I\u2019m dreaming of spaceships today. I want to write a story set in one.<\/p>\n
I need to write a story. It\u2019s only Tuesday here and my New Year is on Friday and I\u2019m writing your post nearly a week early because of that festival. I was going to tell you all about Medieval Jewish foodways in western Europe and about modem Jewish foodways in Australia and I was going to make you cravingly hungry for honeycake. I\u2019m derailing the whole conversation (one I haven\u2019t yet begun) because of my dream of spaceships.<\/p>\n
I won\u2019t tell you the dream itself, for it\u2019s going into a short story, later today. One short story set in a spaceship and I ought to be caught up on all my new fiction for Jewish New Year. What I want to talk about is the alternate path the dream did not take.<\/p>\n
Before 2020, I assumed that if someone were inside for months on end, when they went outside, finally, I would have a Rip van Winkle experience. I would emerge to a strange place I did not recognise: the rest of the world would have moved on.<\/p>\n
This is not at all what happened when I went to medical appointments last week. Sure, the streets look at bit different. I emerged to a financial recession, after all, where the strict COVID limits on who can do what. Overcrowding is rare and people are more scattered. There are crosses and lines to mark safety.<\/p>\n
I knew about these changes, however, before I encountered them. Rip van Winkle emerged to a place he did not know and that he did not understand. While he was asleep, he was out of sync with the outside world.<\/p>\n
It would take an active choice to be out of sync right now. Or a second terrible moment, like the wildfires in the US or riots or\u2026 a great deal of what\u2019s happening in the world right now. Multiply the peril and one\u2019s focus turns to keeping going. I suspect the US has many Rips right now.<\/p>\n
Given my last twelve months, I assumed that this is what would happen to me. That I would emerge into a changed world and I would not belong to it at all. When I found that this wasn\u2019t at all true, I needed another metaphor. Washington Irving failed me. It\u2019s tragic that he did not fail the US.<\/p>\n
I explained my situation a bit more clearly to a neighbour\u2019s friend when I put my rubbish out (this was such a big accomplishment! Once this statement would have been sarcastic \u2013 right now it requires the exclamation mark.). My neighbour\u2019s friend failed me in a different way when I emerged.<\/p>\n
When we told each other what we did for a living and I said I was a writer, he took my earlier admission of disability to mean that I filled in my time writing. He was nice about me turning my disabled state to good use.<\/p>\n
This was when I fell out of sync with the world. Had working for a living changed since I last spoke to a stranger? He moved off the \u2018occupation for a person with disabilities\u2019 and onto the \u2018does this out of passion\u2019 thing. If we meet a few more times, maybe he\u2019ll see the professional side of writing, and understand that being disabled doesn\u2019t actually mean having a lesser life. It\u2019s a life with restrictions and much medical stuff, but it\u2019s capable of being amazingly rich. Mine is that life. I commented to him that I was bored for a whole hour earlier this year and I looked at the boredom and examined it closely and exclaimed in wonder at it and that is when I discovered that I was no longer bored.<\/p>\n
This is why I had the spaceship dream.<\/p>\n
I was never Rip van Winkle. I\u2019m in a small spaceship. I can talk to other people and am in touch with the whole world of I want to be, but I\u2019m in a spaceship. No dinner parties. No long chats with friends around a pot of tea. No long walks in the spring sunshine. But I know what\u2019s happening and can be a part of it. It\u2019s only my physical presence in a place other than my spaceship that\u2019s not a given.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I\u2019m dreaming of spaceships today. I want to write a story set in one. I need to write a story. It\u2019s only Tuesday here and my New Year is on Friday and I\u2019m writing your post nearly a week early because of that festival. I was going to tell you all about Medieval Jewish foodways […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,56,15,17],"tags":[26,130,131],"class_list":["post-617","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-essays","category-life-experiences","category-memoir","category-rants","tag-gillian-polack","tag-rip-van-winkle","tag-spaceship"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/617","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=617"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/617\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":618,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/617\/revisions\/618"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=617"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=617"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=617"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}