Dream

I had a dream I hopped a freight train in my stocking feet. I hung on to the railing of the last car. The train took me to Tewksbury, to a place that looked like Pinewood Gardens. My father, brother and sister met me there. I need shoes. It's now more like a circus. We walk for awhile. Dad wants to show me a placque labeled D20 where he says Bancroft School promised to reserve space for Sarah's cubbyhole. It's on somebody's front walk. There is a twisted, melted mess of little placques and monuments. It looks like a pet cemetery. Dad goes inside. I wonder if there was an earthquake that dumped all these useless markers on this poor person's walk. Sarah touches D20 and says yes, this was supposed to be mine, and sighs. Dad comes back out without a word. We walk across the street towards what I am thinking of as Bancroft School, even though I know it isn't. It looks like the projects, only worse. The homes are hollowed out shells where scrawny half naked white men and young black girls with pigtails are either fighting over or playing with long, worn-out strips of fiberglass insulation. I tell them to stop, because that stuff is expensive. The men growl and sneer at me, and the girls ignore me. I briefly contemplate telling them I am a police officer in order to intimidate them, but quickly dismiss the idea. My father and brother walk by me. Several buildings are on fire. I follow my brother. I look around a few corners and through dusty doorways. The rooms are all disconnected, the way they always are in my dreams, with rooms hundreds or thousands of miles apart connected by a few feet of disused hallway. Here, my grandparents bedroom, coated in dust, there, my childhood bedroom, the floor covered with toys. I see my brother entering a small room by opening a large, rusty steel door on a concrete wall. I ask if he is looking for the bathroom. I still have no shoes, and my socks are inexplicably white. Then suddenly we are all in my dad's car again, one of the honda hatchbacks, I don't know which one. Brother and sister are as they are now, but somehow still fit in the abbreviated backseat behind me. The stereo is blaring, but I don't know the tune. Dad can't hear me over the radio. I look at my white socks again. He's telling me how he previews the music in a tiny earphone before turning on the stereo. I asked if he took the earplug from the cellphone for this. He can't hear me, the music is too loud.