J Shows Up Again . . .
. . . in a dream of another one of his guy friends.
Bo (a major character in our semiautobiographical thriller Brains & Brawn, if you’d like to meet him) dreamt that he went to J’s old apartment in New York and there was J, eating a slice of pizza. (You’ll remember that my old friend Margie, who’s here helping me pack right now, wrote to me that J would no longer be hungry because “the soul doesn’t have a stomach.” My two-word response was, “His does.”) Bo says, “I thought you were dead!” and J puts his finger to his lips and says, “Sshhhhh! I’m just pretending to be dead. I don’t want anyone to know I’m alive except you.” Then I came in (apparently the other exception to the rule), and the three of us started shooting the breeze just like old times.
Ambiance 
Melinda said,
April 6, 2011 at 6:40 pm
They also don’t sleep: The Single-Bedded Life
karen said,
April 6, 2011 at 8:46 pm
i love that, esp the way you ended it.
It says that the post was written in Dec of ’07– it’s hard to think it’s been that long, it seems like a closer time than that- i used to read your blog quite a bit back then and your link reminds me i can go back.
amba12 said,
April 6, 2011 at 10:50 pm
OMG, Melinda!
Melinda said,
April 8, 2011 at 8:04 am
Karen: Thanks!
Amba: I remember that dream very well. Jim was in the living room yelling, “And where am I gonna sleep?” “I didn’t know you were coming back!”
Another dream I had around that time, when I was giving away a lot of stuff–some of it I’d been holding on to since my immediate post-college days–is that I’d come home and Jim was there and he’d filled the apartment with sawhorse tables painted bright pink. I’m not even gonna begin to figure out what that one meant, except that the guy used to hang on to a lot of impractical stuff!
karen said,
April 9, 2011 at 6:06 pm
Melinda– i wasn’t sure i should have said that after reading amba’s comment.
I think i was back here looking back then as opposed to how having a dream like that at that time might have felt.
Melinda said,
April 10, 2011 at 11:40 am
Karen: That’s okay. My feelings at the time were conflicted, maybe because when someone dies after a lingering, disabling illness you feel like you’ve been grieving by inches for a long time, and you also feel a little relief that you don’t have to worry about them anymore.
On one hand, I would wake up missing Jim and feeling sad that it was just a dream and he wasn’t here anymore, and on the other hand I was relieved that my apartment wasn’t full of pink sawhorses.
karen said,
April 10, 2011 at 2:35 pm
I love the people here, amba.
Will you keep us?
amba (Annie Gottlieb) said,
April 10, 2011 at 2:50 pm
Me, too. Will y’all stay??
(I get some points for 4 years as a Southerner.)