04/08/02
I'll Bring Bugs For Christmas

I was sitting on the couch in the living room in the afternoon, getting ready to record my shows. It was very light outside, like it was the middle of the year, but I don't think it was. Dad came walking into the room carrying three wrapped presents. In real life, one of his favorite things to do is to say, "I'll give you this dollar bill if you can tell me one of the numbers on it!" In the dream he was no different. "If you can tell me what's in these presents, I'll let you open them early," he said in a sing-song voice. I rolled my eyes.

"How am I supposed to know what's in them?" What, did I suddenly acquire x-ray vision?

He went to place them under the lamp near the window in front of me, where some other presents had been placed. I suddenly remembered that Christmas was coming--Christmas?? I also got the feeling that it wasn't for about two weeks yet--so why were we already putting out the presents? Dad made it seem like it was tomorrow.

He said as he put them down by the lamp, "Then you'll just have to wait until then to open these."

I sighed. On a whim, which wasn't much of a whim at all but an obvious guess, I said, "Is one of them a book?" Because books are my favorite thing, and if he knew me, and knew what to get me, he would have gotten me a book.

He put two of the presents down and came toward me with the third. The package was long and thin and narrow. "Yep, this is a book," he said. "You can open this one."

At some point in here, the program Tenchi Muyo! started--completely baffling me. THAT wasn't the show that was supposed to be on, that I was getting ready to record. Fortunately it was an episode I already had on tape, but what was going on with the TV schedule?

In any case, I took the package and started opening it. At first when I pulled off the paper it looked to be some sort of stamping kit that perhaps came with a little booklet (hence Dad saying it was a "book," because technically it was the kind of thing one would find in a bookstore), and the stamps were ancient Egyptian symbols. I already have a set similar to this, but I don't look a gift horse in the mouth. These ones were big, and made out of plastic, like little 3-D figurines with flat shaped bottoms to stamp the symbols with. I opened the box they were sitting in and rubbed the surface of one, and it was smooth plastic. How would they hold ink properly without it beading up? I was puzzled. They were pretty, but I doubted they would work well.

But then these "stampers" shifted until they were candy. Some strange sort of confection that was all the rage. They were still Egyptian, but now they were all shaped like bugs. Insects. I specifically remember a wasp or hornet, the way the Egyptians depicted them. Perhaps others like beetles, flies, butterflies of varying shapes and sizes. They were in 3-D and were SO very delicate that I was very careful to pick them up. They were all in gold, except for a few, which were in silver. (Not real gold or real silver, but colored plastic.) Only, I learned that this WASN'T plastic--it was something you could eat!

Dad explained it to me somewhat as I sat staring at them and handling a few. All sorts of insects as depicted by the Egyptians, they were. But I DID come across one tiny flat one that looked to be a lemur on a branch or something; Dad came close to inspect it but I don't know what became of it. It seemed malformed, not "complete," like a mistake that wasn't meant to be included with the kit. I was so afraid of breaking a wing or leg off of one of the others. As Dad put it, these were a new popular kind of collectible candy--I could eat them, or I could put them on display and collect more! I wondered what they tasted like--gold and silver candy, who WOULDN'T want to taste it!--but I refrained, and put the wasp back into its little space. (They rested on a white surface, in little hollows shaped to them.) I wanted to eat them, or to simply look at them more, but I felt a greater need to preserve the strange little candy bugs as I had gotten them.

I lifted my head and said "Thank you!" in such a sincere voice. This really was a thoughtful gift, no matter how strange it was.

And when I woke up, I immediately wondered, why I should dream of my dad bringing me pretty plastic bugs to eat! o_O



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