"If you want to make God laugh, tell Him your plans"·.Old Proverb
Mine is a quirky, playful deity-more like an eleven-year-old boy than a wise and thoughtful old White man. Not so much Zeus, a lot more Pan. For example, a couple of weeks ago, I had begged a deadline extension from a person running a radio play contest. This kind anonymous stranger cheerfully gave me two weeks more in which to hang myself, to touch every one of the thousands of stored pieces of paper I own, to empty file drawers that contained student essays from 1901 or so.
I even had the audacity to beleaguer Michael Feldman (of "Whaddaya Know?)-actually to bug his producer-for a copy of the play I had tried to slip him over the transom that summer. I'm sure THAT was filed in the "round-file" before the Great One ever cast his eye upon it, but his producer was very nice in trying to find it. Meanwhile, in my colorful imagination, the lost play assumed gigantic proportions of excellence. My memory of it was that it was "taut and brilliant," though apparently not so brilliant that I could recall enough to rewrite it.
It had actually been a sleep-written play, as this essay is. I dreamed enough of it to get me started, then awoke at five am (the present time) to finish it. But, unlike some of my Edward Casey-type scribblings, this one actually kind of held up to the light of day and didn't stink too bad. Most of the time, listening to somebody recount her or his "really cool and weird dream" is like listening to somebody describe the great diet he found on the 'Net.
In the next few days, I searched disk after disk of old floppies-the giant kind. My husband had salvaged the most likely ones from the attic, but I had to run them on my office computer, which is the only one still in existence to even HAVE the kind of port they take. This took hours and was depressing. To demonstrate how long it had been since that drive was touched, when I ejected a disk, an actual dust bunny flew out along with it. So much dross, so little gold. Mountains of kilobyte typing, so few places to sled.
I finally gave up on the evening of the deadline. Called the contest woman and told her to take the piddly piece of junk I'd sent her (I even called it that , I think. PR was never my long suit.) I slept poorly. My friend in Maine, a wonderful writer who had read the piece and called it funny, slept poorly too, since I kept begging him to search his mountains of writing. We all came up empty. Dark and hidden, like a tulip bulb beneath the snow, the play became monumental-witty, warm, insightful, maybe the best thing written by anybody this century. (And I'm writing this on the very eve of the eve of the century turn also, so I should know.)
The next morning, I rolled over in bed and groped around for my glasses, tipping a glass of water, sending the TV remote clattering to the floor, nudging the Vicks Vap-o-rub jar, and settling on a disk-labeled with the play's title. Now, I wrote this play at least ten years ago, directly on the computer I haven't had at home for at least seven of those years, and waves of detritus like lava have flown and rivered around that nightstand since. I bolted upright and shouted to Ken to wake up , that there had been a miracle. Miracles are rare in Ken's life, so he was groggily able to oblige me while I tremblingly slipped in the rare disk. Ken swore he hadn't put it on the nightstand, Alex was clueless, and the cats, Dumb and Dumber, would be more likely to bury it in the litter box than fetch it to me had they found it.
After some conversion and editing for computer-assisted gibberish, it WORKED, for one ·lousy·page-- of about a five page play. The rest was perdu-sent to perdition-unrecoverable-hopelessly, as the computer likes to judge things-"corrupt." As if that weren't bad enough, that one page was nothing like as gem-like as the one in my memory. (Though, of course, still a winner had I been able to recover the whole thing. Never mind that it was a day late on the second extension.) Now why did God do that? And just now, to underscore His or Her knavish power, He or She has awakened me from a terrifying nightmare in which I was being pursued by a hideous criminal with a face half Hannibal Lector and half a garage mechanic I relinquished my car to once. He was intent on murdering me and I had hidden in a shed with a young buffoon man and his wife and their child and we could hear Hannibal coming, thrashing and the buffoon asked me for a dollar bill, which I produced instantly from my purse. He rolled it up and stuffed it in the mouth of a wine bottle which contained a little wine and then demanded a match, which I said I didn't have. He said "of course you do. You have to." And so I plunged my hand into the black hole which is my purse and found one match left in a matchbook. He struck the match just as the madman burst through the door and the wine bottle blew up with a tiny "poot," hurling a little wine my way and thus pointing me out in the semi-gloom. Because we realized that we outnumbered him and he was on the ground, we piled onto him, pushing his head into a convenient hole under which flowed a river of molten lava (so uncreative are my dreams that it was easy to incorporate this bit from the Nova show I had watched on volcanoes that evening)
When I awoke we were holding him down by force and the baby had had an accident in her pants-she was sitting right on his head too. There were police sirens in the distance. Then I REALLY awoke to write this piece about how my God is a real cut-up. Gives me a Molotov cocktail and then makes it blow up with all the force of a party tooter. Speaking of which, a party tooter is what I'll be blowing if I can make it until midnight night after tomorrow night-seeing what kind of prankster God will be mine in the 2lst Century. I suppose the new God will be Soupy Sales. (Sorry about recounting my cool and weird dream-I only did it to show you by example how banal most dreams are.)
Norma Gay Prewett, (Gay Davidson-Zielske) 5:30 am , Eve of New Year's Eve, 1999