Dream of my sister

[fbhjr]

I dreamed I was living back at the original “Highland Heights”. The apartment my friends and I had for 3 months back in 1983, and I was the only one who had actually lived there from our friends.

We were having a bit D&D weekend where a lot of people go together and just ran one game or another 24/7 for the weekend.
I was getting ready to run a shift in my D&D world when my sister walked in with a suitcase.
“Anne!” I shouted. “Hey everyone! My sister is here!”
Most of the folks looked up, waved or said hi, then went back to their game.
“What are you doing here?” I asked her.
“You told me I could come and visit any time I wanted,” she said. “So I thought I’d stop in now. Is that OK?”
“Of course!” I said. “It may be a bit crowded with the other folks over for the weekend, but you are totally welcome.”
She put down her suit case and sat in the chair next to me.
A bunch of the players came out of the other room.
“Are you ready to start, Frank?” they asked me. “What character will your sister play?”
“Let someone else take my turn running,” I said. “I want to catch up with my sister.”
They grumbled a bit, but went back to the other room. They started playing something else fairly loudly.
“I’m hungry,” Anne said. “Can we go some where and get something to eat?”
“Sure, there lots of good places on the street,” I said.
We left the apartment and started walking down the street. A cold wind was blowing and I could see my sister was very cold.
We were passing a restaurant that looked very expensive.
“How about this one?” she asked.
“I’ve never eaten there,” I said. “But, we can try it.”
We went in. It was pretty crowded, but most of the folks were at the bar.
My sister waved to the greater and asked for the first table available. She nodded and waved us towards the back of the place.
As we started to follow, and man came over to my sister.
“I love your tan,” he said. “Where did you get it?”
“Key West,” my sister said.
“No wonder you’re cold here,” he said.
My sister just nodded and kept following the hostess.
We were seated at a round corner table in the back of the restaurant.
“I never knew you had been to Key West,” I said.
“My work keeps me traveling,” she said.
“What are you doing for work?”
She looked at me with a look that implied I was supposed to know this.
“How long has it been since I’ve seen you?” She asked.
“Seventeen years, four days,” I said. “At the time you were working for a family called Lanfer taking care of their twin kids.”
“Well, I’ve worked for someone else for a long time,” she said.
She was going to say more, but the waitress came over to take our orders. I hadn’t looked at my menu yet and when I opened it I found it was in a language I couldn’t read.
My sister ordered something without looking at the menu. I picked and random one and pointed to it.
“Really?” the waitress asked.
“Sure, why not?” I said.
She wrote it down. I saw as she went back to the kitchen she stopped, showed another waitress the order and pointed at me. The other waitress looked very surprised.
“I think I may have made a mistake in ordering that,” I said.
“Not if you’re really hungry,” my sister said.
“So, what about your job?” I asked.
My sister looked uncomfortable talking about it. I looked past her and realized two men had sat down at our table on the other side. There was an arm rest between the two halves of the circular table, but that was it.
“Want to swap places?” I asked her.
She nodded and we did.
“Now, tell me about your job,” I said.
Dream ends

The inside of the apartment did not look like the apartment in real life. It looked more like the apartment of someone else I knew who lived in Somerville where we did go and play role playing games 20+ years ago.

It is, of course, 17 years 13 days since I’ve seen my sister, not 17 years 4 days. I guess I don’t do math well in my dreams.

We did live just a block or so from a restaurant, The Boynton, when I lived in Worcester. It was that level of crowded a lot, but was not some expensive place with menus in another language. And, to get there we would have left the apartment and turned right. In the dream we turned left. That would have put the fancy restaurant about where the pizza place was in real life.

Back when I lived at “The Heights” my friend Jim used to joke that my sister was really a spy and that explained why she would disappear for months and never answered telephone calls.
Last night we went to see “RED”, a movie about retired spies working for the CIA.
So, maybe that connected in my dream?
All the evidence in real life is that my sister lived alone, took care of other people’s kids and rarely traveled anywhere. She just liked being left alone.

It was good to see her again, even if only in the dream.
Although, every time she shows up in a dream I worry because usually the folks who show up for random visits in my dreams like this are dead.
i hope that isn’t the case here, but after 17 years, it’s hard to be sure.