I dreamed my friend Summer was driving me home. We were traveling in a sort of amphibious car across large stretches of water west of Lake Ponchartrain. We saw a high bridge to the south that turned out to be Interstate 10.
We pulled out of the water and onto an on ramp that climbed up, up, up into the blue sky like the slender track of a roller coaster. I became too scared to look at it, it went so high and seemed so tenuous, so finally I closed my eyes until I could feel that we'd turned into the freeway lanes and were no longer climbing or falling.
When I opened my eyes, we were back on water, moving across a large bay, weaving amid traffic in the shipping channel headed for the Port of London. My friend Rob was now driving, and I asked him if we'd be putting in at the Thames wharf or the Trafalgar wharf. He said we were headed for Trafalgar, and I asked if that was the one with the great reflections of the Cathedral. He said no, that was St. James wharf, farther east.
We put in at the dock and walked across Trafalgar Square. There was only one lion. We were headed to a long row of shops that spanned several city blocks. They were all lined up along the front of adjacent, connected, brightly painted double shotgun houses. Doors opened onto porches at the front, or in the side walls of each house shop that led, enfilade, into the next, until they broke off at the cross streets, then continued on the other side.
The shops were just as brightly painted on the insides, deep peach, sunny yellow, rose pink, sky blue, jade green, the color changing from one shop to the next. There were some antiquy, vintage knickknack sorts of shops, a LOT of candy and snack shops, and a big pet shop. My friends Will and Julie, from New Orleans, went on ahead, but Joanna and I explored the pet shop.
There was a discount room filled with dozens of big, tawny, fluffy dogs that the shop had totally thought would be last year's trendy new breed, but they hadn't sold, so they were all still hanging around. There were some cages set high up into the walls. These held bunnies, bedded down in wood chips and hay. Joanna was appalled that they were being kept like that, because it really wasn't good for them. She called over a clerk and showed him how the rabbits' coats and bodies had gone all matted and lumpy from poor care. I was explaining that he should listen to her, because she was an expert, and encouraging the rabbits to mutiny and fight back if they weren't kept better in the future, when I woke up.
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