Appropriate perhaps for a drive to work with a psychology major, my older daughter and I talked about dreams on the way up to Kingston. In her dream, her boyfriend had turned out to be a gangster. If you knew her boyfriend, it would be immediately understandable why this could only be inexplicable and humorous in equal measure. The boyfriend of the dreams casually confessed to having been involved in opaque, gangster-like activity. The cops wanted my daughter to wear-a-wire and she didn’t want to do this. I was curious to know what it was she was watching all night up there in her room, so that cops with wiretaps were asserting themselves this way.
I’d had a more predictable, protean dream. I was on a train, but I’d forgotten my backpack in another car, so I went to get it and I got distracted when I remembered my backpack, I was worried that it wouldn’t be there anymore. Do the activities of the day, impact where in the memory hoard the mind searches for settings, and people and tensions to play out the day’s release at night? We wondered about this as we exited the New York State Throughway and cut our way over to the overdeveloped strip of Route 9W where the Target she was working at was situated.
I guess I’ve sheltered my daughters some. She’s twenty and is only now discovering that eight-hour shifts, stocking shelves are boring. That standing around on your feet all that time is tiring. That there are many people who are working there who, unlike yourself, don’t have much choice in the matter. Still, she got off her ass and found the job without much prodding. I’ll try to stay quiet about the fact that it doesn’t make sense economically, as it requires her mother or I to drive up and back for thirty minutes each way and consumes the attendant amount of gas. I’ve very glad that she is talking to the other people there, who she works with. They customers who come in and look for things like ketchup. It’s part of learning to be American, for she who isn’t really from here.
I head over to the edge of the enormous parking lot they have at Target, after dropping her off, determined to figure out why it is my phone’s Bluetooth won’t connect with the car. Eventually I have it reconnected and I ring back a number that had called me. Spam. What did I expect? Then I call Japan and speak with a colleague for the next ninety minutes. We’ve both been doing a lot of work to fix something that needs better coordination. Back home I park the car at the head of the driveway and finish the last twenty minutes of our conversation, for if I’d driven down to the house the call would necessarily drop. It’s Wednesday. I’ve wondered about this and now I know when the garbage truck comes and actually picks up our garbage on Wednesday mornings. It isn’t as early as I’d thought.
Wednesday 7/21/21
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