Eggs and lessons.

In this dream, I am on a different fantasy campus than usual. I am teaching a class of students how to do things with eggs. We have planned to learn to make omelettes, but we have run out of time. I take a dozen nearly hard-boiled eggs with me, promising the class to bring them back the next day so that we can continue our work.

On my long walk home, which will take me through some of my home fields, I remember that I have told someone I might stop in at a holiday celebration he and his family are having. They are Jewish; they have had the holiday off; it seems possible that I, too, am supposed to have had the holiday off, or did have the holiday off, and that the egg lesson was actually on the previous day. His whole family is there, as is his new partner. Sometimes he speaks French. Sometimes others reply in French. They have obviously been celebrating pleasantly all day: in a strange and partly empty student building, they have been sitting in a largely bare student lounge with no-pile green carpeting, eating and speaking French and celebrating.

At some point, I go elsewhere; there is only so much one can say in such a situation. Someone--a father? a brother?--attached to this group cooks up an omelette packed full with cheese and mushrooms. It fairly glows, sunny yellowy gold, on his plate as he lets the cheese melt. We chat while he works (we are now in a kitchen on the ground floor of this building where the others are still together), and I realize that my dozen nearly hard-boiled eggs are hardly fit materials for continuing to make omelettes in twelve hours' time, but I continue going through some motions of planning to cook them. I will not eat a hard-boiled egg. All these eggs will go to waste.

I decide to change out of my skirt into a pair of jeans. Suddenly the air is charged with skepticism and with danger--with incipient transgression. "Where will you change?" the father/brother relative asks, as I walk to the stairs. Sure enough, when I reach the top of the stairs, I encounter the person I know best of this group; his partner seems to have disappeared. I go seeking a space where I can change. Somehow, he is there again and again. Finally, he embraces me, all in a barely spoken sadness. Everything is confusion: I don't know how to turn; I don't know where to change.

And yet he and his family show the way: soon, they have all departed for wherever it is they are going next. When they go, my whole landscape, all its contours and structures, resettles into things not known but readily discernible, and it is, quite simply, better.