I dreamed I was at a sewing camp in a small town perched on a dry rock coast. There weren't many plants, mostly tall, dark, dusky dusty cypress trees. The sea was dark and deep and steely in the sunlight. The stones of the hills and crags were a deep, warm brown, striped with amber and rust and gold. All the villas in the town were built of golden sandstone, with wide bare lawns walled with the same, and brown ceramic tile roofs. You'd think the dryness and lack of brighter colors would have made it seem barren and ugly, but there was a lovely minimalism and simplicity to the landscape and architecture.
The streets were steep and narrow, and all the vehicle traffic ran on rails. There were rail carts of all sizes, from individual transport ones that were hand driven like the little carts in old movies, to huge motorized trailers that were built to haul blue whales in and out of the ocean. Because the spit of land that the town was on divided two bits of sea that the whales favored, so the sentient whales had negotiated a system to be hauled overland quickly to get from one deep bay to the other.
So I was at this sewing camp, and I knew a friend of mine was coming soon who kept kosher. I walked down to the kitchen buildings to talk with the cooks and make sure they could accommodate him. That took a while, and when I came out, I had to wait to go back up the street because a whale was coming. I watched in wonder as it passed, long and gray and sleek, sides dripping with cool salt water. I saw it go down into the sea, then climbed back up to camp.
The sewing project that year was to make a sundress. There were hundreds of bright rolls of fabric to choose from, almost as if to compensate for the lack of color and flowers in the town, and my eye was caught by them all, of course. But I ended up deciding on a pattern that had a light, loose under dress gathered at the neck, that I'd make from light, sand colored linen, and an over dress to cover and fit the shape, that I chose to do in midnight blue lace.
I finished my project and went home to Rio Medina. I still lived in the house I grew up in. I discovered that my mom had moved back to that area, too, to a house she'd had built up FM 471, that was a perfect reproduction of my great grandmother's house in Ammansville. My grandmother had decided to move in with her, so they were both there.
Also, Gollum lived nearby. He didn't seem to mind Mom and Momo, and they didn't seem to mind him, but he HATED me. Whenever I came to see them, or to drive them somewhere, because they didn't have a car, he'd lurk around trying to get me alone so he could strangle me. Finally, he hid in my car one day when I went to pick Mom up to take her to a friend's house. After I dropped her off, I was continuing down to Castroville, where I was headed to help the Medina Valley band director out with a show they were working on. Suddenly I saw Gollum in my rear view mirror, and before he could get his fingers around my throat, I grabbed his scrawny neck, pushed him out my open window, and held him outside my truck as I rolled the window shut. I told him, before thrusting him away and closing the window, that next time I'd shut his neck in the window and let him flap along beside me, choking, at 70 miles per hour.
I got down to the school, and the band was already in the gym, working on their show. I checked to make sure there were video cameras set up hanging from the ceiling, so that they'd capture the overall footage. The show opened with a single guy in the spotlight on the floor of the darkened gym, playing the bass line of Chameleon on a marching baritone. And man, that kid could blow! His sound in the lower register was huge, and filled up the whole gym. He vamped that line for a bit, then everything went silent in a dramatic pause. Then, the stage lights went up in a flare of color, showing the rest of the band, and the tubas, in rows along the side, took over the bass line in a pretty thunderous roar, and the trumpets picked up the melody... it was pretty awesome! And then I woke up.
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