I don’t know where the lake is that my parents called Silver Lake. It was a stop on the road somewhere, probably in California. I never saw the lake close up. It lay low within its banks and far beyond trees and reeds. We parked at a lonely picnic area, late in the day, tired and hungry from a long day’s drive, with miles more to go before we would stop again. We spread Mom’s oilcloth on a table, but the wind blew so hard we had to weight it with rocks, and the wind kept blowing my hair into my face while I ate. Paper plates, cups, and napkins had to be held tight, and I don’t recall but wouldn’t be surprised if some escaped and tumbled away in that wind. It made us all a little cranky to be so road weary and hungry and have to fight the wind.
None of that detracted from a sight, late in the day, of sunlight striking the slope of a nearby mountain. It shone through a faint haze just dense enough to make golden sunbeams slant onto the trees on that hillside in such an indescribable way I wanted to memorize the scene. For some reason it made my heart ache just a little, so sweet was that light. We held tightly to our tablecloth as we folded it, and drove away. The memory of that golden light has stayed with me for some forty years. I’ve looked for sunlight like that ever since and sometimes glimpsed it, always ever so fleeting.
I’ve been struggling for topics to blog about, but surely there can be no more chilling thought for a writer than people not wanting books even when they’re free. Someone posted, on a mystery mailing list I belong to, that she boxed up what I’ll presume were mystery novels, and placed them out in front of her home, labeled as free . . . and had no takers. This was in a small university town.
The story surprises me, because in our former neighborhood, where our back yard faced a community college parking lot, we had excellent luck putting things out in the driveway for free, including boxes of used books. Sometimes people took entire boxes rather than a book or two. Nearly everything we put out found a home, including an old sofa we’d acquired already well-used, which I was certain we’d wind up hauling to the dump. Ours wasn’t a busy street except during classes, when students parked there, so I have to assume it was sometimes students who took those items. Then again, my experience with that was ten years ago. Now everyone I see walking around has a cell phone stuck to one ear, and I’m lucky if they avoid colliding with me. Maybe they wouldn’t SEE the books, even with a big sign.
When I was a student, I would’ve browsed through any box of free books on offer, even though I had plenty of other reading that I should be doing instead, for school. My grandmother used to say that no one in our family could clean an attic, because we’d stop to read everything. (That was before bubble wrap, when we used newspaper to wrap fragile items.)
Which reminds me, I dreamed just last night about the car I drove as a student. I hadn’t thought about that car in years. It was a white 1964 Mercury Comet that had a lot of miles on it before I got it. The dream was a mini-nightmare, not because I found myself in that car, but because this creepy guy who’d just followed me out of a bank removed what I thought was a disguise — a wig, under which he had a shaved head — then tried to get me to give him a ride. I was suspicious of him, so first I told him that if I did that my dad would kill me. (I must’ve been a teenager in the dream, which explains the car.) He argued with me, but I got into my car and locked the doors. It isn’t the sort of dream that usually qualifies as a nightmare for me, but it woke me up, heart racing.
That first car had some real-life nightmarish qualities. One was its tendency to overheat if I drove it to a higher altitude. I love the mountains, so not being able to drive my first car to the mountains without it overheating frustrated me no end. As the car aged, it developed other idiosyncrasies. I think my dad and I were at one point the only two people on earth who knew how to start it, which involved pumping the gas pedal just the right number of times, then holding it down . . . oh well, I don’t remember the sequence now. It had other problems too, and I have to wonder now at my desire to drive the thing, but when you’re young I guess you just want to go. You don’t care what you put up with to do it.
That car’s most nightmarish problem was the front passenger door’s sticky latch. My parents paid for my gasoline on the condition that I drive my grandmother anywhere she wanted to go. One day the door didn’t catch, and it flew open when I made a turn. Grandma didn’t fall out, but that incident qualifies as more nightmarish than the dream that ratcheted up my heart rate last night.
What about you?
Do you rummage through boxes of free books whenever you see them?
What was your first car like?
Do different things scare you in dreams than in real life?
