What I can't remember

It was one of those deathly boring teaching in-service things where you get snowed in by hand-outs you never look at again. This time too. A couple dozen maybe. This teaching thing was going on, and I could not have cared less. I’ll admit it—my mind was a couple thousand miles away somewhere beyond my control.

Beyond my control because it was a dream. Two members of our department were there—Howard and Bob—both far more dutiful than I was, at least they kept far better track of all the blanket-blank handouts. I just took them from the Dean—who, oddly enough, wasn’t my dean—and proceeded to lose them, just like that, in the blinking of an eye. Gone. Disappeared. I swear.

That was the horror: the moment those handouts came into my possession, they vanished. Nowhere to be found. And it was funny. During Act I, we all laughed.

All of this was a dream. I get handed these papers I’m supposed to write on or fill in or something and I lose them, but those two loyal members of my department keep me from death-by-Dean because they give me some of theirs. Something like that—what do I know? It was a dream.

And then I woke up. I honestly woke up. I remember turning over, annoyed at being such a lousy excuse for a human being. Gotta change, I tell myself. Got to get myself organized for once in my life.

I’m awake for awhile. I lay an arm over my wife, who’s fast asleep, then lie there for awhile thinking about which stack of student papers I’m going to attack next. The green lines of the radio alarm flick and split and, soon enough, I guess, I’m off again, thank goodness.

Now here’s the kicker. I actually fall back into the exact same stupid dream. I’m not kidding. Does that ever happen to anyone else? Bang! I’m back at some stupid teachers’ in-service for the 385th time in my life, and someone 30 years younger than I am is telling us all how to be Energizer bunnies in the classroom. The handouts keep coming, keep coming. It’s another blizzard, and as soon as I get the papers, once again I lose ‘em. They're just gone.

But this time Howard and Bob are laughing--at me, not with me. I pick up traces of it when I turn my back. I’ve become their party entertainment, Mr. Magoo, a senile old fart with a rattletrap mind and the perceptions of a demented opossum.

Act I woke me annoyed. Act II wakes me humiliated—shoot, mortified. I’d much rather be annoyed.

Freud believed dreams were a safety valve, allowing our horrible-ist fears to leak out of the pressure cooker of an overheated subconscious, swarming up like swamp gas from our greatest unuttered horrors—or something such.

So now I'm haunted: someplace, I’ve got to be forgetting something. A double-feature nightmare doesn’t rise out of nowhere. Right at this moment, something important isn’t where it should be. I don’t know what I misplaced or where, but I’ll tell you this, I must have left something I don't know of somewhere I can’t find.

Dang it.

And don't laugh either.