Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Rainy days and Sundays

Rainy Days and Sundays

This is the kind of days that my Dad used to love. He called it a “Soaking Rain.” Last night my Black Lab woke me up. At first I thought it was one of the lights on my C-Pap machine flashing but nope! A couple minutes later I saw a flash that heralded a storm coming our way. It’s been a slow steady misting rain ever since. Good sleeping weather is what it is.

I have bad dreams, often about things I have never been guilty of. Not that I haven’t been guilty of plenty but you would think it would be those that come back to torment me. NOPE! The ones I find most troubling are out of left field. I am accused of something I never did. In the Book Pappion this is perhaps explained when the central character discusses the fact that he was sent to Devil’s Island for a crime he didn’t commit. That he was a petty criminal the authorities got tired of dealing with and they framed him to get him out of circulation. He accepted this with certain stoicism, remarking that there were indeed many criminal activities he had been involved in and got away with.

This is sort of the way that I look at these dreams. Often they involve being caught naked in a compromising situation. This has never happened to me, nor have I ever imagined it happening or been compelled to expose myself in public…. Still I dream of it happening and my being subjected to ridicule like Anthony Wiener….They say thought proceeds action and I have never thought about such a behavior nor does some deep dark force inside move me to want to act in that manner…. UGH! Thank goodness. Still when I start feeling indignant about the actions of famous people like Wiener and Lance Rentzel (The Dallas Cowboy who was once married to Jody Hetherington) I say a prayer thanking my creator that I was not given to such propensities.

In my latest dream I am called onto the carpet while attending a military school and accused of not taking the class seriously and that I am going to be the object of special scrutiny and the whole weight of the system is going to be brought to bear to see me severely punished. “Whoa!” I cry out in my defense… “Aren’t we overreacting a bit here?” And the dream goes on to show my detractors are quite serious about the retribution they are planning.

Now I know I have my detractors and in some cases I have done ill to them however it was usually not intentional. Nor am I a paragon of virtue or honor. Like Pappion I have done things I regret and gotten away with it but I can count the bad ones on one hand. There have however been other instances where I escaped wrongdoing more as a consequence of the actions of others than through any remarkable virtue of my own. I am going to have some accounting to do when the great judgment day comes but there are acts of kindness and compassion as well on the positive side of my leger. As a matter of fact they considerably outweigh those actions I would rather not think about, so why is it that I don’t have more happy dreams about what a good fellow I am. (Get it, Goodfellow?)

I suppose it is just as wrong to imagine illicit behavior as to practice it. Often I sit in Wal-Mart waiting for my wife and see people and imagine what their lives might have been like by the way they look and carry themselves. Sometimes I even wonder, when I see a particularly mature and attractive female, what it would be like to share an intimate moment….but taking that step from thought to action is never a serious consideration… still it is a thought and I suppose those dark thoughts will be weighed on the scale, come the final analysis of our lives. Actually I am proud for the most part with the life I led, the woman I married and the children I raised. My daughters made good marriages and gave me five (5) grandsons. I suppose I can take some credit in that as I would accept some responsibility if it turned out otherwise. Still I am bothered at times by bad dreams and when they come I find myself awakening in the middle of the night and the dogs looking at me and wondering what is going on. Well they have bad dreams too… I suspect because I often see the being chased by the great wolf in the sky and jerking and yelping and whimpering. So I guess it’s an unavoidable consequence of life and I ought to suck it up and quit whining about a phenomenum that is simply a fact of nature.