I HAVE A RIGHT TO KNOW WHY I’M BEING ARRESTED!

So my dream went something like this:

I’m at a check-out stand with some god-awful looking parka right out of the early 70’s. For some reason I’m buying the horrendous looking thing.

One of the arms has been turned inside out as if someone had taken it off hastily and not turned the sleeve right-side-out again.

The cashier says to me in a decidedly accusational tone, “Was there a sock in here?”

(Be my guest -- psycho-analyze away!)

“Yes,” I answer him matter-of-factly.

“Where is it NOW?” he demands. I tell him that the sock fell out of the jacket in the dressing room and I left it on the floor.

(Be my guest -- psycho-analyze away!)

The cashier calls a huge and very scary-looking police-type guy over and the massive lunk pulls me into a corner and demands to see my socks.

I lift up my pant legs by a few inches and I’m shocked to see that I’m wearing two different socks – one is bright red with holly on it, obviously a holiday sock and the other is multi-colored stripes with individual toes, like the socks that were all the range when I was in high school.

(Be my guest -- psycho-analyze away!)

I can’t explain myself. I’m speechless – and in deep trouble.

I tell the cop that I don’t know where the socks on my feet came from and that I’m innocent (of what?!), but my words come out weak and mumbly.

I try again to declare my innocence but I can hardly get the words out. They’re stilted and shaky and demure – not the way I want them to sound.

(Be my guest -- psycho-analyze away!)

The cop is trying his best not to giggle… which pisses me off so much that I take one big breath and YELL, with every single word clear, concise and very loud, “I HAVE A RIGHT TO KNOW WHY I’M BEING ARRESTED!"

At that point, Tom grabs my shoulder, telling me to wake up, and as I wake up I realize that I had been YELLING loud enough to wake up everyone in the house – which, as you recall, included my aunt Ulli and her husband Michael, who were sleeping directly across the hallway from our bedroom.

How embarrassing!

Life as a Series of Click Points

When I designed kids' educational and edutainment games at Edmark and Humongous in the mid to late 90's, we designed around "click points." The idea was that kids mouse around and click just about anything on the screen. We'd make lots of items on the screen "hot," but only some items would lead to actual modules or games. Most of the click points would just animate and do something fun, a dead-end programatically, but still lots of fun for the kids.

While I was in the midst of designing those games, I'd see things in my own world in terms of click points, and often I didn't know whether I should giggle or scream in frustration! I'd see a mailbox on a street corner, for example, and in my imagination I'd see the top slot opening and a giant red tongue coming out, lapping a letter out of an amused (or terrified?!) child's hands. A flower was never just a flower; it became a click point that would release hundreds of beautiful (or terrifying?!) butterflies and insects that would fly all over the screen. Chimneys elicited all kinds of possibilities, as did books, doors, and vehicles!

Although I have no graphic abilities whatsoever, I'd constantly -- and almost subconsciously -- "design" click points out of every day objects in my every day life. It became a bothersome menace after a while and it came to the point that I eagerly waited for my "symptoms" to dissipate!

About a year after I finished work on Blue's Clues, I realized that I could finally look at a mailbox or a door or a flower or a chimney without mentally creating a click point from it. I felt like a schizophrenic who had finally stopped being tormented by demons! (Not that I have personal knowledge or experience with the feelings of an actual schizophrenic, but still.) I felt liberated from my own adorably cute, but somewhat disturbing "demons."

Now, eight years later I am, for some reason that I can't pinpoint, suddenly imagining a stream of click points again! I squeeze the toothpaste tube and envision PeterMax art emerging. I open the dishwasher door and envision the cow running away with the spoon!

And I can't help but wonder if this is a matter of newly creative juices flowing... or of this flu or headcold or whatever it might be that seems to be gripping me suddenly!

Art Imitates Death

A few months ago, a film called 2 Weeks, starring Sally Field and Ben Chaplin, lasted for about a nano-second in theaters. (Oddly enough, I can't even find an Amazon or IMDb link!). It was, very coincidentally, about the last two weeks of a woman's life as she succumbed to ovarian cancer (like Mom). The focus of the movie, though, was really on the relationships between Anita's four children, three boys and a girl (like my siblings and me), who came together from out of town (as we did) to be with their mother at the end of her life.

I never had a chance to see the movie in theaters last spring, but I rented it from Netflix recently. I watched it twice, once alone and once with my daughters. I am still just amazed at the similarities between what Anita's family experienced in her last days and what we experienced during Mom's last days.

The movie depicts quite a few similarities to what my brothers and I experienced (along with our dad) when we all met at my parents' house to "help Mom die." (This photo was taken during that time, a week or so before Mom died. She was completely enveloped in her children's and husband's unwavering love and, in addition to deep sorrow we all felt, there was an unexpected and inexplicable joy between us as well. I love this photo because it depicts all the emotions we shared that week.) It was the first time the six of us had been together alone, without spouses and grandchildren, for over 20 years and, similar to 2 Weeks, that time was as much a time for us siblings to get to know each other again as it was a time to say goodbye to our mother. The sister in the movie is in many ways the teacher and organizational soul of the group; she's the one who reads Death and Dying and who, in turn, suggests that her brothers "read up" too. In our family my dad and I shared that role, but the similarities were still striking as the sister organizes 2-hour, round-the-clock "watches" so her mom is never alone during her last days.

In the movie, Anita goes through some of the things that we witnessed with Mom. At one point Anita stared ahead and tears began to run down her face. "Hi Dad," she whispered and mumbled through a (seemingly one-sided) conversation with her dead father. Similarly, my mother asked my father at one point, "Who's she?" and a few minutes later she whispered to me, "My mother..." trying to continue but unable to form words after that.

In 2 Weeks, one of the brothers comments that his mother's soul seems to have taken leave of her body after she slipped into a coma and as she neared death. I remember thinking the exact same thing when Mom passed through that stage. In fact, I wrote about it: "She’s not my mother. She doesn’t look anything like my mother. She looks like a skeleton. No character, no spirit, no personality. Now we’re just caring for her body until it gives out – likely within hours."

After Anita died, her daughter did something that I did after Mom died, sure that I was the only one who ever did this and that I was being morbid and weird: we both took photos of our dead mothers. I can't tell you why I did it, except that it was the only way I could think of to hold on to her for a bit longer. (Similar, perhaps, to the dream I had during that week when I was severely sleep-deprived: "I had a thought/dream in the middle of the night: Miss Saum, my kindergarten teacher, used to pin “notes to go home” on our clothes. I dreamed that I pinned a picture of Mom at her most beautiful to her body so the mortician could see how beautiful she was before he cremated her. I wanted those who would care for her body to know that she was SO not just another skeletal cancer patient.")

In the movie, Anita's body is put into an unmarked car in the early hours of the morning, as the morning paper is being delivered around the neighborhood. Two of the brothers comment that it's hard to believe that regular life goes on, even after their lives have changed so dramatically. I remember thinking the same thing as Mom's body was wheeled down the path and into the very unspectacular white Ford Windstar.

I knew that moment marked not only the moment when I had to say my final goodbye to Mom's physical presence, but it also marked the moment when I began a new stage of my own life -- the stage in which I had to learn to be motherless. It's now almost four years later and I'm not sure I've learned yet how to be motherless.

Codornices Dreaming

There's a space between awake and asleep where thoughts dance lightly in my head, tingling and teasing like pixie dust and then blowing away into nothingness. Sometimes I'm able to force awareness just long enough to grasp onto an elusive thought before it disappears, but most of the time I'm left only with a sensation and, if I'm lucky, an accompanying emotion.

This morning, as I drifted in and out of sleep, I dreamed of holding my breath so as not to scatter the pixie dust. And maybe because it was morning and I was closer to consciousness anyway, I was able to not only be present in my dream, but to remember it.

I was at Codonices Park in Berkeley, a park I loved as a child. I was five. And I was 45. I was both five and 45 in my dream. At the same time. I know this because I was aware of both my physical presence and my deepest emotions being both very childlike and very womanly.

Codonices Park has an amazing concrete slide that's built into the hillside. It's been there for at least 60 years, perhaps longer, and I can promise you that just about every child who has grown up in Berkeley for the past six decades knows what it means to tear a flap off a cardboard box, lay it flat at the top of the cold, gray slide, hold onto it with one hand while positioning themselves on it for maximum speed, and then pushing off for the long curvy ride to the bottom. And I'll bet that every child knows the tunnel that runs under Euclid Street from Codonices Park to the Berkeley Rose Garden on the other side of the street.

These were places I played as a child, and in my almost-asleep-almost-awake morning dream, these were places I played as an almost-adult-almost-child. I was phenomenally happy in my dream, as children so often are, feeling playful and carefree, feeling love and loved, and being completely in the moment. In my dream, I flew down the slide, becoming airborne, and floating as if my ripped cardboard had become a magic carpet. In my dream I discovered jewels that lined the walls of the tunnel, jewels that were warm to the touch, so I held my child-and-woman skin against them, feeling magic -- and magical -- as they warmed me. And in my dream the Rose Garden bloomed every color of the rainbow and the flowers that grew tall all around me felt like a velvet blanket enveloping me.

But in my dream I had the district feeling, as adults so often do, of impending and crushing reality and of very grown-up responsibilities. In my dream, the responsible adult in me was imploring the carefree child in me to "wake up," and the carefree child in me was begging to the responsible adult in me to just let me play for "a few more minutes" before I had to go. Please don't make me step off the magic carpet and let go of the warm, magic jewels and take leave of the garden of a million colors! Please don't make me leave this magic place where I feel so loved and safe. Don't make me wake up!

But I did wake up, jolted out of my blissful dream by the grown-up life that I live. If I'm very still next time and I beckon the pixie dust back some morning, maybe I can go back to my child-woman self and stay and play for a while.