When I was a kid I loved going to the science museum (and I still do to be honest). Halfway down the stairs to the basement was a piece of ancient seabed—parallel petrified ripples, completely still but somehow fluid. This morning, for just a moment, the pre-dawn sky was the seabed upside down. Straight ripples of clouds stretched across the southern sky, each line edged with pink, the rest a sandy gray.
By the time I parked, the usual morning sky was back, the ripples flattened and kicked aside by some mindless force. A co-worker held open a glass door for me and said, “Weren’t we just here?” The nights seem to go so quickly. Unless you’re not sleeping well.
Last night I woke up with a sense of time. I always know what time it is. I knew it was about 1:30, but I checked my watch anyway. My shoulder was getting sore. I turned over, rearranged the covers, and must have drifted back to sleep because at 3:30 by my reckoning, I opened my eyes again. The right side of my nose had closed off, so I turned back onto my shoulder. This pattern repeated a few times, broken up by a couple of trips to the bathroom. I know that I slept because I dreamed.
How is it possible to know something has happened but have no memory of it? Dreams don’t leave footprints, they don’t open doors, they don’t leave the kitchen light on. But they must leave something, because I know with absolute certainty that I dreamed last night. My latest hypothesis is that dreams disrupt my rigid sense of time. For me time is everything. Dreams laugh at time.
This morning our waiting room smelled particularly sterile. The room was empty but at regular intervals a foamy dollop of alcohol dropped in front of the counter. The sanitizer dispenser is brand new. The old ones were terrible but if you hit them with just the right amount of force in just the right spot, they did their job. The foam dripped onto the industrial carpet, leaving a dark circle the size of a silver dollar, with lighter rings spreading out until the carpet became itself again.
My manager cleaned off a chair for a visitor today. The wipe smelled like a tropical hotel lobby. I closed my eyes and thought of a beach in Mexico. I pulled my goggles over my eyes, and floated facedown in the warm water. Then gentle regular waves built ripples on the sandy ocean floor. I nodded off for a second, but didn’t dream.
I’ve seen the same soft lines on the floor of Lake Michigan too, studded with rocks—granite, coral fossils, sea glass. If the temperature is just right, I can float there forever, rocking slowly in the waves, sun on my back. Floating there, it’s easy to lose track of time. The only clock is the building need to breathe.
I haven’t found a piece of sea glass in a few years. Plenty of plastic bottles wash ashore. I like to get up early and walk the beach after a storm, looking for Petoskey stones. I’m very good at it. I can spot a dry, gray rock and know if it’s worth wetting to see the hexagonal pattern appear by magic. I fill my pockets and wonder when the lake will run out of fossils.
A hundred and fifty years ago, a lumberjack sat on a wooden pier, pulled up his wool collar against the wind and took a glass bottle out of his coat. He glanced around and drained it, warmth spreading across his skin. Just as the foreman’s boots stepped onto the planks, the bottle dropped into the lake, empty. When the lake was a sea, it made coral for millions of years. My daughter has never drunk Coke from a glass bottle.
