It’s Christmas Day and we are all together Mum, Elaine, Me and Dad in the Coring Road house, in the living room with its opulent fake gold embossed wallpaper.
It’s already the afternoon and Elaine and I are bored enough to look through some old stuff that had been put away in storage.
Read moreThe sun is coming in from the French doors and Mum and Dad are talking while I am pulling things out of old cardboard boxes. I look at each item before handing it to Elaine to look at too.
The room is reversed. The couch, where mum and dad are sitting, is on the other side from the radiator where Elaine and I are looking at the boxes. From one box I’m pulling out her old soft toys, one after another.
The next soft toy I pull out is the purple teddy that replaced Big Ted after Big Ted got burnt in the fire.
“He doesn’t look like Big Ted,” I tell her as I push the teddy bear in Elaine’s face.
It’s purple and triangular, the wide base at its bottom is white. I guess it wasn’t supposed to be an exact replica.
And then I notice Uncle Vartan has shown up. I go over to him and give him a big hug. He feels warm and full in my embrace.
“You’ll have to take the baby for a walk,” Elaine says. Uncle Vartan has brought with him a baby that sits in a pram at the end of the couch.
“I don’t want to take the baby,” I tell her. Then again it wouldn’t be terrible if I took the baby for a walk, out in the fresh air.
We are bored and need to get out of the house.
I clamber up onto the truck behind me, to see what other boxes I can find. It’s a huge army pickup with a metal frame which I use to lever myself onto the back of the flatbed. Then I turn to Dad.
“Why don’t you put all your stuff in a storage unit rather than in this old pickup truck?”
He looks up at me.
“It’s slow,” he answers.
“What! Slower than a storage unit?”
I laughed at the absurdity of it, full belly laughs. And I couldn’t stop laughing, in fact my belly was rippling with laughter until I awoke…
“You alright?” says Siobhan as I stir to.
“Yeah,” I reply.
“I thought you were having a seizure,” she says.
“No,” I reply, “But I have to write this dream down,” still laughing.
Photo from PxHere.