"I had the pear dream again": a US history lesson

Some people claim they dream more if they eat a whole pizza before bed.

For me it turns out steak and an episode of Kids in the Hall does the trick.  It was the first season, possibly the first episode ever.  I haven't seen that show since I left Canada over a decade ago.

Last night I dreamt a miniseries.  Part one is a history lesson that has the same irrationally uber-realistic quality as my all-time favorite KH skit in which one of the characters sits up in bed and exclaims, "I had the peeeeaaaar dream again."  End scene.  A one-liner that good needs no elaboration.

I was seated outside at a long table planted at a slant in a grassy field.  About twenty people eating dinner in suits and skirt-and-sweater sets.  It was my wealthy east coast family and my mom, descendent of the deserting black sheep (my grandmother, not present), was on my left.

"That's Andrew," she pointed across the table slightly to the right of a severe-looking black-clad woman earlier introduced as my great-grandmother.  "Andrew" looked like a grandmother himself, though one not so tall and gothic.  "He" had curly white hair, a slight frame, wore a long sweater dress, and giant granny glasses over watery blue eyes.  He was my great-grandmother's financial advisor.  "He had your wedding dress made," said my mother.

I remembered the beautiful off the shoulder gown.  It probably would have cost several thousand dollars off the rack.  I had always wondered where my mother got it.  "Did anyone ever try to pay him back?"  I was feeling angry and guilty.

Mom waved the air with her fork dismissively, "They make frocks like that all the time; look around." My newly introduced second-and-third cousins milled around the dinner table with champagne cocktails and a rainbow of discreetly tailored jewel-toned satin dresses.

I could hear the tone in my mother's voice, though: be grateful for the connection she had to these quality people.  I owed her now for pulling her family strings to contribute to my wedding day.

I got up and left the table, needing air.  The suburb we were in was so wealthy that there weren't rooms or even houses to put them in; it was all open air but kept pristine and naturalistic by hundreds of discreet servants and expensive air conditioning robotics.

I walked in my dress shoes along a narrow muddy ledge a few feet below the crest of a long ridge.  Below to my right ran a stream and at the end of the ridge, the stream emptied into a small pond.  A historical re-enactment was taking place, or possibly a hologramic recreation; it was hard to be sure.

An important historical event had taken place in this very spot: the assassination at a stream of a US president about a hundred years ago.  Being Canadian, my knowledge is a bit on the fuzzy side but I am going to wager my dream version of US history doesn't square with reality particularly.

A man shaving over the water was shot in the back.  The man who shot him, in faded baggy denim, suspenders down, chest bare, stood for a moment and looked at the prone President now face down in the water.  Then he too was gunned down.  The new assailant stood up out of the tall grass.  He wore a dusty black suit and hat.  Another moment went by and from behind him, a shot.  This from a man in uniform on horseback; there were long red stripes down the sides of his pants.  His hat was navy blue.  He was the head of a military police hunting party who had heard rumors about a threat to the president.  Coming on the scene too late, he'd mistaken a secret service agent for the killer.

The shot that killed the man in black went through him into the weeds and struck a woman, squatting to deliver a baby.  She was hit in the heart, killed instantly with no time to even take a breath and give a final push to bring her baby into the world.  The man on horseback, oblivious to the domestic drama he'd interrupted, turned around to gallop back down the trail to report to the rest of his party.

And that's when this guy in a white sheet, shoulder length blonde hair, sandals, strode out from the bushes and across the stream, carrying the newly orphaned infant in his arms, and looking for all the world like a Madonna-Jesus hybrid in a medieval-era painting.  Behind him, the sun shone on his golden hair, and the stream ran red with the blood of four bodies and childbirth.

At that moment the hunting party rounded the bend; luckily for posterity and the well-being of the man in white, it contained a journalist.  He was so struck by the scene that instead of further gun shooting, the man in white was posed for a picture that immortalized him in history and turned him overnight into an american hero. 

It turned out our baby-saviour was a criminal recently escaped from prison.  He had been hiding in the rushes, mistakenly believing that the man in uniform on horseback was looking for him.  The white sheet was stolen from a farmhouse down the road to disguise his prison clothes.  There he'd first seen the pregnant woman crying by the clothesline.  In exchange for keeping quiet about his existence, she'd made him take her away with him.  He didn't want to do it, but he had no appetite for murder - he'd been a stage coach robber but prided himself on no casualties and a clean getaway.

At the stream crossing she'd gone into contractions too bad to allow her to walk, and then they saw a man coming from the other side with a shaving kit so they knelt to hide in the rushes.  Before long they witnessed one man shot, two men shot, three, all while the woman screamed the pain of labor silently into the criminal's hand cupped tight over her mouth.  He didn't even know she'd been shot too till she fell dead into his arms. 

So the criminal turned out to be the only witness to a complicated triple homicide with collateral manslaughter and the reporter on horseback won some kind of journalistic prize and the President lay dead but at least the truth of his death came out, so American-style justice, which is to say a good story got told, was ultimately served.

I pondered these events as I walked back to the dinner table.  I couldn't pay Andrew back, obviously.  I was in several income tax brackets below this pack of relatives.  But maybe I could even the score with barter.  I had some marketable skills.  I doubted he'd want the details of the complex metabolic pathways that drive human biology.  I wondered if he wanted to learn how to salsa dance.

Tin Foil Hat

I have been microchipped by the US government.

Before you make any assumptions about my connection to reality, the whole story is this: my wife and I went north across the border to have a chat with a BC justice of the peace, shortly after Canada made our kind of union legal.  We had been living together for eight years, so it seemed high time to make things official.  But we are considerate people and have no desire to bring down US culture and civilization as we know it so we opted to perform the ceremony in my country of origin, where people are too busy trying not to freeze to death to worry about how their neighbours are keeping each other warm. 

On the way back to Seattle, US customs stopped me and put a microchip in my passport.  "Just to make it easier to track you as you cross the border."  The tone in the officer's voice suggested this was supposed to remove any anxiety I might have about being followed down dark alleys by men in black.  My facial expression must not have seemed sufficiently comforted because he added, "We could only find you with the right detectors and we only have those at the border right now."

Right.

Now.

Ha ha.

Four years later, on Christmas Eve, just as I was preparing to head north again, the mailman brought me my Green Card.  Santa loves me after all, was my first thought.  I opened the unassuming registered letter from Nebraska, and pulled out a plastic-and-hologram card that was, indeed, sufficiently green to be satisfying.

And then, attached to a page, the way credit cards come glued to a single page, was a foil pouch.

"We recommend you use this pouch to protect your new card and prevent wireless communication with it."

Welcome to the US.  Here is your tin foil hat.  Please be sure to remove it at the border crossing so that the guards can scan your brain.