Not Deep, But General
One thing that happens when you get older is that more people you once knew and are now dead show up in your dreams. Whether this is because you know more dead people no, because your own death is more part of your thoughts, or you yearn for the past as you cannot when you are younger or some other reason is hard to know.
Last night Professor Morris showed up. I saw him for the last time thirty years ago and he died shortly after that. He was also a minor poet, though a good one and I sometimes quote his line: “It is kind of Connecticut not to be twenty-five anymore” because my father liked it when I read it to him.
Like most of his students, I admired his quirkiness and his devotion to a world of literature (18th-century English Poetry) that no one cared about. He had admirers but no followers in part, I presume, because no one wanted to spend any more time reading dry rhyming couplets, the oppressive from of that age.
If he and I talked a few times in his office or hallway that would have been the extent of it. We certainly were not friends in the way students and professors can sometimes become.
In the dream, he gave me a book and a CD player. At first, I thought the book was Harry Potter or some such—odd, I thought—before I looked down to see it was by an author whose first name was Alice and whose last name I did not know. The CD player was large and clunky and while I was happy to have it—I need one in real life—its size felt like a hassle.
That fact makes me think (consciously) of a friend, also older than me, who has a few such devices in his basement. The last time he and I were together we spoke briefly about Joyce’s The Dead, a story which ends with snow. “Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland.” is how the last perfect paragraph of that peerless story begins. It is a story about dry people you might well say.
I post this in part because I had the above in my head, more or less word for word when I woke up. I can not tell you whether I was awake or asleep when I “wrote” it. But then again I had no awareness until this morning that it snowed here last night. Not deep, but general.