Making Sense Of It All

I often seem to have nightmares about being lost on foot in a city and running into stray dogs, which must be one of my great fears, although I wouldn’t know why. I have often gone to a strange city and wandered around alone, on foot, for hours and hours and hours. Some as large as San Francisco and others just whistle stops off the BART or the bus lines of other areas and I’ve really only had a few truly scary situations come up.

One of those was in the city I lived in for nearly thirty years and it was my own fault for being careless. I was looking for one of my children in a not so good part of town in the dark and a drunk threw himself on top of me, knocking me down and knocking the wind out of me. I don’t know what might have happened if a car load of noisy teenagers had not pulled into the parking lot almost immediately. As it was, they frightened him off and I was left very shaken, but really just fine.

Another time was when I was trying to get to a concert in a park in Berkley. The part that concerned me was walking through the park after the concert, because it would be dark and late and I would have to catch a bus back to the BART station. That part turned out to be easy. The hard part was getting there when I took a bus in the opposite direction by accident and ended up in a part of town where the people didn’t even smell like me and the bus driver refused to speak to me. She did eventually eject me from the bus and point to one going the other way, which I understood was a real gift at that point!

Most of the time I have just meandered my way through, stopping at coffee shops to rest, or read, or chat with someone I met. I have sat in unique little parks all over the country writing and watching the people around me and felt completely at ease. Once I had a small picnic with a man wearing a funny oversized hat high above Lake Tahoe. We sat on the edge of a bridge above a little waterfall, ate our sandwiches, and talked about the bear he’d just seen, a little higher up the mountain, but that was not in the city.

I’m more comfortable downtown alone for a million reasons. Bears are one of them. I am afraid of bears and dogs that I don‘t know, and I don‘t know any bears personally. They feel just like two versions of the same wooly toothy creature when I am alone and of course they sense my fear.

Fear is like a welcome mat for grumpy animals. It seems to annoy them and something about me always draws animals. If you want to see the local fauna, take me with you. I’m good for almost anything you’d like to see. Ask my children.

None of this explains my dreams. I don’t dream of bears, except as a sort of spirit animal and then I always feel safe. I just dream of being lost and alone and at the mercy of urban “wolves.”