Dream A Little Dream Of Mom

Last night's dream:

My mom was living alone after my dad died.  We siblings had been watching over her, and she felt like we were telling her what to do too much so she ran away.  We eventually found her in a small town in Indiana – somewhat like GC or her childhood hometown.  I went to see how she was.

I found her along the main street “working” at a diner.  She wasn’t actually employed there – just that the owner-grill cook (a sort of Aunt Jemima-type person altho I never saw her and she could have been a man) kind of looked out for her and let Mom help.  There were café-type tables for the customers to sit at on the sidewalk in front of the diner.  Mom stood outside near the door holding a tray filled with cheeseburgers.  They looked really delicious: tasty, greasy, melted-cheesy burgers.  I guess Mom was sort of serving the hamburgers altho she wasn’t waitressing and I never saw anyone take one.  At one point Mom did pick up a triple-thick cheeseburger (3 meat patties) and take a big bite then put it back on the tray I suppose for someone else to select.

She was happy as a clam.  Pretty oblivious to anything going on around her, at times kind of flighty but able to focus on whatever it was we talked about.  At some point Mom removed a bunch of silverware she had stored in her pocket.  She took two forks and intertwined the tines together to straighten the ones that were bent.  I got the impression that she was familiar with the priest and church in town – that they watched out over her.

She told me she worked at the hospital, too.  I think she just sort of hung out there and they were used to seeing her around and treated her like a likeable stray dog, come and go as she pleased, everyone pleasantly greeting her.

We must have gone to her “apartment.”  [Reminded me of Harrison Ford’s apartment in The Fugitive – the one in Chicago that he rented from the Polish woman – altho Mom had only one room.]  I remember Mom pointing to her green rocker-recliner and saying Susan had given it to her.  She mentioned Susan a couple other times in the context that Susan had told her something or given her something.  And this made me wonder why Susan had never told us that she was in communication with Mom and where she was.

There was also something in the dream about Mom being barefoot and walking on stones along a railroad track.  I don’t quite know what that was about, but it reminded me of the train tracks that run through the center of her childhood hometown.

Basically, Mom was daft but happy.  She giggled and brushed aside anything that could be worrisome.  And everyone in the town looked out for her.  Kind of like Alfie Landau in GC.