(Mark Czerniec /ChatGPT)
My Last Ridiculous Obstacle
In making my first baby steps toward fathoming Jungian psychology, I have been trying to recall and log my nightly dreams. This practice definitely pulls more dreams into my awareness. Sometimes their content is mundane. Other times, I have discovered profound hints.
One of the main themes in my dreams for years has been the logistics of getting from here to there. For example, I’m on the north side of the city trying to get to the south side, but there’s a river in between — and bridges, and hotel complexes with revolving door entrances, concourses, escalators … and so on.
This time, I was in some sort of venue. It was like an auditorium, but may have had cathedral ceilings and stained-glass windows. Part of a crowd was present and conversing quietly, but nothing was being staged at the moment. I was on a balcony level, looking down at the main floor. I wanted to get down there, then leave through the main exit.
There was a metal stairway near me, but it was blocked by a stanchion rope with a snap hook. When I unfastened it, I noticed other impediments — a metal flat bar, some boards. I finally had to worm through a low hole and dangle my way onto the stairs, feeling annoyed and silly.
As I walked down the bleachers toward the main floor, I saw a clown seated there. She was a woman in whiteface with a red clown nose, ruffles, big shoes — the full costume. Both her outfit and two small tool or tackle boxes next to her were a spectrum of bright neon colors.
Looking at her, a thought entered my head: “This must be my last ridiculous obstacle.”
Even as that thought was completing, she spoke in a deadpan voice, almost as if I was a ventriloquist: “I’m your last ridiculous obstacle.”
I laughed hard at her irony, and marveled at her elaborate joke — then turned and exited the venue, glancing up at a Dolly Parton poster and walking the gravel pathway in my recently-purchased socks.
Later, reflecting on this dream, I suddenly recognized the clown’s voice. It was my late wife Amy, who was brilliant at delivering poker-faced zingers.
She was a woman who fought cancer for ten years, though chemotherapy, mastectomy, surgical site infections, an 11-hour reconstruction surgery, a global pandemic, and car problems — yet still showed up, walking with a cane, to manage her one-woman coffee shop in the university library.
The colored tool boxes next to her were her pill organizer — the 28-compartment plastic array in seven neon colors where she kept the baffling assortment of prescription drugs she had to take. The bleachers echoed our last “date,” during which she brought me to a Rangers women’s basketball game to watch some some of her customers competing.
UW-Parkside Rangers women's basketball game at Alfred and Bernice De Simone Arena. (Amy Czerniec)
In our last weeks together as her liver failed, climbing the staircase to our only bathroom became more and more taxing on her. It involved me climbing directly behind her, holding her gait belt and the banister, and assisting each foot up to the next step.
Now here she was in my dream, flatly assuring me that — having finally accessed those stairs — all of life’s aggravating ordeals were behind me.
So when, a couple of days after this dream, I heard my washing machine becoming loud, signaling that its bearings were going, my first reaction was a wince of self-pity and agony. I pictured myself hauling baskets of dirty clothes to a laundomat in my dying car in the snow and pushing bushels of change into the coin slots.
My second reaction was laughter, picturing my wife in a neon clown suit, saying, “This is your last ridiculous obstacle.”
I sat down at my keyboard, created a folder, and then asked Google Gemini to recommend the best front-loading washer for performance and reliability without fancy features. Within 20 minutes, I had purchased the machine from Best Buy and set a delivery date. They brought it on Monday, and the whole operation took another 20 minutes.
Next, one of my web design clients was having a small crisis …
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