Awful Dreams

In a small café, customers stream through the door. I jot down orders that pile up as I wonder what’s happening in the back kitchen. The patrons are looking more and more displeased. I scurry table to table filling glasses running endlessly dry and simultaneously noticing the increasing number of empty napkin holders. Where’s the manager? Why is there nobody here but me? The order slips are almost gone. And now plates of food begin appearing in the back so quickly that I cannot recall to which table each one goes. I’m running and running, the proverbial dumb chicken but with its head still attached and throbbing! I hear the clamor of “Where’s our meal?” and more people keep entering through the door. Now I find myself in a plain white-walled classroom of my school. The clock on the wall ticks on and on as students trickle through the door. Students sit staring as I search a pile of papers for the attendance sheet. The papers fall and I just know my lesson plan is lost among the scattered sheets. I bend to pick them up and my brain is a fog. What am I to teach? I sift through the disarray as ticking seconds become minutes, and a silence pierces me as I view the stony faces before me. I try to mouth words, but they simply won’t come. I can almost feel the fidgeting of the students as my upper lip begins to twitch. I know they are thinking me an imbecile. As I stand dumb stricken, time is fleeing, and more students are entering the room. . . . . I awaken to the loud incessant ticking of the clock beside my bed. I’ll rise to greet my day, get into my car and meld with a stream of other people driving to their everyday jobs. There will be days that I encounter the cheerless or dissatisfied faces of strangers or even of family and friends. There will be times that I hasten frantically, feeling all is futile as bills pile up or work overwhelms me, and there are sure to be times when I will feel at an utter loss as I live vicariously the nightmarish woes which sometimes my husband must confront. How grateful I am for ordinary days whose hours of normalcy are heaven compared to the mind boggling misery endured throughout this world. And how thankful I am for ordinary days that greatly outnumber a few awful dreams!