Head scratching.

The One Who Must Choose 

In some traditions (Norse, Slavic, Celtic), fate is flexible. 

The naked dreamer stands at a crossroads, exposed but empowered.

When he was much younger, his mum had asked him to shave his da. She knew he wouldn’t want to but he could never turn down his mum. They both had that in common. His da dutifully trailed into the toilet. Leaned against the sink and let him soap his face. A Bic razor. No cuts. A tidy up before he died.

His da was brought up to believe unshaven men were dirty. Men with beards were no doubt Protestants with small mouths hiding behind that hair.

Nakedness = moral truth revealed, often painfully.

He’d shared a trench with his da. A square-nosed and round-mouthed shovel and a pick between them. Stripped to the waist. No hard hats then. A gold crucifix around his neck, swinging with each load. Each close in the tenement had to have a four-foot six ditch dug to the wall and out to the pavement. Watch out for the clay of old gas pipes. Leaking gas. The stink of sewerage and something being punctured. Long trenches dug and every day a new grave.

‘Slow down,’ his old man said to him. ‘We’ve got aw day.’

Everyday different but the same. Hunched over the shovel. Half asleep. Awaiting the next tea break. Lunch break. Train home.  

Running = attempting to flee fate, but Greek myth insists fate always catches up.

Da gave Ma the brown envelope of his pay packet, unopened. His best mate was the opposite. If Nan knew what she was getting when she married Big John, she’d have jumped out of the wedding car in her white dress and fought the kids for the silver her man had thrown in a scramble.

But Big John was always honest about his failings, his favouring for pubs rather than the discomforts of family life. Da liked the pubs as much as the next man and he became a different kind of man in company, but it was Ma that doled out how much he was due. Those were his rules.

One Friday night he got a fiver. He met Big John on the corner of the street outside the bookies, skint, looking for a pint. Da handed him the fiver and went home.

Running = the soul in motion, seeking guidance or power.

Punching the gaffer on a Friday, meant no work on a Monday. Da wasn’t one to hold a grudge. He took his cheese sandwiches and went for long walks. With no pay-packet, he did the obvious thing and snatched all the bills in brown enveloped and flung them in the bin.

A pint glass with no bottom that somehow doesn’t spill is classic dream logic, but symbolically it’s rich.

His wife joked with him about it. How he’d managed to miss so many doctors’ appointments and tests. He was costing the NHS a fortune. £233 for every appointment missed. He’d laughed about that too and claimed it was their bungling that caused it. She knew what it was like trying to book a doctor’s appointment on a Monday morning. More chance of finding the Holy Grail hanging on a fence post.

But he hadn’t missed any appointments.

Tying of Laces: This symbolizes preparation. You are getting ready to leave or move on to the next phase of your life with your own identity (your shoes) firmly attached.

Brown envelopes in dreams almost always carry the same emotional weight.

Da died in his bed. Ma was beside him, sleeping. Seems like a different world. But not that long ago. Not really. Not now.

In Greek mythology, the Fates, the Moirai, meaning ‘the allotted ones’ appear three days after a child’s birth to determine its destiny.

Under the top soil and pavements lie the pipes and cables that we laid. The names of the streets escape me. But if the gaffer walked into a room and had us skulking down, I’d know his face and his fate. He’d get till Friday, payday, when he handed over that brown envelope.