Dream Time

For the last two weeks, the sky here where I live in northern California has been white with ash, the sun a vivid orange orb suspended on a milky horizon. A thousand fires are burning. I walk outdoors in the morning, just as we all do, sniffing the smoky air, thinking of the people who have lost their homes, of the firefighters working day after day to contain the blazes, the animals displaced. On th­e new­s, we are instructed not to go outside, for the air is full of hazardous debris. The exuberance of summer seems to have slid to a halt, with baseball games canceled, outdoor swimming pools deserted. This white sky is a mystery most of us have never seen—it has stopped us in our tracks for a bit and connects us to areas we can smell but cannot see, which are going up in smoke. We wait for the air to clear­.

I remember the haze of Maryland skies in summer, which never seemed to dissipate. Summer was an endless stretch of time before us. In June, most of us had plans—the last day of school was so filled with anticipation that no one could concentrate, much less remain in their seats, and the teachers let us go long before the three o’clock bell. Day camp, or a family trip to Ocean City, or horseback riding lessons lay in store, or at the very least, swim lessons at the local pool. By July or August, however, the initial excitement had dissolved in the heat. Once we’d learned to make lariats, dive off the high-dive, or roller-skate backwards, almost everything else we’d actually planned to do began to seem too hot or too difficult. A humid blanket of inertia seemed to descend on the adults as well, their willingness to engineer entertainments for us finally exhausted. They left us to fend for ourselves as long as we returned home for supper.

So we fooled around. We drew hopscotch boards on the sidewalk with colored chalk, ran through lawn sprinklers or sat limply in backyard wading pools. We cut pictures out of our mothers’ magazines and made them into messy collages and walked to Woolworth’s for penny candy. We climbed pine trees and fell out of them or banged ourselves up on skateboards. We ran in and out of our houses for Band-Aids, Kool-Aid, crayons, glue or paper towels, until our mothers kicked us out again in self-defense. After dinner, we begged our parents for coins and glass jars, and then we were off again in the darkness to catch fireflies and to listen for the bell announcing the arrival of the Good Humor man, a thrilling ritual of which we never wearied.

Nothing was expected of us beyond staying out of the emergency room and not setting anything on fire. We lived our lives outside in summer, a wild and grimy tribe with one or two self-elected chiefs, experiencing the lazy luxury of nature, and a life lived entirely in the present. We gobbled up movies and comic books, and wasted whole boxes of Cracker Jack digging down for the cheap plastic prize at the bottom. I remember spending an hour poking my finger in and out of my brother’s Venus flytrap, to see if it would eat my finger, and a whole morning making imprints of the Sunday comics with a wad of Silly Putty. We consumed an afternoon making an outdoor fort of blankets and pillows and bedspreads imported from our bedrooms, just to sit inside it for an hour and abandon it by dinner. Autumn was a long way off: we were free to drift in and out of hot afternoons and muggy evenings without preserving anything or proving anything.

It seems my adult friends and I have forgotten the art of goofing off. We make plans and carry them out mercilessly, terrified a morning or a weekend will slip by with no concrete way to account for the hours. Time off is a commodity, like money, to be spent fully or saved, rather than a gift to use any way we please.

When my neighbor Laura said to me, “I did nothing today!” it was a statement of chagrin, not delight. Her short trip to Yucatan with her boyfriend became a complex project, requiring research, photos, descriptions and plans—it might as well have been a work assignment, to be carried out with maximum efficiency.

Australian bush people, for thousands of years, have dwelt within what is called Dreamtime. They experience a more blurred sense of time than the one we know, a time in which distinctions between dreams and past, present and future aren’t as finite as ours; time is an environment which exists on deep inner and outer levels.

Pueblo pottery is mostly done in secret, in what the craft workers consider ceremonial time or private time. The Pueblo Indians describe themselves as being inside time, reacting to an internal rhythm which cannot be talked about but which is there, nonetheless. Time, to them, is to be respected rather than allotted; ceremonial time is “Slow” time, teaching the great lesson of patience.

My friends and I complain that there’s not enough time, but what I want, what I suspect we all want, is a different kind of time. Connected time, lazy time. Time to nap and write and watch movies and window-shop, time to fall down into our lives again and stretch out, time which doesn’t need to be accounted for. I want my secret self back, the one who lived like a poet early on, watching the moon’s face, dangling my feet in the creek and talking to turtles. I want my tribe around me.

My cats sleep inside these days and vanish on wild cat missions at night, when the breeze has picked up and the air is better. Maybe this smoky summer is a blessing in some way we cannot know, reminding us to stop, shelter in place for a bit, wait for the haze to clear, breathe deeply when we can. We can dream, and wait for the wind to shift.

Stacy Appel is a writer in California whose work has been featured in The Chicago Tribune and other publications. She has also written for National Public Radio. Contact her at WordWork101@aol.com.

~Stacy Appel