It had been almost a week since my last weird, pointless dream, so I was not surprised to wake up this morning with the following doozy running through my head:
It's a Saturday evening in the summertime, and I'm late for some charity black-tie event (preserving some fuzzily-defined wetlands, supporting some regional museum nobody's ever been to, or something to that effect). As is always the case on this type of weekend, I had evidently tossed my tuxedo and related paraphernalia into my bag in a rush on Friday without, shall we say, running through the detailed mental checklist. Inevitably, some important accoutrement is missing. In this instance, my heart sank as I realized that I had forgotten my shirt.
Let's back up a moment. I have no idea why, but in this scene I am staying at a house on Walnut Rd. in Hamilton, Massachusetts. This is a nice little road connecting Hamilton to Wenham, and I found myself in a house a few hundred yards from the center of town.
Luckily for me, I remembered that my friends Oscar Anderson and his wife Gillian Blake lived only a few doors down (in real life they live in NYC), so I called Oscar in a panic. He told me to relax. They were going on ahead to the gala, but he would leave the door open for me, and I would be welcome to borrow a tux shirt. I hastened over there, and when I rifled through his shirt collection in a basement closet (this room in Oscar's house, by the way, was my roommates Drew Berkery and Bob DeAngelis's room from our sophomore year house at Georgetown), I found zero tux shirts. All I had to work with was a skin-tight white button-down Oxford. Don't ask me what this item of clothing was doing in their house, because Oscar is roughly twice my size, and Gillian is roughly half my size (I have always suspected that she is part Elf). Anyway, I tugged on the snug, taut shirt and vowed to make the best of it.
I dashed out to the street to meet up with my friend Ian Griffiths, who fell into the category with me of single-guys-who-are-late. We started jogging down the middle of Walnut Rd. in our tuxes, but then I remembered that I needed to hit the ATM.
Luck was on my side again, because I remembered that my friends James and Andrea Baker lived only a few houses down (they live in L.A. in the real world), and they had recently founded a neighborhood bank. I knew they operated the bank out of their house, where they lived with their little daughter Fiora, so I bounded up their porch steps, cash card in hand. The doors were open, but nobody was around, and I found myself wondering if this was the best way to run a bank. There didn't seem to be any employees, and I couldn't imagine who their customers were.
As is usually the case, rather than work up to a frenzied climax and satisfying plot resolution, this dream sort of fizzled out and sputtered to a stop. . . .
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