"A Cake"

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.

     As is often the case in dreams, the event never took place. I did not dine with my father, although I did abandon my other, strangely related, friends. And I recall, just before awakening, that I was very sad to not have been able to have the opportunity to dine with them, these Japanese “relatives,” who might surely have provided me, despite my failed cake, with a wonderful dinner. Yet my father, far more oddly attired and even dangerous in appearance in his highly buttoned overcoat, compelled me to join 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