To Dream, Perchance to Return to the Before Time
Donna McCrohan Rosenthal, East Sierra Branch
I woke up from a dream a few mornings ago, drifting slowly into reality as I remembered a lovely imaginary vignette of attending a conference made up by community service organizations. We solved major world problems. Which ones? I have no idea. You know dreams and their random snippets of this and that, woven together into something that has its own weird logic. We might have ended poverty, or found a new recipe for tapioca. I can’t even guess. But I can say emphatically that we’d concluded convinced that we’d unlocked huge answers to overriding questions. Then we celebrated with a posh reception. We clustered into animated, energized groups, one after another, discussing how we would put our plans into action. We laughed. We smiled. We congratulated ourselves on our accomplishments. Waiters circulated with drinks and canapes on trays.
At this point, the sun pierced my reverie. The dream slid away as I reluctantly shook off the drowsiness. But I couldn’t bear to leave what I’d just experienced. I tried as hard as I possibly could do to ease back into that amazing event.
How had we intended to save the world? You’d think I struggled to recapture every faint glimmer of recollection.
But no. Instead, I hoped against hope to reclaim the fragment about canapes.
I’ve missed that sort of gathering so much. Parties, of course. Chatting in little clusters, absolutely. I long for the before time.
If only we could emerge at last from this persistent pandemic, applying everything we’ve learned and striving our very best to restore our health (which would go far in any efforts to banish the world’s troubles).
Then we’d have a real handle on mending the broken parts.
Doing right about what matters.
Doing what the good guys do.
And plucking canapes from trays again.