I Dream a Perfect World...

I had the most remarkable dream the other day. It wasn't unusual in its form -- just one of those false awakening dreams. Surely you've had one, where you dream you've awakened in your bed ... only to then really awaken, surprised to find the previous was only a dream? I've had them often enough that I frequently have a moment of questioning the reality: Is this really waking up, or just a dream? How do I know? (And, no, I've not seen "Inception" yet, though I know there's something about a top involved...)

So I woke up, and rolled to a sitting position to look out the bedroom window. It was hard to see out -- the shade was pulled over sheer curtains, though the fuzzy outlines of the buildings outside could be seen. I looked down at the dark narrow plank floor, then tried to see better out the window, to get oriented in the flat, pale dawn light. My wife still slept by me. Our parents were in the small houses nearby, where we'd moved them from our old house in Lexington. There were a few other houses visible through the shade, not as silhouette, but as obscured, fuzzy impressions. It felt real. Totally real. "Well," I said to myself, "It might not be the idealized Lexington, but at least it's Lexington."

Perhaps that needs explaining. I've come to realize that, in dreams, I have idealized or compacted versions of places -- a Lexington with fewer streets, a DC with the areas I frequented all pushed together so they abut -- basically places with all the irrelevant details edited out. Sometimes they're idealized; my dream Georgetown more resembles a set for a production of "Oliver!", with texturally aged, brick townhouses with dark wood porches made of thick, craggy beams, all pushed together over quaint alleys and the canal, than it does the actual neighborhood. Anyway, the point of my thought was that I'd decided my morning felt real enough, even when I looked past the foot of the bed to the large, glass doors opening out to a balcony, a town on the hillside below resembling something in Italy more than southwest Virginia. And that's when I really woke up...

And that all pretty much serves as preface to my organizing my film -- as in the stuff I put into my still cameras -- because I've been doing that around the edges of work and family care lately. You see, as we abandoned our old house, we let the utilities go, including electricity, which in turn allowed the refrigerator in which I kept my film defrost. What ice that had caked into it then, of course, melted, soaking all the film boxes. So now, I have to go through all the film, dispose of the boxes to wrecked by water to save (as well as get rid of what film was ruined), but first get the expiration dates off the boxes and write them with a Sharpie on those little plastic film cans.

Okay, that's a lot of background to get to a moment of revelation...

I walked into my room in the midst of the extended process the other night, I looked down on the sea of film canisters ... and felt an odd pleasure. As I later told a colleague at the station, if you had come to me in college, and said that, in 30 years or so, you will be sorting through scores of film canisters on an Afghan war rug, your Leicas nearby, I would have taken that as a promise of absolute success.

A part of a documentary including Larry Burrows, one of the greatest war photographers. Note about 1:34, the scene of him pulling film canister after film canister out of the box to carry with him into the field with his Leicas. This still gives me a unique thrill, to see an idol doing something so similar...

As with so many things, this seems like the story of the genie: I get exactly what I wished for ... but not really in the way I wished. I don't know whether to be ecstatic or depressed...