blot of mustard

Cases spiking across Sunbelt

Outbreak forces Tyndall

to backtrack on reopening

Russia bounty threat

Dark, 3:25 and 3:35, and the coffee smells good, which, since I notice the aroma, brings me to realize I'd gotten out of the habit, a shame to miss one of life's ordinary pleasantries, even one so simple as Wake Up and Smell the Coffee. This cup sips good too. While it was brewing I went out the front door to get the PCNH for Linda and to stand on the sidewalk outside my office study den window and look north up Beck and StAndrews at Thursday before it has time to lighten up and get started.

Shining on the old bank building, the red taillights of one car as it brakes to turn from 10th Street onto Beck Avenue. Otherwise still.

An unpleasantly fitful night of sleeping, tossing, turning, coming half awake and dozing back off. As with Old Scrooge, an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. And the accompanying unpleasant dream that kept returning, along with increasing pressure that I refused, to get up and go appease the bladder so as back to bed and peace, but no.

But the dream. I'm trying to figure out where it came from besides the fragment of underdone potato, sometimes one can do that with a bothersome dream. Like the marching band that played "Deutschland Über Alles" at top volume all night long in my head that first night in the ICU in Cleveland Clinic nearly ten years ago: why? You can figure these things out.

These are Times when one has hours to do nothing if one wishes, or watch a war movie yet one more time again, and aha! I've nailed it. It wasn't "Downfall" that I watched earlier in the week. It was the word "traitor" in a film I watched yesterday. In the opening scene a firing squad and an artillery shell exploding nearby to interrupt the burial of the body. Then flashing back to the story, a young German soldier, a prisoner volunteering to help his American captors, and of course being caught in the final scene. Haven't watched it all the way through before because if they're Germans I want them to speak German instead of good American English. This one was set in a French convent, and of course the girl's name was Monique.

The American army colonel remarking about the hero, that it was just as well for him that he was captured and executed, because a traitor will always have been a contemptible traitor from the point of view of both sides, and that's the way the rest of his life would have been.

So my dream, with Benedict Arnold constantly in the background as conscious contemptible comparison to what I, though I'm not sure it was me, was now, in the dream, doing, betraying General Lee, and feeling the disgust. How could I have done such an eternally damnable thing, how could a Southerner betray General Lee. So it was all of that coming out too, what's going on with the protests and people calling General Lee a traitor, which in my growing up years would have been fighting words. My something-great-grandfather on my mother's side was it, drafted as an old man in his sixties to fight for the Confederacy and dying in a prisoner of war camp in Illinois, and here in my dream I turn traitor to The Cause. I remember, as a small boy growing up, hearing about "The Cause". It was illusive, but you always had a sense of what it was, something about Tara.

Dream and life history and current events and all, it's like waking up and finding yourself standing in front of a firing squad and you have no idea why. Have you read An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge? It ends two ways, one a good and great relief, the other a sudden and devastating shock.

So anyway, I've read that if one sleeps on one's side, it's better to lie on the left side than on the right side because of the arrangement of the human digestive system. Most common, I sleep on my right side through the night. But the point was proved this morning. Coming half awake, I turned over onto my left side and, in accordance with principle, a huge, enormously relieving burp. So it wasn't the blot of mustard after all.

Nevermind.

You are way too young to remember that headline, but I sure as aitch remember it.