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Nutshell Kingdom: Shalimar
2006
Fell asleep early with the light still on.
Dreamed I was a child, living in a giant empty parking lot. The lot went on and on. Weeds cracked up through old asphalt, painted white lines faded, lampposts stood like lonesome trees leafless and branchless and as dusk wound its way over the lot, no light emitted from them but instead a dull hum of electricity trying to force its way through like a flower trying to bloom through frozen ground. The sky is gray and immense. The lot goes on and on and when you look out over its expanse your stomach flips like when you lose your grip at the top of a ladder.
I was little boy and I lived on this lot with my parents who were cruel and lazy. Meanness and neglect and hunger glittered from my eyes like so many specks of broken glass across the lot where I lived. I saw my brother drop from a pick-up truck, knocked to the ground by the hand of my mother and then watched him scurry off to sleep on a dull pallet bed.
At dusk, I make a vortex of weather by cupping my hands together and swinging them through the air like I was making a giant bubble. This vortex contained winds and rain and hail and was about the size of one of those fat plastic baseball bats and twice as long. I would swing the weather against the pavement over and over, like a plastic bag full of glass, feeling the tempest shiver up my arms and into my poor shoulders until I could not stand.
And as I woke, an angel came to me and wrapped me in a warmth so that I could not fear. My room was lit and my blankets were heavy. For some reason, the word 'Shalimar' was on my lips, as if that word whose definiton I had never known was bestowed as a gift and a comfort, a password with which to survive anything, to take warmth in the coldest and hardest of situations, to survive without anger, to move up and out of whatever wreckage is to come and endure.
By the way, after my dream, I looked up the word 'shalimar' online. It was a perfume popular in the 50s that was supposed to carry an Eastern erotic mystique. It has been out of fashion since, except at incense stands and stores that sell essential oils. Before my dream, I had only heard of it in the Van Morrison song, "Madame George," which I had not listened to in quite some time.
