Again. Everything was in tune, bouncing to the beat. Then everything went blank. In a matter of minutes.
Currently, my brain is not accepting any input. It needs to be shocked back to life. Defibrillator anyone?
Nicola Conte had the entire house in a trance. Milo’s head bobbed up and down to the music as he stared down the toy squirrel. My icons bounced up and down in the dock. But me — well, I stayed perfectly still, enjoying the moment, legs in lotus and my breath going in and out to the beat.
As a child I had very few dreams that I remembered. There was one, however, that rocked me, and is still as vivid to me today as it was the morning I woke up.
The automatic doors slid open with a whoosh as I stepped into a record store the size of a K-Mart. Every glance was filled with bins and bins of records, laid out in neat rows.
The group dispersed, my mom and dad going one direction, the others in another, leaving me and my best friend to discover on our own. I had my miniature Hello Kitty playing cards with me, so we decided to play.
Drumroll Please. I had decided to try doing the magician’s basic trick, making the cards fly from one hand to the other. It didn’t work. The cards had now flown all over the store. I bent down to start picking them up, following them in their straight line that snaked around the different aisles.
I had reached the last card. As I went to pick it up I noticed the toe of a cowboy boot. Pan up to the cowboy’s face. It stuck terror into the heart of this 5 year old.
“You’re coming with me,” he said gruffly.
I trembled. “No. Dad?” I looked at him pleadingly, knowing he would help me.
He knelt down on one knee to talk to me, as the others gathered around. The cowboy, too, had his posse surrounding him.
“I think you ought to do what the man says,” he replies quietly.
“No, no, no,” was all I could think inside. As the cowboy took my hand I took one last look at my dad, then woosh, the doors opened and in an instant we were gone.
As a kid I had a little yellow tea pot, with yellow tea cups. Nin would serve coffee-milk to me… more milk than coffee.
Cafe du Monde weened me onto coffee. I would make lattes with 2/5 coffee, 3/5 milk, and 6 sugar cubes. Now I drink the black stuff.
“Uh-oh. Courtney’s going to be upset about this,” Nin said to June.
June had no reply, only a funny look on her face.
Nin and her sisters were all gathered around, scattered out, sitting in their lawn chairs. To each side of them were large concrete walls – but that wasn’t what had caught my attention.
“So this is the rich man’s work?” I asked as I looked down into the man-made river that ended in a pool directly in front of us. A sea lion looked back at me from the pool, with mist swarming all around his body. It was like he was smiling at me.
I wasn’t mad — I’m not sure why my grandmother thought I would be upset over this. To the left of the sea lion was an ape. He was sitting in the pool, water up to his torso. He seemed to be thinking very seriously about something.
“I’m not mad.” It was actually a thing of beauty. The river wound through the trees and out of site, apes dotting the water, with the mist circling around them and out into the trees.
The sea lion nodded, dove under the surface and began to swim up river.
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