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The Dream
I am sleeping on the living room floor because my bed has not yet been assembled. It is my first night in a new living space. It is very early, not yet light outside. I get up and walk around to take a look at my new home. I thought I rented an apartment but the place feels like a house. The floor plan resembles the house I grew up in but it's larger and falling apart. I see for the first time that none of the doors close properly and the floors are splintering.
The rooms are sparsely littered with my possessions. Nothing is in order yet. There are large unopened boxes with BOOKS written in large letters on the sides and open boxes with odds and ends pulled out: lamps and towels and dishes parked on chairs and the floor.
Returning to the double windows of the living room, I see a few adolescent girls, each walking to school alone, down the middle of the semi-dark street to avoid male predators.
I feel but do not yet see or hear activity on the south side of the house. Through the window of the south door I discover children and teachers in the yard. Hundreds of school age kids milling and calling out and chasing each other and .... doing kid stuff while scores of teachers run around trying to get them to line up and stay lined up. I think they're preparing for a field trip. There are also puppies and older dogs. Slightly familiar breeds but not quite: pumpkin-colored dachshunds and teeny-tiny labs and some breed that walks mostly upright.
A little boy trips over an exposed tree root and falls. I run out into the yard to find the person in charge. They can't line up here. If something happens I might be sued.
I can't find the lead teacher. While I search, teachers are morphing from the staid, tidy instructors I knew as a kid into interesting people with dreadlocks and nose rings and bare feet. They speak English in accents from all over the world. Some of them speak languages I can't identify. They are an exuberant and good-humored group of adults and children. Lots of smiles. Lots of cheerful "I'm not sure who you should talk to" and ... turning their attention back to herding the kids.
I finally get a business card from a tall, male teacher with a Midwestern accent and return to the house to telephone the school. Back inside, I discover the kids and puppies have wandered in. For the rest of the dream I am trying to get the kids and the teachers to leave my house. They are everywhere: in closets, under and behind furniture, popping out of boxes and spilling my stuff all over. I hear footsteps and realize they are even upstairs and I didn't know there was a second floor.
Teachers are pursuing the kids, who also have accents and are every skin color I have ever seen. Kids and teachers alike are well-dressed and ragged, skinny and plump, talkative and shy, on crutches and wearing braces, with sticky hands and dirty knees and giggles and "reasoning" in that voice that teachers use and my house is starting to smell like a school.
I attempt to explain to a trio of teachers that I can't practice piano with all these kids in the house and it's important that I practice every day. And also I just got up; I haven't had any coffee yet. And.... A male teacher with an Eastern European accent, as a kind of thanks-for-letting-us-use-your-space and sorry-about-the-chaos gift hands me a cloth bag containing four obviously-recycled bottles, corked and filled with wine he made from ingredients found around my house.
Some kind of joy is infecting me. I want to capture the fun and post it to FB but I can't find my cell phone. "I think one of the kids has my phone," I say to the wine-gifter. "Here, use mine and dial your number," he says. I do and we hear my phone ringing somewhere out in the yard. We locate it and I take pictures of the kid and his friends and teachers nearby. The picture looks like it could have been taken at a music festival.
A female teacher who looks like me with very long hair explains "This house has been vacant for a long time." She says the school outgrew its original facility and appropriated this abandoned building.
As the queues finally begin to move, I yell some kind of farewell and in unison, a thousand voices take up my words and turn them first into a chant and then a South African freedom song. Children's voices and teacher voices harmonize. They are on their way.
I am making coffee when I discover some kids were left behind. There's no phone number on the business card. These kids are gonna be here all day, maybe through the night. I'm not going to get any practice time today. It's going to be frustrating trying to unpack and set up my house with them running all over. I mostly don't care. But I'm running out of steam......
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I wake up because I'm exhausted.
