Dine In To Dine Out
My trash can was borrowed for popcorn over-flow apparatus and I was reminded that giant bags full of flavored popcorn would make for lovely pillows to crunch thoughts at night. However, I would prefer an assortment of flavors, or simply a bag of variety candy beans. Flavors for a wide-range of night owl favors. Either way I’m snacking in the early, mid and late night.
Tuesday morning’s dream reminded me of my first ever day of college classes and something that farm kids like myself who go to public school in the same one story building for 12 years with no knowledge of door or room numbers, never know about until they step into a real world building. My dream had me starting school again, which started-up / triggered first day anxiety jitters. My friend and fellow high school art peer, though we didn’t attend college together, and in real life we spoke over the phone the day before the first day of classes, Matthew, was with me and we were on a search through every cavity and strange addition to reach our Drawing 1 destination in what is/was the properly titled “Art Annex” on the campus of then Southwest Missouri State University (now Missouri State University) in Springfield, MO.
Matthew and I lugged around our official U.S. Army cannister discards and sold to civilians at a reasonable price, stickered up and decorated to reflect personal taste and with expression to announce to the real world that the real artists had indeed arrived, each filled with what we thought were the latest one-dimensional (sometimes two) marking and shape forming tools, arrogantly pre-purchased before glancing at the first-day syllabus, which we ran late to get to. Our giant pads of newsprint paper big enough to sleep under, widened the path, clearing the brush of every painting room we past. But, where was Drawing 1 in Rm. 204? (I can’t exacto the room number, but it was on the second floor, and the only other floor besides the first floor in an actual living building and even my dream. Usually a dream will mutate your Grandma’s weird floral carpet with Bruce Wayne’s bedroom, a golf club locker room and something like “The Art Annex”, but Tuesday morning it was full-on “The Art Annex” that I at least remember).
Not wanting to ask for directions, as there was no gas station nearby and I made the same catch of intimidation that I did over ten years ago by a janitor who shot looks of pre-mediation murder and a hint of a vanished “I want to be an artist when I grow-up” melancholy every time some kid with a loan and his or her life ahead of them tracked in mud behind them or spilt plaster and paints to make a permanent art piece unless he cleaned it up. He was a janitor that I once saw browsing the men’s blouses at a thrift store on a Saturday morning at 10:15 in 1999. He was a janitor that I longed to get-to-know, even if he did scare me a little bit. He was a janitor, maybe still is, that never knew that I too would one day become a janitor. I shifted back into, “Matthew. Come on, we need to find Rm. 204.”, as we continued to tick over the class start time and tick-tock-off all who we passed in the corridors and opened doorways to classes already started.
12 mintues past 8:00 AM (yeah, a ridiculous time to start drawing upright with 28 others and no room for wiggle or aggressive pencil stroking), a kind second year student girl (She was a girl! My first actual encounter and potential conversation with an actual college girl!) saw the zit breakout, red cheeks and anxiously first-day look behind yellow locks and flailing arms full of what we thought were Drawing 1 supplies (and they certainly were, I thought), accompanied behind by a Matthew’s unhurried manner and kind grin as we rushed towards a staircase, the last possibly place that might help lead us to Rm. 204. She asked if I needed help as she dried her recently washed hands on her stained shirt. Awkwardly checking my watch instead of her I blurted, “Uh!? Where is Rm. 204!?” Pointing up the stairs with what I think was one of her middle fingers, she moved passed us and down the corridor, leaving in the air a grin of “Stupid Freshman didn’t know that the No. 2 on the front of that room number means 2nd Floor.” Trying to overcome what I thought she thought of me in a world where there weren’t supposed to be any “stupid questions”, I think I said, “Thanks”. Which, this whisper probably didn’t get back to her, especially over the clobbered and bang of deaf we caused up the stairs and stairwell with heavy feet and aching supply arms to Rm. 204. We blew open the door, high-fiving in a shade of mock bazookas (of course) to interrupt a full, irritated-lookin’ class who had each just received their syllabus for the fall semester and were on their way out the door, excused early to purchase supplies, as we had just come in with our own.
I then crawled out into Tuesday morning, thinking how I always allowed my way into class an added twenty or thirty minutes cushion after my very first day of college classes, assuming that Rm. 204 was the second of four rooms upon entering the English building. I then found out, and out of breath, that rooms that start with a 2 are on the second floor. At least this was so in real world measurements.
-djg