Enter Regina Spektor, or at least
a little bag of cocaine. (Brain will keep singing "Hotel Song"
these day.) This is in what I guess is my bedroom? but is really a public
school classroom—I’m guessing the home ec room at Hammonton High (I never
actually took a class there but geographically that is where it feels like). It
seems I am a cocaine user, and I am almost out: I check my jar and it contains
only a wee bit, all pressed together into a small disk, like the stub end of a
piece of chalk that someone has used to scribble on a sidewalk, getting it down
to the last bit they could safely scrape without burning their fingers. I shake
this out of the (baby food) jar and into the mortar; I break it up with the end
of an umbrella. But after that I apparently don’t do anything with it, except
muse, as cluelessly as IRL, about the current cost of the stuff and how much it
must cost those assholes you see in movies with enormous mounds of coke on
their coffee tables. Necessarily given this mental image, someone sneezes. And
we have a scene change.
I am carrying a stack of black
plastic take-out containers to another, bigger, classroom space in which family
and friends are gathering for a meal. It is an enormous square room, far bigger
than any classroom should be, but it has a chalkboard along its, I dunno,
150-foot front wall. En route I realize the little cup-lets of sauce or
dressing that I’m bringing are superfluous because so-and-so will have made her
famous sauce that everyone must love and praise. Indeed, my bringing
commercially bought sauce will be an insult. So, just as I’m getting to the
classroom door, I compile the insulting sauce into another container (yay dream
arms!); just inside the door there is a standard black classroom/office
trashcan where I deposit my redundancies—then immediately worry that someone
has seen me putting recyclables in the trash, but also worried if I make a big
deal of the act of discarding it will come to light that I brought sauce. I grab them back out and take
them to the recycle bin, which is all the way across the room by the fryer.
Speaking of which. I have also
brought potatoes, a huge bag of them, and they are suspiciously uniform in
shape, like cigars—or better still carrots with a few inches of point knocked
off. Anyway, I set up to chop them and somebody volunteers to do it for me; so
I take the few I have already chopped over to the fryer, where somebody else
volunteers to fry them. “Unless you want to…” he says, and I admit that I
really don’t fancy standing by the fryer in this heat. Because it’s hot.
Later, we’re on a bus ride home,
and while I don’t remember exactly visiting a particular, beloved stationery
store whence we have just departed, Bob and I are discussing its history. This
is an amalgam of Dan’s Stationery on Bellevue Avenue, Hammonton, some
stationery-specializing vendors at the Berlin Farmers’ Market (née Berlin
Auction), and at least one dream store. I am running through the
establishment’s names in reverse chronological order, and I’ve gotten through
maybe four different names and owners when a guy across the bus aisle (I’m in
the windows seat, Bob on the aisle) volunteers the next one: Tapper’s
Stationery. Neither of us go any further, even though IRL the next older
iteration (and, in my lifetime, the original,
magnificent stationery store) was Dan’s Stationery. In this case, however,
the establishment we’re talking about is a competitor that opened up across the
street (and in some sense, across the mall) from Dan’s—a much more compact
store, probably in what used to be Albright’s Shoes. (A few doors to the right of this:?)
The bus ride ends and we are, in
whatever sense, “back home”. It now appears to have been a chartered bus and we
are all one party; my mother (but not Mom) is at least in part Shirley
Partridge. (Shirley Jones is still alive and working, BTW, 84 this year!) She
is exhausted from the trip; we all know the script calls for me to be mightily
pissed off about something and to take it out on her, briefly—a situation for
end-of-reel resolution—but my dander and I are honestly not up to it. So, once
off the bus and across the street, on the sidewalk in front of the park, I line
up with the other children (Marcia Brady appears to be in the mix) to hug mom
and thank her for a fabulous trip.