Enter The Tiger
I woke up tired. It was the tiger’s fault. He had abruptly presented himself tome in my dream, a huge responsibility that I was not prepared to deal with. He hadsomehow entered my kitchen, not my real-life, current kitchen but a small cityspace of long ago with a single window that opened onto a fire escape. Hestared at me and his breath and body filled the room, and he made it knownthat the emptiness in his belly was becoming painful enough to affect histemperament, and this would soon become my problem.
I opened the refrigerator and grabbed a package of stew meat. I thought I would throw the beef chunks outside the open window and thus entice him onto the fire escape so I could shut the window and be free of him, but he growled and pushed against me even before Icould unwrap the meat from its paper. Wishing to avoid his claws, I threw the meat down at his feet, and he ate it, paper and all, but it seemed only to excite his appetite further, and he leaned forward, muscles twitching, far from sated. Do tigers like cheese? I frantically wondered, remembering a wedge of Jarlsburg in the fridge. The only flesh in the immediate vicinity was what I wear on my bones, and I was loath to part with it. Now we were suspended in an uneasy standoff, and its likely outcome did not bode well for me. I disembarked from the dream.
"Cats again?" said Monte when I told him about it. He was referring to other feline dreams I used to have, the ones where kittens grab onto my legs with their scratchy claws and pull at my hair and leap onto my back and I can’t shake them off. Yes, I know it’s weird to have had nightmares about cuddly little kittens, but I figured out what anxieties they symbolized and managed eventually to banish them. This was different. We’re talking tiger here: a huge and powerful beast invading my space and holding its ground and showing no sign of backing off.
Awake and in the sanctuary of daylight, I gave myself time to ponder the dream, and it didn’t take long for its meaning to crystallize. Big, dark, insoluble problems have shoved their way into my life, and they are squatting there, demanding something of me.Some of these are the fall-out of other people’s bad luck and mistakes, and although I try to help, I must avoid being consumed by them. Lately they have been permeating my borders with a new degree of forcefulness and are not so easily dispensed with. Other problems, meanwhile, have always been there, patiently lurking in the shadows, confident that they would assume dominion in their time. These are the ones inherent to being alive and getting older, and they are no longer mere abstractions. All in all, it's a pretty daunting tiger that crouches in my kitchen.In the morning garden, I discovered that a rabbit has been eating my flowers and left a row of beheaded stems. Perhaps this is an animal I can deal with.
And maybe not.