Looked in the mirror to brush my hair this morning and remembered what I had been dreaming maybe an hour or so earlier. A friend had driven me to Madison Street, the downtown of the next suburb over, to get a haircut. I'd sat in the chair in the window of a salon while a short, stocky blonde man fussed and waved his hands around my head telling me what should be done. He went off somewhere and my friend grabbed some scissors and did the cutting. Later in the dream I looked in a mirror and wow, it was one bad haircut. Nothing left on the sides, strange knotty sticking-up places on top. I had wanted to go back and pay the salon guy for my haircut, but my friend said, no, why pay him, he didn't do anything, let's just go. And then we were in a neighboring, empty storefront, and someone threw a body through the half-open front door and gosh, sigh, we were going to have to figure out a way to get rid of it.
We couldn't identify the body. And, dear readers, lest any of you are concerned, I can't identify the friend who cut my hair dream either. It was a composite of -- well, many of you.
Madcap adventures that some psychologists would ask me to pay deep attention to, and most would suggest I just disregard. Yes, as we like to say at The Perverse Lutheran, what does this mean?
I try to post at least once in my blog every February, to mark The Perverse Lutheran's beginning in February of 2006. I wish I had something more coherent than a dream this Monday morning, but here are three things from the weekend I was still pondering at 5am this morning:
The dissonance of yesterday afternoon's Bach cantata. But how does one write about that? Words can't do what music can. That's why it's music. Even the text of the cantata itself pales next to what Bach did with it.
Transfiguration Sunday and the "burying" of the alleluia until Easter. In yesterday morning's children's sermon, the pastor asked, what does alleluia mean? "Rise up," said one child, which is not exactly right, but is still intriguing." Alleluia means praise God," said the preacher, when there were no more answers from the kids. This is, of course, true, but not enough. I say, alleluia means what it means: vowels and consonants sung in many keys, many melodies, through joy and sorrow. Praise, triumph, victory, heavenly longing, communal singing. Majesty. Easter. Not a word, but an orientation.
Thing three: some highlights from the creative writing showcase at Friday afternoon's tenth anniversary celebration of Opportunity Knocks, the program for disabled teens and young adults that is such an important part of my daughter's life. At the microphone: Sonya with a song lyric, Claire with a poem, and Eliza, my daughter, with a bit of romance. And finally the always radiant Jessica, declaiming her biography from her wheelchair. I typed her final sentence into notes on my phone: "I will never give up no matter how hard life gets."
Bad haircuts, crazy dreams, chromaticism, chaos -- I keep trying. And on Monday morning I say, Alleluia.
