One of those morning dreams when I keep waking up and falling asleep again and going on with another chapter of the dream.
In the dream I had a shop on the seaside, in a place where my family once really owned a shop that it rented away. This shop had a front window and a lateral transparent door on the corner. I remembered that once I, too, had taken care of the shop, and I wanted to do it again because if I did my life would be a bit better. So I went into the shop and found that a family of my friends still took care of it. But I wanted to get it working better. In the front window I remembered I once had made a little exhibition of objects I owned, pertaining to Italian writer Alessandro Manzoni. I didn't want to use that again, I wanted to turn the shop into a florist's, but I just wanted to get my things back. And I could not find them, because there had been some problems around. Italy had had a diplomatic problem with some Mexicans and now everybody believed we would be at war with Mexico. I thought it was preposterous. But I still could not find my things, there were some old items I was fond of like a school composition, and I went into the basement to look for them. There were books belonging to the family who ran the place, and I was a bit shocked to find books virulently opposing religion. I knew they were sort of free thinkers, but this was a bit much. In the basement were a couple of policemen who worked there, and I enlisted their aid to find my things. Of course, as soon as I did that, I found my things neatly ordered in some boxes. It was a bit silly of me, I could have watched better. But the policemen were cute, and I could hope in a date with one of them.
Meanwhile my family was wondering about what I would do with that shop. I tried to reassure them. Other things happened, of which I remember clearly only the presence of my dog, now long-dead. It was nice to have him still around, even though there was that matter of the war with Mexicans to consider as I walked around.
At the end it seemed the shop was ready to use. It was full of brass vases and trinkets (like the Egyptian shop in Gardaland) and I thought that instead of getting rid of them I could use them for atmosphere or even sell them. I worked intensely with my friends who by now were relatives, and the boys were my cousins and one of them asked me out. Forgetting the policeman, I started thinking I could accept, maybe that very evening, no matter that the kid was my first cousin.
But there was another problem. Suddenly the main window was walled up. It could stay like that, but it took away light from the shop. Enter my real uncle, the one that passed away recently. In no time, he fixes it. I now have a wonderful window full of light. My uncle starts working on a nice tall hedge around the shop, which of course up to a moment before did not have a garden in front but a street, and as he works I realize he has a German name which ends in something that means "bear" like the name of one of Dietrich's wives, Herrad, which of course doesn't mean bear. I'm about to launch on a philological research when the phone ringts. |