In my dreams

Last night I dreamt that Jeffrey Blank wanted to marry me. He's been dead for probably five years now.

I babysat for the Blanks when I was a teen-ager. I had a babysitting monopoly going in my neighborhood because a) I loved little kids and b) I had no other life. It didn't bother me, it just seemed to be what I was about at the time.

When I first started to work for them they had a great house, smaller than most in our neighborhood of old stone center hall Colonials built around 1920, but to me it was the perfect size. Their family was fun too, Jill was around 3 and Philip was a newborn. They moved towards the end of my tenure as their steady Saturday night sitter to a huge house on several acres and had added a daughter named Sally. They had definitely moved up in the world but I always thought their cozy Colonial was the better house.

Are you with me so far? I'm feeling a little lost myself here.

Anyway, in the dream Mr. Blank was short and thin (in reality not words I would use to describe him) and he had a soft high voice (which is how I would describe it in reality). Somehow I met up with him and he told me that he loved me and wanted to marry me. I was a little confused in the dream: wasn't he married to Mrs. Blank and wasn't I gay?

We went to a holiday dinner at his friends' house. He held my hand in a very sweet way. He told me that it had been his life's ambition to have four children. I knew that he had three. Uh oh, did that mean that if we married I would have to have more children because I am clear that I am done with that, whether I am awake or asleep. I asked him about this. He said oh, no he had four children already. The last had been the result of an affair with a woman at his fitness club. He said the child was now 20 and I was trying to figure out where that child fit in in the birth order of the other Blank children. I wondered if he was a cheater.

Was I in or was I out in this dream/relationship? I couldn't tell. Then an intercom came on in the house of his friends. It said that the R2 was leaving shortly and all those who planned to board this train should get to the station. I got on the train.

I was happily reading when Jeffrey Blank came up to me and said very sweetly he had enjoyed holding my hand and was disappointed that there weren't two seats together where we could continue to do so. He started this whole schtick about it and people started paying attention and this woman in the seat ahead of me told him to shut up and got up and moved to another seat, but others were laughing and when he finally reached the climax of the schtick people applauded. I thought, I could hitch myself to his wagon after all.

The train emptied out around the Temple station as I knew that it would and I said, hey, let's find a seat together. He had a very thick book with him that he was reading and I said, what are you reading and it was a political book and I thought, uh oh, I am going to have to challenge myself to read difficult books if I get involved with him. We went into a special section of the train which doesn't exist in real life and found two chaise lounge looking seats. I thought I hope he doesn't think there's going to be hanky panky here. There wasn't any, just a sweet feeling of holding hands with someone who was kind to me in life and who now is very dead.