Dreams - Wednesday night, January 24

I was riding on a schoolbus of adults and teenagers going to a volleyball match. My friend, Gooner, was on the bus too, and I was trying to fill out a scholarship form for her son, Dustin, who is also my godson. I was having trouble because the schoolbus ride was not only rocky, but I was supposed to write in pencil. At one point, Gooner complimented me on my handwriting, but she was referring to something that had been written in blue pen. I said that it wasn’t my handwriting, that it was the secretary’s.
Two former students of mine were also on the bus, along with a whole bunch of teenage boys who I didn’t know. We had all just been to a funeral, and one of my students was reading the program that had been given at the funeral, only it was like a program for a volleyball tournament.
At one point, there was too much light coming from the lamp a couple rows up – the woman sitting there was the aunt of the girl that had died. She was a middle-aged farming wife from Stanford. She turned around nicely and asked if it was too much light. I said yes. But, then she turned the light almost all the way off. One of my ex- students made a smart comment while looking through the program, where there was picture of the woman’s niece in a volleyball uniform. She said something like, “If your niece has just died, how do you know not to turn your light all the way off?”
We were seated almost at the back of the bus with the teenage boys while all of this was going on; they were very interested in my two former students, and one of the couples started dancing in the aisle. They were nice guys, just pretty hyper and a little rowdy. The teenage boy who was dancing looked like a younger and thinner version of Lurch from the Adam’s Family. He was wearing a letterman’s jacket and seemed to be unaffected by the funeral we had just attended. When he returned to his seat by the window at the end of one of the back seats, he seemed literally very far away, like one of those pictures you see on perspective, and a little sad.