I dreamed I was wandering through a world built from LEGO. I was staying in a French mountain town, and I had to wait while they rebuilt my room, since a prince had just stayed there, and they needed to remove his exclusive specifications. So I wandered up the street, past a pastry shop and a dress shop, along a small stream, down out of the mountains and onto a desert plain.
There I found an oasis palace, the court of an Arabian nobleman, mosques, markets, small homes, all built of LEGO. To the north I found a jungle temple, then more sand and an ancient Nubian fortress town. Lots of gold LEGO used there. I headed east, through a rocky canyon, and at the other side I found a charming Bavarian village, which lay to the north of a Jewish enclave with a temple more beautiful than any of the ones I saw in Prague, all, of course, built from LEGO.
Eventually I found the end of the LEGO world, and entered the back halls of the home of its creator. Draped in sheets and dust, I found huge sections of the Taj Mahal under construction, and I made a mental note to encourage her to finish it. But I never did find her, and my mom called and wanted me to meet her in Paris, so I left for France.
In Paris I found that my mom was staying in a hostel where her room was a small wooden clipper ship. She needed my help because she was going to sail the ship home, but first she needed to disassemble it and rebuild it at the port. They’d told her all the pieces were interchangeable, so she’d started a quick but haphazard disassembly. But I took a closer look, and, in fact, every piece was unique, and would need to be fitted back in the exact same place, so the first thing we had to do was put it all back together.
An older English gentleman came to help us, which was good because it had started raining. The wood was getting a bit damp, and became harder to take apart. I looked closely at one of the ends and found an intricate series of notches where the pieces fit together. It was really ingenious. As long as the wood was quite dry, the pieces came apart and went together easily. But once the wood got damp, like it would at sea, it would swell and the pieces would lock together and be waterproof.
The problem was, of course, that it was raining, so the wood was getting all wet. Me and Mom and the Englishman worked hard to keep things dry, and I began disassembling at the prow, making sure to keep all the pieces stacked in exactly the order I'd removed them in. I'm not at all clear on how we managed it, but somehow we did. We picked up a crew and some paying passengers in the port, and the Englishman agreed to come along and run the gift shop counter.
I had become very fond of him, and I thought he might also be quite fond of me. I was the only person on board whom he'd trust to make him tea while he was working, because he said I was the only person who knew what a proper cup of tea was. Somehow, though, I never noticed if he took milk or sugar, though I pretty well assumed he did NOT take sugar. But instead of asking, I'd always just bring them, and bring enough tea for me, too, so I could use whatever he didn't.
I was in the galley, and I was having a horrible day. I poured the water into the teapot instead of the kettle by mistake. I thought of just microwaving the whole mess and calling it tea, but I knew it wouldn't turn out to his standards, so I dumped the whole thing, and a friend came in and put the kettle on the boil for me while I tried to reconstitute some powdered milk, because we'd run out of fresh that morning. I wasn't as worried about that, since I was pretty sure that was just for me, but I kept getting the proportions wrong, and filled a tiny pitcher with sludge that wouldn't dissolve. I was so tied up with the milk that I let the tea leaves steep for too long, so it was all bitter, and I just couldn't seem to do anything right, and I knew I was going to let my Englishman down, but then I woke up.
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