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why knock yourself out describing a dream?
[annie dillard]
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When I am old, I will not wear unflattering lipstick and insult people who don't help me quickly enough. I will not turn a beige Buick into a passive-aggressive roadblock, and I will never, ever cover my car seats and sofas with plastic and old towels. I won't give my grandchildren things that I don't want but refuse to throw away, like old vases and photographs of people I don't remember. My house will never smell like mothballs and dog hair and anger.
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I will not buy big black purses and hoard Kleenex in them. I will not coif my hair in tightly wound curls and dye the white out of it. I will not wear sensible shoes and pantsuits, or plastic hats in case of rain. I will not be rude to other people just because they are young. I will refer to my husband by his name, not his title for God's sake, and I refuse to sleep in a separate room. I won't buy perfume that smells like vanilla or frequent bingo clubs on Tuesdays, unless they have a happy hour.
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I won't sit in front of a humming television screen day in and day out, the flickering light illuminating my disappointed eyes and wasting brain. I will not wish that I was twenty-three or someone else's widow. I will not turn the heating up to ninety-three degrees and try to guilt the kind and innocent into visiting me. Under no circumstances will I smile benignly into space while the people around me talk and laugh and go on existing. On this point I will not negotiate.
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I will, however, avoid pantyhose and girdles at all costs. My husband will probably die before I do since men tend to be lightweights, so I will have to team up with my sister and buy an old abandoned gas station to live in. Not a horrible recent one, but one of those filling stations from the fifties or sixties, with the round friendly-looking metal pumps and the big glossy letters saying We're Here to Help! and Sandwiches and Beer Inside.
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We'll probably be able to buy it cheap since people are fools, so we can blow our retirement savings on the remodeling. We'll paint the walls yellow and turn the garage area into a porch slash studio, where we can weld interpretive sculpture out of metal scrap we find off the side of the road. A good sound system is a must, so we can blare old crazysexy Americana tunes about men we used to love before we found out about their no-good cheatin’ hearts. We'll make sure it's well insulated, since we are so old, and outfit the joint with an eco-friendly solar-powered heating and cooling system.
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The temperature will remain a balmy eighty-four degrees year-round, courtesy of global warming, so we will keep the garage doors thrown wide open so we can sit and enjoy the breeze and spectacular polluted sunsets. We will celebrate our long lives by eating pancakes whenever we feel like it and napping excessively. I might take up smoking cigars, for the dramatic effect.
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I will grow my hair out until I can wrap it around my head like a big white turban. We will only give advice to the younger and less fortunate if they are smart enough to ask for it. When people run through the streets and yell that the end of the world is coming, we will offer them free pancakes to calm them down.
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I will grow my hair out until I can wrap it around my head like a big white turban. We will only give advice to the younger and less fortunate if they are smart enough to ask for it. When people run through the streets and yell that the end of the world is coming, we will offer them free pancakes to calm them down.
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Since gas will be four hundred and thirty-four dollars a gallon, even, we will get one of those bikes that seats two people and ride into town to restock on hot chocolate ingredients and cigars. We made a pact years ago that we would never live more than ten miles from a reliable Julio's Tortilla Chips outlet, for this very reason. Plus our knees aren't twenty-four anymore, ya know?
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We will have to live off the grid, since we blew most of our cash on installing chandeliers in both rooms at the filling station and getting matching tattoos of Janis Joplin in an undisclosed location. It won't matter, since we will grow all our own food and always fall asleep before the sun sets. We won't use medication because we don't feel like prolonging the inevitable. Plus, we're okay with being old as long as we know it won't last too long. This, too, shall pass. Anne will play the piano at night sometimes to help me get to sleep.
We will wake up early in the predawn stillness and make breakfast in the dark. Then we’ll talk about the dreams we had that night, about what we saw and where we went, and we’ll talk about what it must be like to die, how it will feel, what we will see. I might draw myself out of a weird, hazy dream, then see her new-old face, and she will joke around with me. She'll say, Wow, I remember you being cuter.
We will wake up early in the predawn stillness and make breakfast in the dark. Then we’ll talk about the dreams we had that night, about what we saw and where we went, and we’ll talk about what it must be like to die, how it will feel, what we will see. I might draw myself out of a weird, hazy dream, then see her new-old face, and she will joke around with me. She'll say, Wow, I remember you being cuter.
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Or maybe our pain will fall away and we will suddenly break out of our bodies and the world and fly through a black hole cut through everything and fall into His arms. We’ll spend a significant amount of our time debating over who will see God first, and what joke we should tell Him, since it is important that we make the right impression. Anne insists on the stupid one with the dinosaurs and the Arabian bartender. I bet He's heard that one a million times.
Maybe we will both die on the same day that the world finally bows under all the scary things that have happened to it. One day we'll be drinking sweet tea out in the garage, exclaiming over an exceptional sunset, and then everything will just sink down away from us and we'll be new again, no more holes in our hearts, no more broken bones, just a room with curtains gently lifting, in the house of song.
Maybe we will both die on the same day that the world finally bows under all the scary things that have happened to it. One day we'll be drinking sweet tea out in the garage, exclaiming over an exceptional sunset, and then everything will just sink down away from us and we'll be new again, no more holes in our hearts, no more broken bones, just a room with curtains gently lifting, in the house of song.
