Lobster in a Bucket

Dreaming

There’s a subtle point in life, in transition, where the past, that thing that once seemed so familiar, becomes like a dream. Before that point, the dream was now. In transition, the present is surreal; something ethereal that doesn’t feel normal inside, in the gut. Getting "now" to seem real is pretty important, at least if you want to actually be at ease, and comfortable without whatever’s going on outside yourself.

My first long transition happened at the onset of adolescence. I was 11. Up until then, most my life was spent in a bed. I slept in it about 10 hours a day. After getting out of it, I would eat, do school on the kitchen table, and then get back in bed to read more. In all I probably spent 14 hours a day in bed, on average, between the fall of 1990 and the spring of 1993. I favored descriptions of ancient Mediterranean cultures embellished with pictures of men killing each other, and women making pots. I read history books even if they weren’t illustrated, but the pictures were nice. My all-time favorite pictorial history had the dubious honesty to make their Mycenaean women topless. It wasn’t pornography; it was history.

My idyllic life of short school and long reading ended. I moved into the South and started spending a non-negotiable, 7 hours a day at school. For the whole year, all of 6th grade, the present was like a very bad dream, You couldn’t really call it a nightmare because nightmare’s usually torment you briefly, not wasting time to get to the point. This lasted for at least 1260 hours. That is, 7 hours a day, for 180 days. Those books, those Mycenaean nipples, and that life seemed way more real for every one of those hours. On the first day of 7th grade suddenly things shifted. I walked down the hall with a kid in my new home-room. I said something, he laughed. The laughter of this kid suddenly offered more comfort than could any book read over a year ago, or any found remembrance of lying in a womb lined with books. The bad dream became life, the memories a dream.

Now I live in Uganda. I’ve spent over a year here. In front of my house, cows graze, children play in tattered clothes, chickens peck out each other’s eyes, and sometimes I have an awkward conversation with someone from here. Inevitably, every small thing you see, every little activity here gets compared to America, to the life you knew. “Today I rode my bike through a herd of cattle.” “Today I saw children playing in an open refuse pit.” “Today I drove a dead baby home from the hospital, to be buried in her back yard.” It’s all like a dream. The fast food, coked-up hobos, and Sunday morning church services of my American home seemed more real than Africa. For about a year Africa was a dream that I inhabited. And then it changed. As I sat on the side of a crater, flowing down to a lake that reflected the sky above with almost perfect honesty, I realized that it made more sense, intuitively to be there, than in America.

America, with its marginalized minorities, its suburban fortresses, and irrational exuberance, no longer made sense. At least not the way that Africa did. People came knocking at my door, wanting anything, large or small for obvious reasons. I had stuff, and they didn’t. It made sense. What I should say to a black guy my age on a subway, on the other hand, was quite shrouded.

And then I think of Christ. He went from alive, to dead, and back to life again. That’s quite a transition. Christ didn’t spend any time in his resurrected state wisting for the past. The reality of the present was the kingdom of heaven. In fact, Christ spent much of his time before his transition proclaiming the time that was to come. “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near.” Christ stands out for how immediately, how effortlessly, how joyfully, how prophetically, he embraced the greatest transition experienced by any man.