Observables #26

on dead fish, online school and my Márquez life

I’m living out a Gabriel García Márquez novel right now. I came across this dead fish on the road after a night of strange dreams—one of which was about Elsie needing to be picked up at night, but I missed the call because she had been calling my mother’s phone, which had slipped to the bottom of my mom’s pants (down by her underpants, she said). This was much discussed in the dream, amidst the stress of trying to find Elsie. Finally I realized I could track Elsie down from my laptop, but I still couldn’t call her (dream logic). Eventually I shook myself awake to make the movement of the GPS dot stop.

Awake now, I understand that I am all the characters in the dream including the one with the phone in her underpants.

The night before we had watched two episodes of Gilmore Girls because Elsie and I are bonding with a mother-daughter show. (Did that influence the dream?) Also, it’s online school time (another universe altogether) where our days are spent watching screens and then bumping into each other at the fridge. Sometimes the daughters pull out this fangled app which scans the bar codes on items to find out which products are “a little too salty,” “a little too fatty,” or full of phenoxyethanol. We have now learned that anything called “clean” will kill you on the spot. This is an upside down world where we feel wonky all the time and fish heads have their place.

I walked off the dream in these boots in the -22 weather. That’s when I found the fish head. I didn’t have a scarf so I had to freeze my face and fingers off to snap the picture. But it felt worth it—finding something so rare. A talisman of hope? Could a bird’s mishap equal my possibility? I can hear my mother’s dry wit here, “Sure.”

I stopped on the road to listen for silence. I skated on the ice rinks that had formed above the path. I was THIS close to a blue jay. Then I went back inside to make sure Elsie was where I left her, and not walking around on a mission from which I could never get her back.

Joan Didion’s The Year Of Magical Thinking, which poetically charts the death of her husband and simultaneous hospitalization of her daughter; Ursula Le Guin’s essay “The Question I Get Asked Most Often,” which is so funny and unusual as she muses about where ideas come from; and this, from the insightful Brandon:

This false idea that there is worthy subject matter and unworthy subject matter. But in the end, like, what matters is the quality of the attention paid to the subject matter. The quality and depth of the attention. That’s what gives us novelty.

From the fish head to my daughters’ GPS coordinates—my attention is sharp. What will I dream about tonight?

This week’s Sister On! finds us reframing a problem from a listener—we call this episode “Sleepless in Toronto.” Join us!