dreams of Zombie plagues... in my dreams.

I had a dream last night in which I was traveling across canada in order to escape an onrushing zombie plague. Then, I dreamed that I woke up and gave my friends a blow by blow of said zombie-plague dream, making revisions and embellishments as I went along.
Weird. Even in my dreams I can't resist a good old exaggeration. In fact, I felt so odd about the in-dream dream revising, that when describing the zombie portion of the dream in actual, wakeful reality, I down-played the hell out of it. But trust me, the zombie evading was crazy intense.
Oh, and at the very end of the exposition portion of the dream, curtains pulled back and I realized that I was sitting in the audience of a giant theatre while my friends were sitting on the stage. When I finished telling them the souped-up tales of zombie fleeing, they all got up and did a bizarre celebratory dance/tumbling routine to convey their remarkably excessive adulation.
Any ideas what this might mean? Other than that I'm a pathologically embellishing narcissist?

Walking

No one walks here. I find that very odd. Everyone rides small motorcycles around town.
The only ones that walk are foreigners and little kids, though some of the little kids have their own motorcycles too. I was strolling back from the store yesterday and I was passed by a kid who couldn't have been more than eight, cruising down the street on his little honda.
And the bikes here all have cruise-y names lke: 'dream'. and 'viva'. and 'wave'. except one. There's actually a model of moto here called a 'smash'. A suzuki smash. Not the best name for motorized transport now is it?

sunsets and rainbows (and puppy dogs and cotton candy)

I'm currently staying on the top floor of a kindergarten in Battambang, Cambodia, and from my room I can hear the children laughing and playing in the classrooms below.
The door at the back of my little flat leads out to the roof, the best place to catch a nice breeze at the end of a hot, dry afternoon. A few of us were up there a couple of nights ago, waiting for the sun to set so we could break our fast with fresh mangos or dragon fruit or guavas or oranges (it's currently the Baha'i fast).
It had rained that afternoon, but the sky was clearing, the sun dipping low in the sky and ringing the clouds with gold. To the east, a double rainbow stood out against dark clouds in the distance.
I hear it's still winter in Canada.

Mongkul Borei

I was in a small village in the district of Mongkul Borei in western Cambodia a few days ago, working on a little photo/video piece about how the Baha'i community here is slowly (and sometimes not so slowly) transforming community life in a number of villages across the country by providing moral and spiritual education to children and youth. I know it doesn't sound like much, but it really is having a profound effect in some of these places. In this one village, over one hundred people were already involved and the demand for the classes was far exceeding the ability of the organizers to provide them.
Anyway the second day that I was there, we were waiting for a class that was supposed to start but the students were missing and the teacher had gone to find them. I was sitting with my friend Kuoy who was there to help with the classes and to help me with the translating. He was sitting under the tree, flipping though a book and would periodically break into song. I was pacing around, watching gusts of wind kick up little dust storms on the dry rice fields, pushing them into stands of bamboo that would rattle and dance and then fall silent again.
A few boys wandered into the scene, glanced over at us, and then walked over to the school building, disappearing inside. I wandered over to see what they were up to and as I approached, could hear them laughing and joking. I stood in the door for a moment, camera in hand, and watched them push desks around and write what only could be naughty khmer phrases on the blackboard and then rubbing them out. They didn't seem to notice me at all. While they played, I slowly raised my camera, eith the intention of checking light, fixing focus. Just as I was bringing the camera to my eye, one of the boys grabbed a small cushion that was lying in the corner to hurled it across the room. The cushion, which had clearly seen better days, began to leak its feathers the moment it left the boy's hand. Upon impact with his friend, the cushion exploded, filling the air with them.
The boys froze when my shutter clicked. All of them turning to face me. We just looked at each other for a moment, feathers hanging in the air, light slanting in from the door across from me. They stared. I stared. feathers drifted.
I shot a couple more frames in the moments before the feathers all settled back on the floor. The sound of the shutter seemed to release them and they all began to laugh, kicking the feathers up again and racing outside. As the last boy left, he turned and flashed me a smile, pulling his fingers up to his eye and clicking an imaginary camera before disappearing out the door.

The kite

It started with a kite.
I grew up on a farm outside of town and, other than my sister, there weren't many kids around to play with which meant lots of hours of entertaining myself.
And so it was, one suitably windy sunday afternoon, that I was flying my sister's kite out over the fields. It was fall, october probably, because I remember broken corn stalks poking up through plowed earth and the air was crisp and cool in a way it never was in the early spring.
The wind was coming in from the direction of town, pushing smoothly over the house and out over the broken corn, out over the empty fields. Lifting my kite up into the air, pulling the string smoothly off the spool.
I'm not sure why I thought this was a good idea, though I'm even more surprised that I had never tried it before, but this afternoon, alone with my kite at the edge of the field, the wind holding it strongly in the sky, effortless, motionless... boring.
So I let more string out, slowly at first, cautiously. But soon letting the spool spin freely in my hands, the kite climbing higher, shrinking away to a tiny dot.
So intently was I watching the kite that I didn't notice the string reaching the end of the spool. Even if I had have realized it was nearing the end, I doubt I would have been able to tell that it wasn't actually attached. And even if I had have realized it wasn't attached, I don't think I could have caught the string before it spun itself free and took off after the kite, lifting lazily over the field.
Luckily, when the string pulled free, it caused the kite to dip, and the string fell lower and began to drag along the ground. I took off after it running out into the field, over the rough ground and the broken stalks. As the string dragged along, it would catch on the corn stalks, tugging and pulling the kite slowly out of the sky. It crashed not far into the field, and I was able to grab the end of the string and start to pull it in. But the wind kept pushing the kite, and it rolled and tumbled over the ground. Being a 10 cent cellophane special, I knew it wasn't going to last long that way, so, in a panic, I began to gather up the string as fast as I could, winding it around and around my hand.
So with the kite safely in one hand and the string wrapped firmly around the other, I went back to fetch the spool, which I had dropped when I went chasing after the runaway kite. As I walked, I let the kite go and it immediately jumped back into the sky behind me, following along as I marched across the field and back into the yard. I knelt down to pick up the spool and began to let the kite pull the string off my arm, concentrating intently on the end of the string grasped firmly in my fist.
But it was october. and my fingers were cold. and the string had been wrapped around my hand for a while at this point and by the time I got to the end of the string, my fingers were completely numb and the string slipped from my grasp and sailed away a second time.
This time I just sat in the yard while the untethered kite lifted higher and higher, fading slowly away, obscured by distance and the tears of a boy who had just lost his sister's kite.
I walked into the house, climbed the stairs to my room and buried my face in my pillow. I cried both for the loss of the kite and for the legendary beating I was sure to get at the hands of my sister whose kite was now probably halfway to the sea.
But my father heard my crying and offered to come with me to find the kite. He was sure that it couldn't have wandered too far.
So my father and I put on our coats and our boots and set off across the field. I had never been to the far end of the field before. It was, it seemed, farther than I'd ever walked in my life. But together we walked, strolling and talking and enjoying an autumn afternoon. We walked to the very end of the field, and then across the field after that, and began to walk across the next one after that. It seemed like we had been walking for days, but I was afraid to turn back, afraid of what my sister might do.
And then halfway across that third field, a miracle appeared in the sky. It started as a little red speck in the sky. A bird perhaps, or a plane, or a cruel, cruel trick of the eyes.
But we kept walking, and the dot stayed. and grew. it bobbed and dipped and fluttered in the breeze.
It was only when we reached the fence that I realized what it was. A tiny knot at the end of the kite string had hooked itself on a tiny barb at the top of the fence and hung on. Hung on with the most precarious hanging.
We stood for a moment, watching the fence fly the kite. And then my father asked, "well? Aren't you going to grab it?"
I grabbed the end of the string, expecting it to jump out of my fingers again. My father helped me tie the end to the spool and I reeled it in slowly as we walked back to the house, back across three fields, three times farther, it seemed, than I had ever been in my life.
It was heroic really. and miraculous. and all of those other superflous words that don't actually apply to anything that happens in our daily lives. In my mind I can see us, ten feet tall and swaggering like cowboys, kicking up bits of dirt that glowed in the setting sun. And swelling music and rolling credits. I swear it happened just like that.

My father got sick a year ago, and by the time I got home from Israel to see him he was shriveled and weak, cancerous. Almost the first thing I did when I walked in the door was ask him about that day that neither of us had mentioned in 25 years.
"Dad, did you remember that day that we went to look for the kite?"
"I think about that day all the time."
"All the way across the field, and then all the way across the next one too."
"I couldn't believe that your little legs made it that far."
"And was it really stuck to the fence like I remember?"
"It was amazing."
He had to rest after that. The cancer in his lungs had taken his breath.
He lived two more weeks.