“Adolescent Daydreams”

“Once his mother left the room, he flounced toward the bed and dropped himself down onto it with the dead weight of a falling dumb bomb. Horizontal, eyes closed, arms extended along his sides: this was the position he assumed as he wrestled with the nymphs, wolves, and ghosts of adolescence. In the background, the Young Rascals’ “Groovin’” set the tone for his daydreams. “I can’t imagine anything that’s better / The world is ours whenever we’re together / There ain’t no place I’d like to be instead of / Groovin’ on a Sunday afternoon.” The sweet dreamscapes, swollen by divine inflatus, hung in lacy filigree, and misted with rose-bloom vapor, that arose in response to this music, were Edenic. They carried the scent of an ancient world existing prior to the differentiation of “I” and “other.” Colored in hues drawn from sea waves, rainbows, spring grass, cumulus clouds and fresh sky, they foreswore the dissimulating, split-the-difference grays and browns of fallen humanity. Moving with the rhythms of tides and storm gusts, pelting rains and the wing flaps of a hundred broad-winged birds, they encompassed the music of nature and the dance of life.”