Weird dream

I had a very strange dream the other night. 

When it began, I was the door of my friend Alyssa’s house, a tiny place where Alyssa lived alone. As my friend welcomed me in the front door, I was fascinated by one heavily-textured, rich-milk-chocolate-brown wall, dominated by the image of a large cross sculpted into the texturing mud.  What I would normally have considered oppressive or weird somehow made the whole wall feel like a work of art. 

The room was sparsely furnished: a chair, a loveseat, a couple of end tables. A lamp turned on near the chair where Alyssa was seated lent the room its warmth and dignity. The few knickknacks on the tables and a small bookshelf were all spotless.

Through an open door, I could see the dining room. Its cinnamon red walls extended the sense of warmth and art from the living room, although in contrast living room, they had a linen texture. Beyond the dining room, the bright white kitchen invited conversation and friendship.

In the kitchen, I drifted mentally back to the days when Alyssa and I had been friends. We sat next to each other in Ms. Gatlin’s fifth grade classroom. That was the year our school was bulging so much that they had divided the cafeteria into two classrooms, leaving only enough room for students to file in along the temporary wall and back out through the serving line with their trays.

I had always taken my lunch to school, so for most of my years, I took a shortcut through the milk line instead of the lunch line, but that year we were all stuck in one line together. We all filed in along the temporary wall, out through the serving line, and back to our classrooms and our desks. Ms. Gatlin  allowed us to talk quietly that I desk as we ate, and Alyssa and I used the time to laugh about things as simple as my blue vinyl kaboodle kit lunch box.

In retrospect, I wonder why Alyssa and I were not also after school friends. I was not one to make friends, and that was the year Mattel introduced the 0dd Ogg, with its catchy little jingle that I heard probably more than I deserved. Alyssa was gorgeous and tall and already beginning to “blossom,” as my mother said, making her a target for a lot of impudent fifth-grade boys. I don't know that we ever talked about it, but I think she was rather embarrassed. If we had nothing else in common, we both were the targets of childish teasing.

But after school, I was as much a mole then as I am now. I would go home, grab a snack, ride my bike, and maybe visit a friend who lived a couple of houses away. The five o'clock train whistle was the signal to come home for supper, maybe a TV show, homework, and bed. By junior high school, Alyssa often accompanied the school choir on the piano, and I suspect her afternoons in the fifth grade involved a lot of practice. Somehow I can't imagine her running home, playing, or riding a bike, although it's entirely possible that she did.

By sixth grade, I'm sure we annoyed a lot of our classmates. The sixth grade homeroom teacher like spelling bees, and Alyssa and I were good at them. I can't remember if we had spelling bees in the fifth grade, but Friday afternoons in sixth grade were spelling bee time. I don't remember how the spelling bees started every Friday, except that the whole class stood along the chalkboard and Mr. Newman started with the weekly spelling list. Two or three or four of our classmates went down on every round; I suspect the most of those didn't want to participate, and some who stayed up longer probably just wished the contest would end. Mr. Newman would work his way backward from the list of the week to the beginning of the school year as long as anyone was still up and spelling.

I loved the spelling bees; spelling was one thing that made me feel like a winner, and I didn't have many. I think Alyssa liked them, too, because she usually was the other one left, and she probably beat me as often as I beat her. I remember clearly that the last word of the last spelling bee was “mustache," but I don't remember which of us spelled it right, so I suspect it must have been Alyssa.

In my dream, we walked together from the kitchen, through the small "master" bedroom and into the remaining bedroom/sunroom. I remember the master bedroom being an earth tone shade of green, and I remember the sunroom having almost a wall of windows, a French door, and a cheery feel, but I drifted back into deep sleep before I really saw any details.

I've sometimes wondered if a time will ever come when I might ask an old friend how she remembers those times half a century ago. As I woke up the next morning, I realized how much I would like to know Alyssa’s side of my memories. But I know that can never happen.

I never saw Alyssa much after sixth grade. Partly, I think that's because she got shuffled off into the “smart kids” group in junior high, while my math grades pushed me back to probably the “second tier." I always thought of her fondly when I heard that she had played for a school performance, and I assume that she was aware of my work on the school newspaper. But I don't remember sharing another class with her, and I don't recall whether she was in pep squad with me.

Alyssa married not long after we got out of high school and had a baby within a year or so. The last news I remember hearing of her was that she had taken a ride on her young nephew's new motorcycle. He had turned too fast on loose gravel, and she had been thrown off and died.

We were not yet 20.