Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Me, royalty
Okay, another dream.
As usual, my whole waking life has been compartmentalized, zipped up, locked away. The fact that the princess looks suspiciously like my audiologist from Santa Rosa, or that the friend who offers to loan me his corduroy jacket happens to be my best friend/partner from residency — none of that matters. This is a Doug I do not know, a first or second year med student too concerned with some late-arriving textbooks from Amazon to obsess over a date with royalty.
It’s more than a mere date. We’re engaged. The marriage is imminent. I’ve survived the rehearsal dinner, which oddly enough preceded the wedding by more than a few days, and now I’m to participate in another dinner, attended by the Queen-to-be (I will be — what do you call it — her consort?) and her top advisers. It’s a different sort of rehearsal dinner wherein my intellect may well be on stage; it will culminate in an exchange of wooden rings polished smooth by generations of blue-blooded newlyweds, followed by yet another rehearsal, my first bedding of the princess, conducted prior to the exchange of vows I suppose to ensure survival of the bloodline.
Only problem is, I’ve been too focused on the events of the day (my classes, perhaps a test or two, my missing books from Amazon) to pay much heed to the evening, and as the hour approaches I find I’m dressed in sneakers, shorts, and an old tee-shirt. No way Ill have time to make it home and change into a suit, and I know that on the grand scale of unforgivability, no-showing this dinner will rank much worse than down-dressing. Not by much, perhaps. But I really have no other option, I have to be there. Now.
I pass my friend on the way to the dinner and he sees I’m in a panic. There’s a quick exchange of information, but he doesn’t have a suit squirreled away in his car. He does have a corduroy jacket, an old rough thing good for keeping a body warm but not high-ranking on the style spectrum. A hair better than my tee-shirt. But the effect of the heavy jacket with my Bermuda shorts is ridiculous, so I go to my doom with the clothes on my back.
She’s on the steps with her entourage and she’s the picture of elegance, looking every bit like a woman who would lead or at least provide a remarkably attractive figurehead for a nation. She didn’t dress down for this dinner. And to her credit, she seems far less bothered by my appearance than I am. “I can go run and change into a suit,” I tell her, knowing well that I can’t do that without delaying dinner for the better part of an hour, but she smiles and says, “Oh, no, I like your furry legs!” and that’s that.
Maybe that’s my place in this whole affair. The royal line is too inbred and they need some new blood. Swarthy Jewish blood with short hairy legs.
As if to confirm this suspicion, the first course is an appetizer of chopped liver. Meanwhile, one of the princess’s advisers is arguing with another adviser about some common-wisdom advice on nutrition and dieting. They turn to me, the medical student, to settle the dispute, and I’m in a sudden cold sweat: Don’t you know they teach us nothing about nutrition in med school? But I bluster my way through an explanation, sure I’m failing this test — I’m a font of stammers and incomplete sentences and self-contradictions. I’m a bag of rough edges. All the while, my betrothed beams at me.
Waking up, I realize that my stylelessness and lack of Windsor polish is precisely what she wants in a consort.
D.
I had a dream last night that I was feeding cereal to a small pig, despite being told not to bother feeding it because we were having it for dinner. But I didn’t want it to die hungry – that seemed unfair – so I was giving it the cereal I bought last week (in real life) which is actually pretty terrible cereal, so I’m not sure I was really doing the creature any favours.
Then I got invited to a free concert, which turned out to be a fundraising telethon so I left.