A couple mornings ago, the children's side of the library was busy. It was the day before our in-person storytimes started, so I'm not sure why we had more littles than normal.
I began the morning helping an elderly gentleman on the copier. A little while later, he came scurrying back over, clearly excited. He was in his late seventies or eighties and the children's side was packed with toddlers, but I kid you not. This man scurried. Through a sea of wobbly toddlers.
He lifted a pale green rock from his shirt pocket, a pendulum he called it, and with an audience of toddlers, proceeded to explain how the pendulum moved differently when he said his name versus when he said my name. After a couple minutes of this, I used my most official voice to let him know the kiddos were patiently waiting for their stickers and if he needed help with anything else (copier related) to let me know. All the toddlers felt very important (as they should) that their need for stickers was suddenly top priority. The gentleman placed a strange rock with a sheet of paper explaining it on my desk.
"For you," he said before politely excusing himself and leaving.
I read about the rock and thought it sounded fascinating. A rock that encourages memories to pop up during dreams among other peculiar abilities. Definitely a curious and rather heavy gift to express appreciation for convincing the copier to copy his papers. I shared the rock with my coworkers throughout the day and decided to figure out what to do with the rock the next day. Yesterday I carried it around with me until I got to my car, when I finally took it out of my pocket. I came up with a plan to carry it with me on my next walk until I found a nice spot to leave it for another person to enjoy. It was perfectly smooth with flecks of a gold color running through. A lovely rock.
Or so I thought.
I believe I've mentioned this a time or two, but for many years I struggled with sleep paralysis. When I gave up dairy over a year ago, my sleep paralysis was one of the things to immediately disappear. Such a big relief! I still don't know what the connection is between dairy and sleep paralysis, but I'm not going to argue with success.
Well last night I had an unmemorable dream, woke up running and completely disoriented and had no idea where I was. Not sleep paralysis, but pretty darn terrifying. I beat myself up pretty good running into things and conked my head. No major injuries though. Just some mangled lips and I sliced off part of my palm somehow. I couldn't walk both dogs due to the strange palm injury, so I took Margo for a solo walk this morning to process all the heavy feelings I was trying to work through. Margo, my total wimp of a dog, it should be noted, came immediately to my rescue last night.
I ran through my mental list of emotions and the first emotion I settled on was embarrassment. People are going to notice today and I don't have a good story. Who ever has a good story when they have an injury? I wonder if there are statistics on how many times a person is actually doing something valiant or life-changing when they injure themselves. Usually everyone I talk to fell down the stairs, broke a toe kicking a shoe off, or tripped over their dog. So I quickly got past the embarrassment. Told myself to use any questions I get today as a way to make others smile. You know, the whole, "you should see the other guy" spiel. But hopefully with a more creative spin once my head injury goes away.
I also felt fear, which was the biggest emotion I was feeling. Even when I was struggling with sleep paralysis, I never had any physical injuries from it. The sleep running brought up memories of one of my brothers, who used to sleepwalk when we were kids. It was terrifying. We were constantly scared he was going to get hurt. But I wasn't really sleepwalking. I had injured myself dreaming.
I think a larger portion of my fear was due to being completely disoriented and not knowing where I was. I also felt like I was falling, which at some point I certainly was, but the feeling of falling continued after that. It made me think about getting older and how I very well may not know where or who I am someday. That there's a possibility to feel out of touch with my reality but also have the awareness that I'm out of touch with it.
The whole time I was working through these feelings Margo was oblivious to my turmoil. She was absolutely thrilled to have me to herself. She likes to nudge my hand while we walk, sometimes to tell me to go another way (to a fountain or water bowl usually) or to let me know she approves of something we just did (stopping for a cookie at the hardware store). Today she kept smacking my good hand around nearly the whole walk, prancing and dancing so much we could hardly walk in a straight line.
As we started walking up our street to go home I remembered the rock in my car.
I'm all sorts of superstitious. I sometimes pretend like I'm not, which then gives me anxiety because pretending I'm not superstitious is the worst time to not be true to myself. There aren't always repercussions for not being true to yourself, but this is not one of those times.
Could this strange dream adventure have something to do with the rock?
Now, what do I do with it? Robert suggested putting it in his mom's rock garden, which is an interesting suggestion I'll be thinking about but not heeding. My walk idea is also bust. I can't just leave the rock for some unsuspecting child to pick up.
I feel like I've suddenly been tossed into a Goosebumps book and I don't like it one bit.
I could read a Goosebumps book to figure out what to do with the rock. But I think the terrifying things Stine comes up with never die. So yea, I'm going to be tormented by a rock for the rest of my life because I helped someone on the copier.
No comments:
Post a Comment