Day Dreaming's Revenge

(Continued from July 8, 2009)

The art of day dreaming grows with practice. (I should have spent as much time on my violin). From childhood fantasies fed by envy, it was a natural progression to the satisfying fancies of revenge. At the reunion I noted the wrinkling of childhood and adolescent beauty. I gloated that I was one of the few who was still working at his music. (I had played in a community symphony orchestra for thirty-nine years). As for automobiles, I claimed superiority by virtue by my well-practiced and principled disavowal of conspicuous consumption.

Childishly malicious? If it's good enough for John Updike it's good enough for me. In his novel "Bech At Bay" the protagonist (Updike's alter-ego) gets revenge by killing the critics who had previously scorned him. (Never too late for me to find a new hero). Updike has only to put down his vengeful pen to return to reality. For the ordinary day dreamer there is always a wailing child who needs us, or bills to pay, or the lawn to mow. I could never day dream my way through those trials.

You can rest assured in your day dreams, Joe

The Rewards of Day Dreaming

(continued from July 7, 2009)

My talent for [daydreaming] appeared at an early age. To my mortification, I saw that many of my childhood contemporaries were clearly more handsome, more clever, more worldly than I. From first grade on they received more valentines from the prettiest girls. In eighth grade they won the music memory contest and in High School they were the first to obtain a driver's license. Clutching my few valentines, struggling to distinguish Mozart from Beethoven, gaping at a yellow convertible speeding out of the school parking lot, I honed the self-isolating art of reinventing myself. I day dreamed that I received a valentine with a heart drawn on it from the prettiest girl in the class; that I could differentiate Prokofiev from Mahler and that I was an adolescent sophisticate driving with one hand on the wheel and the other around a girl. Thus, the motives in attending my 50th high school reunion were not entirely pure.

More Later, Joe

Day Dreaming

(I should preface this post by stating that Day Dreaming was first published in a literary journal in Winter 1999.)

The ability to pass time gracefully is an art that makes idleness attractive. Recently I was housebound and largely immobilized for two weeks recovering from surgery for a bone spur. Happily, I was well prepared to endure the inactivity. While some may have chafed at the enforced leisure, I enjoyed these doldrums.

Good habits, we are told, are learned in childhood. So are bad habits, and thus it was that in childhood I learned the pleasures of passing time by doing nothing. To appreciate this skill, one must understand that idleness is as much a state of mind as it is an absence of activity. The essential requirement is a shameful surrender to nothingness. Day dreaming, with its misty, evanescent, self-hypnotic qualities fits that definition. Self-serving and self-indulgent, it is perfect comfort for one's privations.

More Later, Joe