remember the dream.

Counter to the two Josephs, dreams do not signify God or anyone else reaching out to me. They’re only about my own state of mind, what I was doing or thinking about yesterday, or recently. Responsible dream books I’ve owned and read say that too. No one is reaching out to me from across the country, or from my past, or from the grave. Some years ago I had a most startling dream that, unlike almost all of my dreams, I remembered vividly on waking, so vividly I logged somewhere and still remember. As I worked with the dream the next day, trying to sort it out, I recalled that the previous day, while working with a physical fitness counselor, one of the hosts of the retired clergy conference I was attending in South Florida that week, I’d realized that he looked like someone from my high school years. So, any notion that that other person had been trying to speak to me in my dream was rubbish.

The few dreams I remember generally are anxiety dreams, getting lost trying to find the front door or the pulpit in a church where I’m supplying, or unable to find the correct parts of my uniform while the 1MC keeps shouting for me to report to the admiral’s cabin. I’m eighty years old and the admiral can go to hell.

My writing spot this morning is the blue lift chair we bought my mother for her 98th birthday in 2010. It has a remote for controlling its position, simple for me but mama never could figure it out, so it wasn't a success for her. The chair looks out across the Bay, and I can see any ships or Navy craft that pass, and ducks having breakfast, ducking down for minnows.

The Greek word above is translated “behold” in the KJV. It’s up there because I’d been trying failingly to add a Greek font to my Pages list, and didn’t realize one had taken. I was trying for a font I used in Apalachicola on Word, called “Symbol,” but can’t get it to take. This one is called BST Greek, in which unfortunately the letters are not all in the right order, so I have trouble finding them. So, what's the point of starting out with idou? There isn't one.

My couple days in the ICU at Cleveland five years ago this month, I was tormented by what later a nurse friend told me was "ICU psychosis" and quite normal, the anesthesia wearing off, getting out of my system. One of the torments was that the song Deutschland über alles kept playing loudly in my brain, over and over, and I'd force myself awake to stop it, only to have it resume soon as I went back to sleep. Yesterday, and it's back this morning, that 1918 WW1 song "Smile the while" is doing the same thing to me. It's not "haunting", it's tormenting. Behold, why?

A winter cold has caught me, don’t get close.

Thos+