I was attending a high school reunion, somewhat reluctantly. My old friend Bill Suits was there. I recognized Colin O'Rourke, sitting on a couch. I went over to shake his hand and he said he didn't remember me. I said, "Well, we didn't like each other that much," wryly, out of the corner of my mouth. At one point I found myself alone in a room with Mike Simms, a notorious asshole. (He used to go to keg parties held by classmates, drink their beer, and report them to the police after he'd left.) I figured I should say hello so I said hello. He kind of grunted and turned around.
Then the reunion was outside, on a hill that resembled the front yard of the house I grew up in. There was some vague sexual tension among the classmates, the same tension that might have existed when we were seven years old and didn't know what such a thing meant. Jenny Allen was there. I understood that the event had been organized by Melissa Ladd.
I was also skiing, in what appeared to be a parallel, concurrent, dream; or perhaps it was a dream segment that formed a desultory interlude between one part of my dream and the next. I was wearing what appeared to be cross-country skis, long and narrow, and I had no poles. Someone was taking me and someone else around the bunny slopes, as though we'd never skied before. I wanted to protest, to say that I knew enough to ski down a real trail. The snow was thick and lumpy, late-season snow.
The reunion ended with lengthy goodbyes and complicated arrangements for transportation back home, or to a hotel, or to some ensuing event - it was not clear. Suddenly I was across the street, with Sara. There was a house and a vast field full of Jews of various ages and cultures, some orthodox, some young and modern. A rock band was playing, with the younger people dancing and the older, bearded men tolerating it from the fringes. It was some sort of protest event directed at the activities across the street, from where I'd come. Apparently the high school reunion was held under the auspices of the PLO or some other pro-Arab, anti-Israeli organization. I realized that the people who lived in the house on the Jewish side were kibbutzers, and this was some kind of disputed territory, like the Golan Heights. We snuck around the house and tried to avoid being caught by the occupants, who were preoccupied by the general festivities. It was a beautiful, modern, bourgeois home filled with art and books. We examined a thin volume about art, with colorful reproductions, and I fumbled with it nervously as I tried to put it back in its place on the shelf before someone walked in. We got out without being seen.