mallorys_camera | Life Without Cigarettes: The Saga Continues (Reply)

There are a lot of really stupid people in the world.

But when you have wonderful and dee-lish-us Camel Wide Lights to suck on, you don't notice them so much. Or if you do, their stupidity is endearing, sort of like when you see a chimp kicking around an inflatable ball in its zoo pen and you think, "Wow! I play soccer too!"

In days gone by when tourists would beat on Homer's button and Homer would not reward them by singing and dancing, I would take the time to explain to them: "Well, see, ya gotta plug Homer in. There's this stuff called electricity…"

Yesterday I said, "He works by telekinesis. But today I have a headache."

The sad part is that a couple of them actually believed me and asked if I knew Stephen King.

In other news,
Dreamed I was at my high school reunion – Lowell, not Hunter. Only two people I recognize from my homeroom were Barbara Angell and Jef Poskanzer who for some odd reason was called Jef Cohen, neither of whom (needless to say) I actually went to high school with.

Began to trail Barbara around the school – it was an amazing place with art studios and film production facilities etc. The teachers recognized me which even within the constricts of dream logic, I found odd (a) because none of my teachers actually knew my name 39 years ago when I went there and (b) because all of the teachers were brisk young women in their 20's.

Lost Barbara in the crowd somehow. Was overcome with pangs of deep regret – why didn't I take advantage of any of this? etc etc etc.

Then was with my husband and young child on my way back to Barbara's to spend the night. The husband kept morphing back between Bill and Ben, the young child between Max and Robin. My husband had a job interview at exactly 3pm. Everything depended on this job interview.

Meanwhile we had a pile of luggage in one of Barbara's many living rooms that included a white dove in a cage that wouldn't close and a black lizard in a jar that wouldn't seal, both household pets of whom I was inordinately fond.

At 3 the husband – Bill? Ben? – left for the job interview. And hours passed and my son and I didn't hear from him. And so we began wandering through Barbara's house, came to a bedroom in which an Asian infant was lying in a crib. The infant took one look at us and began wailing – which woke up other people in the house and they were all Asian, Asian or Indian or Moslem: either we had wandered into the wrong house or the house we'd wandered into no longer belonged to the person we thought it did, we were ghosts haunting it.

The Asians gathered around us chatting in indecipherable tongues. Occasionally one of them would say in heavily accented English. "Not belong here, you. Not your house, this."

One of the women felt sorry for us and was helping us pack up our things. "I will come back for them," I told her – meaning the dove and the lizard. I couldn't possibly haul them along with my child and my luggage back to my real house.

"Yes, yes," she said. I didn't know if she was telling the truth or lying.

Kept checking my cell phone for messages from my husband but nada. Then in the bottom of an empty suitcase I found the cell phone supposedly his – he hadn't taken it and that meant he'd ditched us and I didn't have a clue how my son and I were going to survive except somehow, somehow we were going to.