A thin blanket of snow and a less than satisfying vacation with the family

 

I dreamed I was with my family last night. Details are fuzzy, since I woke up before I had a chance to take notes. This usually happens when something goes wrong in the dream. I will hit the eject button, opting out of the story before its conclusion. Anyway, I dreamed I was living at home in Loma Rica with my family, the Kioski clan from Minnesota.

The first thing I remember is walking outside to find a fresh blanket of snow covering the driveway. I got a big thrill seeing the first snow in my entire 14 years in Loma Rica. The ground outside was a giant canvas of melted marshmallow, the puffy frosting of white covering any traces of green and seamlessly blending the driveway, the lawn and the street into a singular, smooth surface. I was thinking something about "Minnesota folks bringing the snow with them" as I stepped out into the yard to meet Greg.

"Perfect for sliding," Greg said.

It did look perfect. My driveway has a nice incline, and I was dying to see just how far I could slide before I crashed into a t-post or ran out of driveway. I grabbed a long, narrow tarp and waved it around to clear the snow off of it, and then got a running start down the drive. 

In mid-leap, I noticed that the frosting was a bit thin. I could see the lumps of gravel and rocks beneath its now semi-opaque, rapidly melting surface. This was going to be a bumpy ride, I thought, as I contemplated the immanent impact of my knees hitting the gravel with only a thin tarp to protect them. 

Luckily, I hit a smooth spot, so it didn't turn out to be the excruciating knee-scraping trauma that I was anticipating. But it was an embarrassingly short slide. There may as well have been no snow at all. I got up, slightly ruffled but uninjured.

"Did you see that?" I asked Greg, more of an accusation than a question. He was the snow-sliding guy, so I was holding him responsible.

"Well, it does melt kind of fast around here," he said, shifting the blame for the inadequate sliding surface back to the inferior quality of the fickle California snow. "You'd have to get up pretty early to do any sliding around here."

I looked out into my front yard and noticed that the trees, which would normally be bare or sparsely leafed at this time of year, were all well-foliated and had a lush green canopy. I made mention of it to Greg and then began making snowballs with some of the last remaining snow that had accumulated in a drift next to the garage. 

I threw one at my mom, who was standing with her back to me down the driveway, but it missed by inches, sailing harmlessly over her head. She turned around with a big smile on her face and began scraping up a handful of snow, making ready for a retaliatory strike just as I was just launching the next wave of my attack. My second snowball hit Ben squarely on the top of the head. 

"No!!" he cried in mock anguish. "Not in the head!!"

He bent down try to gather some snow, but it was too thin, and he only managed to scrape up some slushy wet rocks from the driveway. He threw the rocks in down in disgust. Even at his tender age, he was a seasoned snowball fight veteran, and these conditions were most unsatisfactory, to say the least. I was just glad that it didn't devolve into a rock fight.

<abrupt scene change>

From slushy Loma Rica winter, the scene abruptly changed to a crowded vacation resort in San Diego. The family and I were all staying at a gated mega hotel complex, which was built stack upon stack, row upon row, of neat little condo units. The bike paths and walkways were so heavily trafficked that there were security guards directing people to use specific pathways in order to ease congestion.

"You can't go that way," a sullen black female officer of fifty said to me as I tried to pedal down one particularly busy path.

She pointed to a sign at an intersection, and I noted that I was indeed taking an inappropriately longer route. All the paths led to the gates out of the community, but the one I'd chosen said 14 miles, and she directed me to a different one, whose estimated distance was only .04 miles. I took the shorter route and was quickly outside the gate.

Once outside, I got off the bicycle, which I'd borrowed from Greg for the day, and left it in some bike racks. I'd only gone a few steps when I realized that I'd forgotten to lock it. Greg hadn't mentioned anything about locking it, and I didn't think there was a lock or chain to lock it with anyway. By the time I turned back around to fetch the bike, it was gone. 

Great, I thought, it was only the first day of vacation, and already I'd have to report back to Greg that I'd lost his $500 bike. As well-policed as the gated community appeared to be, this had happened outside of the gate. I looked around for the thieves and the bicycle for a bit, but I realized that it was a hopeless cause. This kind of no-win situation always prompts me to bail out, so I woke up with a lingering feeling of guilt, the fading memories of thin snow and a crappy vacation my only souvenirs.