Yes, last night, three of them---stunned by their content. Dream one: somethinug about a women's prison---some woman in jail for "murder"? Something violent, called to my attention. Dream 2: I am subbing in an all boys class with two floors. One of the students, around 12, seems very brusque and agitated. I separate him from another student and bring him upstairs to a smaller room. I calm him down and observe that he is okay. Then one of the students from the first floor tells me that something is happening there. I get anxious for I have left that part of the class unsupervised. I rush down, looking for trouble as the dream ends. Final dream (3) One of the younger female teachers in the school tells me she has just found an aparment in Park Slope. I know the street; there is a store, or arts venue that I know has just moved to that street---I see the street in my mind--Park Slope with its low lying brownstones. That is it! Why would I have a dream about a woman's prison. Only association that I can make is "anger"---these women in jail have rage inside them; they are trapped---and maybe that is how I feel about my current physical and emotional state. Medical limbo while I take the chemo pills for the next two months, and emotional limbo as I struggle to structure my day and wonder if I can take the risk to be away from the apartment for too long.
Morning---hot! Going to be hot today. Yesterday I continued reading An American Type, Henry Roth's posthumus sixth novel. Great scene where Ira (the hero and protagonist) takes his wasp girl friend to meet his parents in Brownsville for Shabbas dinner. All goes well---his parents are well behaved---but afterwards he reflects on the miserable marriage that his parents are doomed to live through, and again, on the whole Jewish immigrant experience for Jews who arrived in the first part of the twentieth century iand the ensuring struggle that shaped their lives. Menial jobs; minimal pay--a sense of being totally defeated by life. His parents: .A man and a woman who can't stand each other, yet are locked into their destructive relationship. Economics of the time? Definitely---but what else..? Some insight from reading this into my parents' limitations of vision---even as they were definitely one generation removed from the frightened "green horns" that Roth describes and had a comfortable relationship. What fear...what rage did they carry with them from the past, from the uncertainty of their relatives, who just arrived here, and rage against "who"?
Have to move to the rest of the day. Come to terms with my life in "limbo". Will report soon.
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