LETTERS FROM HOME: A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM ABOUT PEACE, LOVE, UNDERSTANDING

A midsummer night's dream about peace, love & understanding

July 29, 1999

But earthlier happy is the rose distilled,/Than that which withering on the virgin thorn/Grows, lives and dies, in single blessedness. -- "A Midsummer Night's Dream"

Dear Gail,

In Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream," the faerie queen Titania awakens from her reverie to discover she's in love with an ass.

"That happens all the time," quips DC, smiling so sweetly.

In my midsummer night's dream, I sleepily arise to go to the bathroom, walk through the wrong door and knock over a flower pot that belonged long ago to Miss May Greene, locally famous educator. When I return to bed, DC asks what made the noise. When I tell her she gasps.

She has just had a bad dream about the magical garden May Greene once tended when her house was at the corner of Themis and Fountain streets. DC grew up listening to our friend Judy Crow tell stories about the fairyland May Greene created.

The ghost of the garden that now occupies the corner only hints at its former splendor. DC's bad dream was that one day no one will be left to tell of Miss May Greene' garden. It will return to being a fantasy.

The clamorous owl, that nightly hoots, and wonders/At our quaint spirits.

DC also dreamt that Hank and Lucy were in a car and smothered in the heat that has dogged our July. But they are fine. The animal to worry about was Jacques, the turtle that lives in a tiny swimming pool behind my in-laws' house.

It seems Jacques had become moribund in the heat and was in danger of turning into soup.

In the night, imagining some fear/ How easy is a bush supposed a bear!

The college women next door to us have abandoned the house they rented. They decided to move out, leaving most everything behind, because a woman was shot and killed last month half a block east. Two weeks earlier and a block south, a closing-time fracas broke out after a policeman attempted to arrest a man outside a bar.

This is life in the neighborhood once known as Happy Hollow.

We live almost peaceably with snakes and groundhogs but struggle to live with each other.

You spotted snakes with double tongue/thorny hedge-hogs, be not seen;/Newts, and blind-worms, do no wrong;/Come not near our fairy queen.

When we returned home late a few hot nights ago, DC suggested we go skinny dipping in our neighbors' children's pool. I suggested that could be dangerous given the current tenor of the neighborhood.

We watched a bit of "A Clockwork Orange" on TV. Amazing how ordinary violence once so shocking has become. We turned the channel.

Peace and love were trademarks of Woodstock thirty years ago. The latest festival will be remembered for arson and looting and cynical music. But once-cynical Elvis Costello was there singing love songs.

I wonder if he sang that tune "What's So Funny About Peace, Love and Understanding?"

My midsummer night's dream is for those who are sleeping to awaken.

Love, Sam