Such a Coward…

I’m feeling crappy today because of a dream I had last night that I just can’t shake. It’s one of my best dreams, cinematically. Character is what I have a problem with.

It starts out with me climbing hundreds of steps up a mountain. It’s a setting that looks like a mashup of The Temple of Doom and the Swiss Family Robinson treehouse. Rope footbridges overlooking lush jungle growth around a marble cliffside. Beneath the foilage, five stories of heiroglyphs stamped into white marble.

There are other people like me with their cameras, but no one I know. It must be some sort of remote tourist attraction because there is a stand selling bottled water on the flat and dry mountaintop.

So I go up there for some water and while waiting in line, I spot this colossal vortex on the horizon. It appears as if half the world has folded into it already and it heads straight for us. Everyone scrams for cover except for me. I gotta get some video of this. The wind around me strengthens and I decide to go for cover. I run and run and look for a ditch but find an overpass looking thing. I hide until I hear the earth tremble and no longer feel safe.

More running.

I keep running until I get to a parked SUV. I open the door and get in with a car load of strangers. My heart is pounding, the tornado is almost upon us now, I feel safe, and the car starts when the driver turns the key.

I’ve saved myself AND I have some of the best storm footage ever recorded.

And then…

A little boy comes to the window and asks to come in. I’m about to let him in when, behind him, a crowd of people rush up, all wanting to get in. The others warn if I open the door they’ll mob handle the car and we will all die.

I can see it so clearly right now, my finger pushing down the lock of that door. Through the window I see the boy’s face pressed against the glass. I tell myself he is dead already.

Our car speeds off to safety.

Through the back window, I see the tornado suck up everything. First the boy and the people behind him, then the overpass, the wall of heiroglyphs, the water stand…

When the storm is gone and the sun is back out, we drive back to the scene which now looks like a landfill. News crews begin to pour in and one of the reporters asks if anyone has video of the tornado. I say I do, click some buttons on my camera, and guess what?

No tornado footage. Just video of people waiting in line for water.

Anticlimactic, yes?

I have dreams like this all the time where some big catastrophic event is coming. If there is an ending, I’m always the hero. But not this time. What a nightmare and I feel like such a coward even though it is just a dream.

Carry

You know the way some girls keep getting asked over and over to be a bridesmaid? Well Blane keeps getting asked to be a pallbearer, over and over. Tomorrow will be the sixth time in just over a year that he “carries.” (This one isn’t tragic, he had a great aunt pass of old age.)

That’s how they say it in the business. Carry. Blane’s father, a funeral director asked Blane yesterday, “Are you going to carry?”

It is of course an honor to be asked to carry. People know that in life, Blane carries a lot of people. He’s a save-the-world-hero type. Always doing amazing things for people and never asking for anything in return.

There are very few people who will do things for you without keeping score. Blane is one of them.

As odd as this may sound, Blane did not carry me over the threshold on our wedding night. We forgot to do that. It wasn’t important. He’s always there to carry me when I need it. That’s all that matters to us. I’ve done the same for him.

Since I can’t be there with him tomorrow (this is out-of-state, he’s flying there now), I’d like to honor of my hero, Blane, for what he will be doing tomorrow. For what he always does, symbolically. Carry.

Here is a video by My Chemical Romance. It’s gothic, shows the beauty of a Christian funeral. I especially like the ending with the pallbearers and the umbrellas.