What!? Two-leggeds Lose Pizzas?
I was startled enough in my dream to wake up with a jolt (literally), and immediately felt compelled to wake up Dad while my dream was so vivid in detail. Wouldn’t you know it, one of the few times I have a lucid and listening (and comprehending), Dad…with a flutter of eyelids, his mouth immediately engages in a recital of a vivid dream he just had.
Now, you and I both know that if I recount my dream in this column, and don’t include Dad’s dream, well, does the word “mopey” mean anything to you?
Dad’s dream took place in an unfamiliar part of the desert southwest, where he was seated in the shade below a tree watching a man on a hill in the distance. The man, dressed in an elaborate long robe, looked over the valley and was quietly speaking to himself, but Dad couldn’t make out what was being said.
If I remember the order right, the man in the robe was approached by another man, who spoke briefly while the robed man walked away to a dirt path just below Dad. This pattern repeated with different men from different times of ages past walking up the hill, speaking for a moment and replacing the former occupant on the hill.
Dad said all of them looked over the valley (that Dad couldn’t see down into from his angle), and spoke softly. Some raised their arms, some did circular dances, others performed exuberant and complex rituals of movement.
Dad said the last visitor broke the pattern completely. He said a great cloud of dust grew high to his right side and came closer and closer. With a loud crunch of gravel and dirt, the dust dissipated and a blue-gray station wagon appeared in its wake. The car looked like a spaceship compared to the covered wagon it had stopped beside.
Dad said it was a big Chrysler from the late fifties. A young girl deftly leapt out of the Chrysler’s back window and onto the chrome bumper, then to the ground. She ran up the hill to the covered wagon’s owner.
The man slowly walked down the hill while the girl stayed behind and motioned furiously to Dad to cross the dirt road and come up the hill to her. Dad looked to the occupants of the station-wagon for a sign of approval, but the occupants (a dad, a mom, and four young boys in the back seat), seemed engaged in a heated discussion.
Dad stood up and kind of half-trotted towards the girl, who impatiently ran part way towards him. Grabbing his arm and half dragging him upwards, she chided him for waiting so long. As soon as Dad got to the crest of the hill, the girl made a beeline back towards the car.
Dad yelled out. “What am I supposed to do?”
She was already partway through the back window and somehow made it past her brothers to the side window and yelled back, “Pray for RAIN!!!”
As the sleek chrome and steel space ship sped off in a cloud, Dad turned and looked down into the valley for the first time and saw a small town built next to a dry riverbed. Dad said he then verbalized the most ineloquent, amateur, and jostled prayer of his life. The next second, there was a crack of thunder so loud it woke him right up just as I was trying wake him.
“Funny, thunder woke me up too, Dad!” I continued before he could interrupt me, “I was sitting under the bushes watching curtains of wet fog go by and staying dry in my spot below the branches, when a young girl walked out of the fog right up to me. She was barefoot, had blonde hair in a braid and was wearing a long print dress…”
“…with blue flowers,” Dad said.
“Yes! And she bent down and said, ‘It’s going to rain, Hazel,’ and then a crack of thunder woke me up.”
Before I finished speaking, Dad flew through the gate and started up the hill on the other side of the fence.
I asked him where he was going, and completely missed the sarcasm in his reply; he told me someone had lost a pizza on the hill somewhere. I completely lost my mind and my ability to reason, and started to incessantly bark, “Save the crust! Don’t eat the crust!”
It took Dad over an hour to calm me down and almost convince me there wasn’t a pizza up there…somewhere. I hope we find it before it rains….
~Hazel Bazel Rocket Dog
