Justifiable Confusion

Scene: I’m in a car with David C. He’s in the driver’s seat, wearing a nice button-down shirt, looking at a map.

Scene: For some reason, I’m in the international terminal at the San Francisco airport. Oddly, the sound of distorted electric guitar is reverberating through the huge space.

Scene: I’m with a lead-footed ex-wrestler from Uzbekistan who speaks four languages and claims to live on Treasure Island. He tells me his name means “dream” or “wish.” We drive all over San Francisco, always screeching to a halt five feet past the stop signs: we’re near San Francisco State University, we’re at the beach, we’re on Geary St., we’re on a twisting little lane we fear getting permanently stuck in; we get to a road you used to be able to drive down, but it’s blocked and people are sitting right in the middle of the road drinking coffee. We pass the first place I ever lived in S.F., 27 years ago, and then the second.

No wonder I can’t figure out when I’m dreaming or not. The first scene above was a dream; the second occurred during waking life and so did the third, courtesy of SuperShuttle. It was fantastic—where else can you get a 105-minute tour of the entire city for only $17 with such a colorful and charming character, especially when you live only 10 minutes from the airport? I tipped him $20 and took his photo and there was much hand-shaking all around. (His name really did mean “dream.” You see the problem.)

There was one interesting thing about the scene that was actually a dream: While it was utterly indistinguishable from real life—David quite often wears a nice shirt—it did have the excellent property of coming true several hours after I dreamed it, when David and Lisa and I were in a Kenmore Air seaplane making our way from Seattle to Victoria, British Columbia, and I looked across the narrow aisle and saw David studying a map. We were in almost the exact physical configuration I saw in my dream, and he was doing the exact same thing.

The people playing the electric guitars in the international terminal at the airport—I was just going to Seattle, but that’s where the lavender-drenched Virgin America is—were members of Persephone’s Bees, and since the information about the gate for my flight was not imparted until worryingly late, I had plenty of time to listen to them, and it made me have to dab at my eyes with my hanky, it was so lovely and unexpected.

After my plane landed, I took the bus to downtown Seattle and Lisa met me at Convention Place Station and we walked to my hotel and then to an Ethiopian restaurant, where David (in a nice shirt) joined us. They walked me back to my hotel after dinner so I could get my requisite nine hours of sleep, and the next day, we took an itsy-bitsy seaplane to Victoria, and then a rental car to Butt Chart—oh, sorry, Butchart (say “boo-shart”) Gardens, where there are many, many, MANY flowers. We sniffed nearly every flower in the rose garden and took photos of our favorites. Nearly every soul there, including all three of us, had a digital camera along.

Before we boarded the first seaplane, which took off from Lake Union and seated just nine people plus the pilot, the pilot asked who would like to ride in the co-pilot’s seat in the cockpit. My hand shot into the air, but he, obvious misogynist, pretended he didn’t see me and asked the fellow next to him if HE’D like to ride in the co-pilot’s seat. When I was grumbling about this later, David and Lisa said that I should just ask the return pilot right away if I could sit in that seat; David also thought the fellow who got to ride in the cockpit might have been the pilot’s friend (in which case he shouldn’t have pretended he was taking volunteers; all right, so just possibly he wasn’t a misogynist).

Anyway, the advice of Lisa and David was excellent, and thus I did get to ride in the cockpit on the return trip, and see the view out the big front window. There were tiny windows on the pilot’s side and the co-pilot’s side that could be opened; we both had them open. When we got near Seattle, we could see the downtown skyline and Mt. Rainier beyond, which was stunning. I hadn’t wanted to distract the pilot, but at that point, I couldn’t resist pointing at the window and mouthing “Wow” and then the pilot and I grinned at each other and nodded vigorously, as if to say, “Yeah—cool!” Then I got out my camera and took a photo and the pilot did the same.

That evening we ate vegan Asian carryout at Lisa and David’s place and watched a DVD.