Every Third Thought Read Online Free PDF Page B

get-up-and-pees—followed finally by what this long fanfare has been snail’s-pacing toward. Having made his way from night-lighted bathroom through darkened boudoir and climbed back into their bed’s His side (on his mate’s right, in our right-handed household, so that when the couple turn to each other his “good” arm is uppermost, free to caress . . . ), he found himself suddenly overwhelmed by a strange, strong, out-of-nowhere vertigo , followed by

DREAM/VISION/TRANSPORT/WHATEVER #1
    A sort of prolonged flash: no “action,” but an extraordinarily alive 3-D not-quite-still shot, with all senses operating. Wintertime sunset over brown frozen marsh and gray expanse of open water, viewed from fixed position well above scraggy loblolly pines. No people in sight, but Viewer (stationary) feels . . . accompanied . Also distinctly feels frigid air on face, and both sees and hears stereophonic strings of geese and ducks out over marsh—some below eye level. Overall sensation stirring, even mildly exciting in its vividness.
     
    End of “vision”: G.I.N. waked or revived flat on back in dark bedroom beside slumbering spouse, head feeling a bit odd still, but rapidly normalizing. Wondered What the fuck? , shaken
not by vision’s unalarming content (generic tidewater scene, unusual only in its oddly elevated viewpoint), but by its startling clarity and full sensory accompaniment on the heels of that brief dizziness—a vertigo not felt in the “dream” itself and now all but cleared, so he guessed he wouldn’t bother Mandy with it unless and until (Zeus forefend) something like it recurred. In which case, he promised himself, he would duly consult the Todd/Newett primary care physician. His Upon-Avon Shakespeare House fall was, after all, five symptom-free weeks behind him. . . .
    No recurrences, thankee thankee thankee Z., at that night’s second and third urinations, with normal sleep and normally half-coherent dream-fragments between; nor any the next day and night, nor the next and next. One gratefully presumed therefore that one was out of the woods, concussionwise if not musewise, and returned to one’s futile workday-morning fiddling with that fall/fall/life-seasons stuff, accumulating page after page of notes on this and that aspect or possible significance, week after week while the world ground on and mortal time ticked by. Leaves fell, as did the U.S. housing market and the Dow-Jones Industrial Average. First frosts froze. Thanksgiving, first snow flurries, Pearl Harbor Day, and first light snow accumulations (short-lived) as autumn ran its run and the days shortened toward winter solstice.
    Equinox. Solstice. Equinox. Solstice. “Bitch is definitely trying to tell me something,” our man re-reported presently to his Mandy—with whom, of course, he had shared his peculiar,
all-but-actionless “vision” (minus its preliminary vertigo) in the hope that her 20/20 poet’s eye might see more in it than his prosaic and bifocaled ones had managed to. But all she could offer was “Maybe if you invoked your personal Parnassian more politely?” So “Prithee, Ma’am?” he begged in effect through mid-December, returning in daily vain to his brief written description (in italics, supra ) of that all-but-actionless though curiously happy-feeling winter marsh-scene.
    And then one day , as we Once-Upon-a-Timers get around to saying one way or another—Friday 12/21/07 it was, in fact: just before the solstitial noon—as George Irving Newett entered StratColl’s own unassuming Shakespeare House 1 to meet his Mrs. in her office and do lunch together in a nearby pizzeria, the low step-up over a wooden doorsill from its screenless,
almost ramshackle front porch into what had originally been the bungalow’s living room and was now an informal student lounge area reminded him (for the first time, oddly) of the high stone entrance step of that other Shakespeare House, where on a certain previous