Dreams are so melodramatic. Even if I can't remember the events or the characters or the situation, I usually recall a sense of high emotion, though not always which emotion. I keep a dream diary and every morning, before I write to you, I scrawl down whatever I remember. Many days I write "No memory"; other days I'm able to trace a version of a narrative. But this morning all I had was suspense. I wrote, "Something was about to be revealed about somebody's wife--"

Still, the drama in that scrap! What could "something" be? Who is this "somebody" with a wife? Why is the "wife" known only as a wife and not as a somebody in their own right? And "revealed about" . . . is the wife complicit in whatever might be revealed? or is something spurious about to be shared without the wife's consent? Passive voice construction obscures who will be doing the revealing, which adds to the suspense.

My brain invented these confusions yet structured them formally, established a purposeful literary frame for them. My dreams are not a mash of person/place/thing. They are arranged for transmission--as a sentence is arranged, as a story is. Dreams may not make sense, but the form of their telling makes sense.

* * *

I slept pretty well last night, better than the night before. My mom's in the hospital, awaiting hip surgery on Monday, and in many ways that's a relief for all of us . . . we don't have to obsess about another fall in the house. Yesterday, Tom called me a fretboard: both a worrier and the receiver of everyone else's worry--phone calls and texts, phone calls and texts, all morning long. Finally he said, "Let's go out for Chinese food," and so he drove us downtown to Empire, where we had a beautiful lunch of noodles and dumplings. Then we spent an hour or so ambling through the used-furniture store and the used bookstore. I came back with a stack: A. S. Byatt, Penelope Fitzgerald, Irene Nemirovsky, Terrance Hayes . . . and also, for the first time ever, saw two of my own books in a "used poetry" section. I guess it was inevitable.

I still don't know when I'll be going to Vermont, whether there will be a rehab stint after the surgery, whether I'll need to sub in for my sister, whose son is heading to college this week . . . all is blurry. But I'm grateful for your notes and calls. You've been through this too, and your advice and support are invaluable. Thank you.