life is but a dream

Today I slept late and dreamed, again, of returning to my house. This time the new owners were not Robin and her family but some wealthy Europeans. They graciously showed me around. They had made every improvement imaginatble -- the house looked lovely -- yet it seemed to that it no longer had a soul.

We should not have sold it, I thought in the dream. I could have gone to New York for a few years, made a name for myself, and returned to Raleigh and my old employer, but at a higher level. But even asleep I knew that was nonsense.

One feature of the most interesting dreams are how you keep noticing new and weirder things around you. As I waited in line, a few hours after my house dream, at the nearby corner food shop, it struck me that waking life in New York was often like that. The store, which I shop at often despite its high prices, is one of those unique to upscale urban neighborhoods, combining the best features of gourmet shop and convenience store. Just a block away from me, it has everything one could want: produce, dairy products, pasta, a deli counter, imported cheeses, an olive bar, bread. It is run by Arab men of uncertain nationality, but the cashiers are exclusively Polish women, for some mysterious reason. The lines are usually short, giving me scant time to study the decor, but today there were a lot of customers and only one cashier, so I had time to notice the odd decoration I had never seen before, about 10 feet up on the wall above the banannas: an old-fashioned-looking pearl-handled pistol and an ornately carved, curving knife in a scabbard, affixed to a plaque. There was a black and white photograph, too, and presumably an explanation, but it was too far up to possibly read, which made me wonder why it was there at all. Some souvenir of the store owner's Ottoman ancestors? Why not keep it at home, then? As I studied this I became aware of more decorations. Someone had festooned the ceiling pipes with extravagent swags of plastic fruit and flowers all over the store. I had never really noticed this before; why? A symbol of abundance? (I had just finished The Da Vinci Code and was inclined to see symbols everywhere.)

The woman ahead of me in line, I suddenly noticed, was holding three or four pods of fresh fava beans like a bouquet. This seemed to be all she was buying, and I was mystified, more mystified by this than by the gun-and-knife decoration. Having cooked fresh fava beans myself, I knew that once you get home and take off the outer layers of pod and husk, there isn't much left to eat. She was holding the equivalent of two mouthfuls of fava beans. If you need fava beans, why not get more than that? Otherwise, why bother? It's not like a vital herb, the absence of which will totally change the quality of the dish. Yet that must have been it. She was cooking some recipe, and had forgotten to buy favas, or could find them only here. She seemed as annoyed as only a person waiting 15 minutes in line to spend 87 cents can be.