Safe deposit box

I went into a bank, to the safe deposit box area.  There was a blank blond-red paneled wood wall about 10 feet high and 40 feet long and right in the middle of it, just barely visible in outline was a set of double doors.  They had no exposed hinges or knobs. Nothing to show they were there.  To get in I pushed the door in an inch or so and let it spring back and open out like a cabinet door.  Inside was a series of wooden doors built into the wall, each about 2 feet square, stacked floor to about 6 feet high all the way across the room.

I walked up to B

ox 151

and tried to operate the combination lock.  The lock mechanism was a flat metal surface about 3” in diameter w/ 60 tick marks around it like a clock and an inscribed hexagon that touched what would have been 12-2-4-6-8-10-12 on the clock face except there were no numbers on the face.  The combination was right to 5, left to 8, then push in again like the doors to the room.  The dial didn’t have a handle and it didn’t have a clicker that helped it stop on the tick marks, so I had trouble getting it to operate.  But after several tries I was finally able to open it.

Inside was a cardboard box that almost filled the outer box.  On the surface of the cardboard box was taped a sheet of paper that had printed a bunch of old black & white photos with some typed text.  The old photos were from several different locations w/ different actions, but a certain woman was present in all of them.  She wore several different outfits for the different situations and in a couple of them she was topless.  I knew the old man who had owned the box and was vaguely aware that there had been a special woman in his life from long before I’d known him, but I’d never seen her.  I had to assume this was her. 

The bank officials told me it was time to leave, so I took the paper and put the box back without ever opening it.  I left and went outside and enjoyed shutting the room doors, which clicked into place when pushed an inch past flat just as they had opened.

I walked over to a stadium that was full of people.  It was completely made of stone, like an old Roman stadium, but it had a grass field for football or soccer like a modern one.  I climbed the stairs to the very top where a wall of stone that had window-like openings ringed the back of the top row of seats.  The aisle way behind the seating was a flat area a step down from the top of the stairs and it had a couple inches of water running in it.  There were some people walking in the water off to the right so I assumed the water running in the walkway was intentional to keep people’s feet clean and the dust down.  The water ran from right to left and at the left end of the walkway it turned and went down a ramp/trough at the same angle as the stairs and seating and disappeared underground at the field level.

I went out of the stadium into the street where some water was flowing at different places, pooling in some areas and flowing faster in others.  A group of people was sitting at tables at an outdoor café and  man there was moving leaves out of the end of one of the pools of water allowing it to empty and spill out faster over the slope next to the seating.

It occurred to me as I walked along the streets, which were in San Francisco, that while I'd had the right to see the paper from the safe deposit box, I didn’t have the right to take it, so I should go put it back.  I went back to the bank, pushed on the door to open in to the safe deposit box room, but this time instead of a room full of boxes being behind it there was another blank paneled wall.  I went up and pushed in the middle of it and another door opened like the previous one.  In this room there were two men sitting at a table.  One of them was a bank official, so I asked him where the boxes were.  He said they were not accessible right now, so I handed him the paper and asked him to put it back in the box when it was.  He said, “No problem” and took the paper and I left.  I got to thinking about it afterward, though, and wasn’t sure that I had handled the situation properly.  I didn’t know the bank official and wasn’t sure what he would do w/ the paper.

Nursing home. Mexico.

I was in a nursing home trying to get to Room 123 to see someone, but it was laid out with odd angled hallways and intersections and no logical numbering pattern, so I was having trouble finding it.  Attached to the nursing home was a gymnasium and recreational center and as I went down one hallway it got crowded w/ sweaty people from the gym to the point I couldn’t even push through.  I went into the gym to look for another door, but at the far end there was an 8’ wall with a level w/ doors above it and no way to get to them.  There were some pipes and conduit attached to the wall and a bunch of Indian kids were climbing up and down them to get from the upper to lower levels, so I thought I’d do it too.  I grabbed onto a piece of conduit but it wasn’t attached well enough to hold me.  I pulled a bench over and grabbed onto the bottom of the upper level railing and pulled myself up.

When I went out of the gym I entered a gathering space that had lots of people in it, but wasn’t as crowded as the other side.  There was an old woman lying on her back on a large ottoman.  She arched her back and tried to stand up, but didn’t quite have enough strength to make it and flopped back down on the ottoman.  She did this multiple times and each flop moved her body a little more off the ottoman until only her head and neck were on it.  I thought that if she did it again she would miss altogether and flop down on the tile floor and hurt herself, so I went over and put my hand in the middle of her back and lifted her up.  She grimaced and groaned in pain and as I moved my hand away I saw that she had bandages on her back where I had lifted her.  I hadn’t seen any evidence of pain when she was trying on her own, which seemed like it should have been far worse.

Later I was walking down a dusty road in Mexico with a friend.  He had a giant pair of pliers, about as tall as him.  We had been using them for some purpose that I can’t remember, but he thought it was illicit, because we were leaving and he made a comment, “We’ve gotten a lot of good out of these.  We should give them back to the power company.”  Then he heaved them up in the air where they hit the power line and their jaws clamped shut and they hung there.  He was also carrying a couple clevises – one about 3” diameter and one twice that size.  He decided we didn’t need them either so he tossed them over by the side of the road at an intersection where there was a beat up old Camaro sitting at a stop sign waiting to turn the corner.  They bounced off the wheel of the Camaro and immediately people got out of it and looked to see what had hit them.

I was concerned that he’d gotten us into trouble when two rough looking guys came walking over toward us from the car, but then I saw they had little kids with them.  A little boy about 3 or 4 was carrying one of the clevises and one of the men was carrying the bigger one.  They didn’t speak any English, and of course our Spanish wasn’t much good, but we soon realized they were taking them as a gift and were letting us know they appreciated us giving them to them.

Later I was driving in a city and Emma pulled up alongside me in a beat up old Indy style race car.  We turned a left corner with her slightly in front and she cut me off so I hit the curb and jumped my right front wheel up on the sidewalk in front of a glass storefront.  I pulled back onto the street and we headed up a hill.  I was impressed that she was able to drive it smoothly at low speeds up this steep hill, but apparently the gears and clutch were taking all her attention because she kept swerving and causing me to drive over into the bike lane and shoulder.