a cake
Last
night I dreamt that I was making a cake, a very strange cake, which wasn’t
quite working out, made out of crumbled cookies and other mixed ingredients. It
truly wasn’t congealing very well, but I thought, nonetheless, it might somehow
become edible. Moreover, another person, near me, was making something quite
similar. We were cooking for an Asian group, a family, which I perceived were,
in fact, relatives of ours, Japanese I believe. I didn’t quite understand the
relationship, but we were related, through evidently, some strange interconnection,
probably stimulated by the ridiculous Ancestry.com advertisements, which seem
to suggest you might be related to all cultures that you simply have never
before imagined.
The dinner seemed, despite my ineptness, to be going along quite nicely, until suddenly in a strange overcoat that reminded me of something out of Kafka, my many-year dead father showed up. He had only one night and wanted to spend it with me in a restaurant. Of course, how could I refuse, and I attempted to explain to these “family” members that I had to go with my father, particularly since he had only one night to spend with me. I had to abandon my strange cake and attend a local restaurant with him.
Obviously, this is a story about death,
about how, despite the cultural complexity of my own desires, despite my
commitment to so very much outside of the limits of my upbringing, I was now
being called back to my “roots,” so to speak, to my own limitations, to the fears
of closure that I suffered from childhood on.
I was troubled when I awoke, I was
sweating, I had a runny nose and trouble clearing my throat. I felt as if I had
awakened in a kind of stupor, and Howard too, had slept long past his usual
time of arising. The red moon had had its eclipse on the other side of the
ocean as we stumbled into the living room to read again the awful news of US
politics.
I guess I failed to meet with my father
who had especially invited me to dinner. I attempted to introduce him to the
Japanese family he had never known about. But he was impatient, in a hurry to
take me away to a restaurant to which we never visited. He just as suddenly disappeared,
as he had with his death. I don’t believe I ever sat down to dinner with these
wonderful Japanese relatives either. Probably, as always, I simply went hungry.
Perhaps the cake was an attempt to
celebrate what my father and I had never truly been able to, our love.
Los Angeles, July
28, 2018
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