Dream of:
27 February 1995 (2) "The Church-Official And The Talking Rabbits"
the prize is an imaginative life
As I was working one day in an office filled with perhaps a dozen people, I thought I heard someone say that someone in the office had won a Nobel Prize. I thought I had misheard, but soon we were all called together in a room, and an announcement was made that one of the women there in the office had won the Nobel Prize for literature. The woman was standing with her back against a wall, looking at the rest of us with an expression of astonished incomprehension.
The woman was black (probably only in her early 30s), slender, and of average height, with nothing to particularly distinguish her features. She was wearing a simple slip dress.
As the others looked at her in silence, I began probing her with questions to find out what she had written. When I asked her what category the prize was for, she didn't seem to understand, and I asked whether the prize was for reporting or for a book. She said it was for a book and I asked if the book was fact or fiction. She indicated it was fiction and I asked whether it was a full length book or a short story. She appeared to become a bit exasperated with my questions, and someone else interrupted me.
Although the man interrupting me worked there in the office - he seemed to be the boss - he also worked for the church, and he was dressed in garb which resembled what a bishop of a church might wear. He intimated that I was being impertinent by asking the woman so many questions, and he wanted me to stop. I told him that my questions were pertinent because I was informed about that type of prize. To myself, however, I was thinking that I actually only kept up with the names of the winners of the prize for literature in the fiction category, even though I knew there were many categories of literature. At any rate, I figured I knew more about the prize than anyone else here.
I looked again at the woman. Neither I - nor apparently anyone else - had even known that she was a writer, much less that she could have written something which could win the Nobel prize. Wistfully I thought how my goal in life was to win the Nobel prize - and here this woman had won without even trying. I wasn't even sure she knew what the Nobel prize was - after all, she was still working in this office. I moved close to her and I told her if I were her, I would quit my job today. I was unsure, but I thought she might have said, "You can take this job and shove it."
Again I wanted to ask her about her book. I asked if she could at least tell us what the book had been about. She seemed as if she didn't want to talk about it, and the man dressed as a church-bishop threw something at me as if to ward me off. When everyone started moving out of the room, I hollered out at the woman and I asked if the book had been about rabbits. For some reason I was thinking the woman had written a child's book about talking rabbits, and the name "Uncle Remus" came to mind. It seemed to me that "Uncle Remus" was a fictional rabbit.
As everyone walked into another room, one man tried to hold me back from entering. I thought he was somehow connected to the church-bishop. The tall man stood about two and a third meters tall and was dressed up to look like Frankenstein, even though I knew that he was actually the actor Alan Alda underneath. When he grabbed my arm, I made a quick move, pulled his arm behind the back of his head and toppled him to the floor. Once I had him in a position where he couldn't move, I told him I would let him up if he wouldn't bother me any more.
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