Sankofa again or as usual

I had this fantasy; a ten-second thing like Mayo’s lamp at the end of Hymn-Sing. It went like this:

I walked out of my office at the end of the day and saw a small, black plastic bag on the sidewalk. I picked it up and dropped it in the trash on the corner. Gently but quickly the bag poofed into a black crow. The crow hopped up to the rim of the trashcan, shook her head and ruffled her feathers. She turned to me, eyed me up and down and said, “Thanks!” And then she flew away.

Ideas like these pop into my head on a near-hourly basis. Not useful for a full story or song lyrics but certainly fun to think of. The worst and best part is that I know they are only as real as steam on a coffee cup: there one minute, gone the next and your coffee stays exactly where it is.

But sometimes, the dreams aren’t fun. Sometimes, the cute crow doesn’t say thank you. And worse - these dreams are a lot longer than ten seconds. On the train-tracks of nostalgia, emotions and pictures fly into my head at 150kph. They dig in like ticks, infecting the nearby neurons like wine spilled on paper and even when I’ve cleaned everything up, the stain of angst is left as a marker of my two or three day neurological journey.

It’s a person that triggers it. Always a person. And I get a glimpse of what my life would be like if I had stayed working at Race Rock, or played in that off-Broadway show, or dated that girl. And for the next few days, I could be batting a thousand on the outside and churning fudge on the inside. Maybe admitting it out loud will help it go away. No, not go away, just soften a bit. Because I sort of like it – I mean, it’s a book I didn’t read, a movie I didn’t watch. I empathize with the protagonist because the protagonist is me!

Your life, my life, anyone's life: One story leading into the next. Chapters, verses, rungs on a ladder. “Edges” as Mark Vinci might say. It’s all part of the game.