Dreaming of Mountains

            I was at a school/resort in the Rocky Mountains. The lobby had enormous picture windows looking out onto two magnificent towering peaks standing side by side from which rocks and snow were falling into the school’s fountained and landscaped courtyard. We could not leave because of the avalanches and so we were trapped in the grand, luxurious old building. The professor was a woman about my age with short, dark hair. I found her very attractive and I was on my way to her bedroom when I woke up.

I spent a lot of Friday working on my review of Shab-e She’r but in the late afternoon I took a bike ride. I had checked the temperature online and found it to be 12 degrees, which was similar to the day before, so I just wore an undershirt and my hoody. It turned out to feel chillier than indicated and so I could have been more comfortable if I’d worn my leather jacket, but once I got pedaling it wasn’t too bad. At Bay and Bloor a flabby middle-aged guy crossed in front of me with no shirt on. The peak of his baseball cap was bobbing rhythmically up and down to whatever music he was listening to and the jacket-wearing crossers were amused by his shirtlessness.

            I decided this time to cross all the way to Broadview. On the way back across the bridge I noticed that the annoying posts that had separated the bike lane from the road are gone. Now any drivers that might get the sudden urge to go bowling for cyclists will be unhindered.

            On my way down Yonge Street, on the left sidewalk a bunch of young white stoners had lost control pf the tennis ball they’d been playing with. On the right a guy of East Indian origin or descent kicked it back to them. It rolled under the passing cars and made it back to them. They started shouting, “Wooo! MVP buddy!”

            When I got home I got back into writing my review but after over an hour of work suddenly the building felt like it had been slammed by a whale and there was a quick fiery flash before the power went dead. It had been the wires on O’Hara that had flashed. I looked out the window and saw that a cop car had been passing just when the sound and the flash had occurred so they got out to call it in. Within a minute or a so the power came back on and the police things shrugged and drove away. I turned my computer back on, worried that I might have lost what I’d written for the last hour, but there was a recovered document with everything I’d written.

            That night I watched a very predictable Alfred Hitchcock Hour teleplay about medical missionaries in the jungles of India. The late middle-aged couple that run the mission are Thomas and Mary. Their secret is that Thomas has no medical talent and so all the major procedures are performed by Mary. Their organization has sent a young missionary couple, John and Lucy to visit their mission and learn from them. Mary thinks they’ve been sent to spy and that they want to take over. Thomas thinks that John is dedicated and sincerely wants to help others but that Lucy doesn’t like it there. They receive word of a cholera epidemic several days journey away and John volunteers to deliver the medicine, but Lucy stays behind. Thomas and Lucy become close friends and one night they take a canoe ride together. Lucy tells Thomas that John has always done anything she wanted and so she finally insisted that they do what he wanted and so that’s why they are there. She says John is dedicated to her and his mission but she can never be equal to his love and it’s too great a burden. Thomas says that too much is put into dispassionate love and not enough into passion. He tells her, “If I was your husband I wouldn’t praise your gentleness, kindness or nobility. I would praise your beauty and treat you as a woman!” Mary has been watching them from her window and when they come back, after Lucy has gone to bed, Mary goes to her room with a scalpel. We can see through the mosquito net the stabbing take place. When John comes back he is informed that Lucy has died from cholera and that Thomas and Mary had to go a few days journey away to administer to the sick. John forces some locals to reveal Lucy’s secret grave in the jungle. He opens it and is shocked by what he sees. We can’t see it but I knew what he saw. John races to intercept Thomas’s canoe and shoots the couple. The woman that he kills of course is Lucy.