The company had arrived, and I was scurrying to a kitchen (unfamiliar and dark) to prepare them a meal.
I think it was meatloaf. I mixed and mixed, added this and that. The ingredients were many and varied: apples, maybe? Unpeeled. Onions? Chicken in meatloaf? The canned kind of chicken. I worked hard with a fork to break up the chunks of tinned meat.
The guests were growing impatient. This was taking a long time. They sat together at a table on the deck and murmured annoyance. They were my students’ parents. Then they were relatives. I was aware of their appropriate and palpable frustration. Still I stood in the kitchen and mixed.
Time passed. Too much time. It became clear that I needed to go to the store. Still I was mixing, reaching for things to add. Finally, with humble exasperation at my ineptitude, I presented the guests with the mixture as it stood and explained that I needed to go to the store.
They picked at my concoction, expressing acceptance or surprise at the ingredients in the as yet uncooked dinner. With forks, they pulled edible items from it and set them on their plates. Clearly there wasn’t enough food. I had to go to the store.
Then I reached in and, with some embarrassment, pulled two pairs of baseball socks from the meatloaf mix. One pair was red, the other yellow.
The guests proclaimed their disapproval. I don’t remember how, but they did it– and clearly. Ignominy, shame were mine: what could I have been thinking? These clearly Would Not Digest. Moreover, I had failed to cut them up.
Sheepishly I removed the socks to the kitchen, failing to remember when I had added them to the mix, pondering the veracity of their inedibility, wondering why I hadn’t chopped them, worrying that now– sans socks– the meatloaf mixture looked woefully inadequate.
After that I went to the store, driving off in our Mini Cooper and entering another and seemingly entirely separate dream sequence, one that involved coming upon my father and a long traffic jam and attempts to find circuitous routes around said traffic. This resolved itself in ways I don’t remember and I have since then, obviously, awakened.
But this morning as I am wrapping Christmas presents, the meatloaf sequence comes to mind with alarming clarity, and I am wondering what, if anything, it is saying to me about a lurking sense of inadequacy….
Or maybe it was just a dream.
