There are three recurring dreams I have with some frequency. One is an unhappy dream. The other two always have me waking up feeling good.
The unhappy dream involves moving from one house or apartment to another, not because I want to but because I am forced by some circumstance—and often it involves moving out of Florida altogether and to someplace much colder—usually back to New York, whence I came to the Sunshine State in 1984. I wake up with a heavy heart.The other two, as I said, are happy dreams. They both involve my returning to work I did in what feels like a previous life. Of course it was not literally a previous life but was so long ago, and my circumstances were so different than they are today, that it feels like I was someone else.
In one recurring dream, I am once again editing for the publishing company all of whose magazines I edited for quite a span of years. Then, as now, I was a freelancer, an independent contractor working from home, but I had steady editing work for this particular company, made decent money, enjoyed what I did…and was very sad when they closed up shop and I lost the gig. In the dream, however, they have reopened, or they never closed, and I am editing for them as before. I always wake up happy from that one.
The other dream that leaves me glowing takes me back to an even earlier time, when I was living in New York and publishing an all-advertising format newspaper. Those were crazy days with many moments of sheer insanity, but my energy level ran high, and the money was good, too. The people who worked for me once a week on “deadline day” (Fridays) were a motley crew of mostly frustrated performing artists—actors, musicians, singers, dancers. A now-famous actress in her pre-fame days was among them, as well as a raft of others who never “made it,” and a very few people outside the arts who, for whatever reason, were available to work one day a week in the large combination living-and-professional apartment where my young daughter and I, along with, for a few years, my then Significant Other, lived, which also served as our office.
Deadline day put a lot of pressure on us, which we relieved with such activities as paper airplane flights and fights. (One time an unwary advertiser walked in the door just as an errant plane sailed into the entry foyer and whizzed by his ear.) Then there was the time—before the move to the large apartment, when we were still located in a smaller apartment in which we did not have the right to run a business—when an advertiser came to work out the layout of an ad, and there wasn’t an available chair anywhere. Even the terrace was occupied by proofreaders working in the fading daylight. I finally led the advertiser into my sleeping daughter’s bedroom, and we settled on the lid of her green, turtle-shaped toychest to go over his ad. (That was the straw that broke the back of the proverbial camel and precipitated our move to the larger apartment.)
Every few years I go back and reread LIFE BEHIND THE OFFICE, just to revisit those days. The book isn’t entirely about the humor (it’s a funny book) to be found in my misadventures running the newspaper from my home. There was humor to be found in other aspects of my life back then as well, and the book covers that, too. The last section of the book goes back even further and deals with my misadventures as a socially awkward teen. But while the average reader will read LIFE BEHIND THE OFFICE and laugh, my own personal laughter is mixed with a sense of poignancy.
I wouldn’t want to “return to those days of yesteryear” (as the old radio show intro said) and actually live them again, but I sure do enjoy revisiting them in print. And others who have read the book have told me they enjoyed it too, even without having been part of the bedlam themselves.
I bet you’d like it too! The way our phone number got confused with that of the call girl service – the misbegotten press junket to review a horrific show in out-of-town tryouts – my creative use of garbage as a ploy to meet my new neighbors – my mistletoe mistake – and more.