Cleveland Dreams, One
I have dreams about Cleveland a lot. Whether you like it or not, I'm going to start telling you about them.
After a trip to Buffalo ReUse, where I slavered over a $1,200 white oak mantle, scored a sweet $5 end table, and pawed through the remnants of other people’s broken American Dreams, I came home, read some ghost stories and promptly collapsed into a deep sleep.
And then the dreams came.
The first was a long, involved dream about the merits of various glass doorknobs.
The second was different. In the second dream, I was driving in a car with Bridget Callahan. We were driving through Old Brooklyn, but a dream Old Brooklyn, a landscape I’ve visited many times in my sleep, a place close to where my mom grew up. We were at an intersection - the street was totally empty of cars - the shops were boarded up, chicory and pokeweed sticking out of cracked sidewalks. There were three people around - two black people, walking away from us on the sidewalk, and one white man who was walking toward us in the middle of the empty street.
I remember the white man very clearly. He was middle-aged, had scraggly grey hair and an untrimmed beard. He was wearing a baseball cap, unkempt clothes, and a sneer. He was yelling racial insults at the black people on the sidewalk, who paid him no attention. He swaggered in the middle of the street, like he owned it.
Then as we pulled through the intersection and made to turn left, in the direction where the black people were walking, the white man approached our car and, as polite and as charming as could be, offered to fix the passenger-side mirror, which was falling off. It was a bizarre, abrupt, and unsettling personality change.
We paid him little attention, and drove on.
After a trip to Buffalo ReUse, where I slavered over a $1,200 white oak mantle, scored a sweet $5 end table, and pawed through the remnants of other people’s broken American Dreams, I came home, read some ghost stories and promptly collapsed into a deep sleep.
And then the dreams came.
The first was a long, involved dream about the merits of various glass doorknobs.
The second was different. In the second dream, I was driving in a car with Bridget Callahan. We were driving through Old Brooklyn, but a dream Old Brooklyn, a landscape I’ve visited many times in my sleep, a place close to where my mom grew up. We were at an intersection - the street was totally empty of cars - the shops were boarded up, chicory and pokeweed sticking out of cracked sidewalks. There were three people around - two black people, walking away from us on the sidewalk, and one white man who was walking toward us in the middle of the empty street.
I remember the white man very clearly. He was middle-aged, had scraggly grey hair and an untrimmed beard. He was wearing a baseball cap, unkempt clothes, and a sneer. He was yelling racial insults at the black people on the sidewalk, who paid him no attention. He swaggered in the middle of the street, like he owned it.
Then as we pulled through the intersection and made to turn left, in the direction where the black people were walking, the white man approached our car and, as polite and as charming as could be, offered to fix the passenger-side mirror, which was falling off. It was a bizarre, abrupt, and unsettling personality change.
We paid him little attention, and drove on.
posted by Christine Borne at 6:48 PM
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