Stephanie Says.. Take a walk inside my head

If you know me, you may agree with my high school chorus teacher in saying that it doesn’t take much to keep me entertained.  It’s true.  Give me a story and I’ll be out of your hair for hours.

Until the sun sets.

See, along with this whole “living in my head during the daytime” thing comes the “not wanting to go to sleep at night” part.

I had my first real nightmare one Halloween when I dreamed that the skeleton at a haunted house had a black snake for a tongue and it (the snake) was coming after me.  (This was long before I’d ever heard of the Dark Mark, I promise.)

It got worse in college.  Knives, trains, friends turned enemies, clowns, tornados, you name it, I’ve been afraid of it in my dreams.  That’s partly why I can’t stand alarm clocks.  I know they are designed to wake a person up, but do they have to sound so much like the shower scene from -Psycho-?

I’m pretty cyclical.  Once I get on a nightmare loop, it can take months to get off.  That’s not the point of this post though. (Bear with me, I do have one.)

The point is that I do.  I know everything is going to be okay when I start dreaming of Dickson again.

Dickson isn’t one of my hometowns.  Those would be the three “s”: Scottsboro, Sweetwater and Somerset (with various other cities thrown in).  Dickson, at least my dream version of it, doesn’t even really exist anymore. My grandparents died when I was seventeen and I haven’t been inside their house since.

I don’t even remember if the things I dream of are true.  Was there really a barn behind the house as well as to the side?  I suspect not, but in my dreams, I’m a little girl again and not afraid to go up into the loft.  Was I ever really inside the storm celler?  The answer to that is probably a negative as well, but when I had that “end of the world dream” that was startlingly like “The Stand”, it was hiding in that very shelter that saved the people I love.

I don’t know if we really ran around the neighbors’ hillsides unattended.  I don’t even really know if the neighbors actually -had- hillsides.  It doesn’t matter.  Not in my dreams.

It also doesn’t matter if I actually rode on a tractor or was brave enough to mount my grandfather’s Palimino, though I don’t really think I was.

The truth is that I probably couldn’t take you there today.  I’d get the path mixed up or wind up on the opposite side of Nashville somehow.  The truth is that I’ll probably never go back, not really.

But it doesn’t matter.  Not as long as I know I can fall asleep and be on that porch again, eating an ice cream cone.  Not as long as I know the nightmares are going to end.

Not as long as Dickson is waiting for me.

 

 

I am not sophisticated in the least.  I’m not even a girly-girl, not really.  I’m clumsy, I haven’t worn a dress in
ever, and I take too much pleasure in discarding things to be a collector of rainbows or unicorns or stuffed
animals.

Something glamorous, however, must eek out of me in certain situations.  The first time I really thought
about this was in tenth grade.  I had been invited to a mystery dinner.  This remains the only mystery dinner
I’ve ever been to, so I have no way of knowing if all work like ours did, but to me a mystery dinner is one where
the menu items (including the silverware) are labled by some other name. Our theme was “The Farm” so the fork might
have been labeled as a shovel and corn as slop and so on and so forth.  (I somehow snagged a copy of the menu if
you’d like to see it.)

The courses each teenager were served depended on the numbers written beside each menu item.  So, if we picked
numbers 1, 14 and 27 for our first course, we might end up being served peaches, hamburger and a napkin first and
soda, chocolate cake and a spoon next.  If we guessed wrong and selected an order that didn’t include any kind of
flatware, we were out of luck.

Most of us ended up sticking our faces into our plates at some point during the evening but no one commented on it
until it was my turn.  I was seated across from a girl named Elisabeth who was everything I was not.  Elisabeth
was popular, but not in any vulgar kind of way.  Elisabeth had Class, with a capital C.  Apparently, she believed
that I did too, because she stopped me as I was about to individually pick up my beans and finger feed
myself.  She was the first person to ever say “You’re not the kind of girl whom I ever thought would eat with
your fingers.”

I realize this could have been meant as some kind of snotty insult, but I don’t think so.  Like I said,
Elisabeth was nice.  She had Class.

The second conversation in which someone decided to mention my hidden depths of mysterious elegance was around
the time that “Portrait of a Lady” was released.  I was in college and my friends and I tended to take long lunches
during which we would sit in the cafeteria for hours and talk about whatever we were thinking about that day.

One of our favorite games was to play “If your life were a movie, who would play you and why?”  It was Natalie who
suggested Nicole Kidman should play me.  (Keep in mind this was fifty pounds and three hair colors ago.)   At
the time, Nicole Kidman was the most beautiful actress we could imagine. For Natalie to suggest her was high praise
indeed because I am many things, but ladylike is not one of them.

I don’t know if I appear to be glamorous.  I suspect that I do not as I am continually spilling things into people’s
laps and tripping over my own feet.  But while I’m stumbling around, it’s nice to think of myself as someone
else.  Someone with class.  Someone with sophistication.  Somone whom Nicole would like to portray.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Do you ever look at yourself in the mirror and imagine what you’ll be telling your children and grandchildren about younger you….younger you, of course, being the you looking at yourself in the mirror?

I do, but then again, I’ve been known to tell myself stories in the shower, so perhaps I’m not the best judge of what is normal.  Normality aside, however, think about it a second.  Will you still be in Williamsburg or Australia or Columbia or wherever it is you are now?  Will you describe yourself as funny or outgoing or brave?  Or will you just be another white haired old person telling “In my day” stories?

I think my first experience with this was not with a child, but with a class.  About a million years ago now, the kids at church who are currently college sophomores and seniors were squirmy eleven year olds halfway paying attention in Sunday School.  Their teacher was me.  I’ve grown some since then and discovered that my comfort zone is preschoolers, not adolescents, but, nevertheless, there I was, all of twenty five, feeling very out of place.

And then, for some reason that I’m sure fit the context at the time, I brought up Tammy Fay Baker.  I had been a teenager only a decade before.  I didn’t realize how quickly things change.  My class looked at me like I was from Mars.  They had never -heard- of Tammy Fay Baker and I was at a loss to explain who she was.

What do you think?  Do you think in like 2030 or 2040 we’ll mention -Gilmore Girls- or -Law and Order- the way -Dragnet- or -Father Knows Best- is talked about today and get a blank look?  Do you think we’ll say “I used to be a pretty good singer” or “Boy, I sure could pitch that ball” and have our children give us an indulgent smile on their way out to their personal airbourne device?

Or do you think we’ll have learned to listen by then, the way my cousins and I do at Family Reunion time?  We never met the original Poppaw Hall, but we can tell you stories about him.  My younger cousins weren’t even born when -our- grandfather died, but they sure as shooting know who he was.

It would be nice, don’t you think, if that is the way the future of our families turned out to be.  I’m not into lines on a family tree the way some people are.  I can’t give you anyone’s birth and death dates.  But it would be nice, very nice, if we all remembered the names.  And the stories.