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.