Ah, the paid federal holiday. Who loves you, baby? I do. Even if I am only a part-time worker, I get full time pay for sitting here and doing what I do, or don’t do.
One terrific benefit of the day off is the sleep-in. Sleeping in has increasingly become a treasured part of life lately. I am sure a thorough examination of my mind — frightening as it is to imagine — might yield the central reason or reasons why only in a matter of years I have become so fond of late sleeping. Whatever the reasons, I find dreaming to be much richer during these series of morning naps.
This morning I drove to Indonesia. Yes, it’s a neat trick if you don’t live in Indonesia what with all the water surrounding the 17,500-something islands that make up the Southeast Asian-Oceanic nation. What’s more, I drove (actually I rode with my friends Warren and Stacy), then drove back and was getting ready for a return drive to Indonesia when my dream ran out of tracks.
Dreams can be like a great, or a really bad, or terrifying, movie. Of course, they are very short films which make “Let’s Go Out to the Lobby” seem like “Dances With Wolves.”
I don’t know why I dreamed of Indonesia, much less driving there from Whereverville. It’s strange to think how the mind gets around to the people you know and the places you’ve been. I can understand dreaming of Warren and Stacy. They are two of my closest friends. I think I introduced them 20-something years ago and it wasn’t long before they were together as a couple and later married. Indonesia is a bit more complicated.
If my memory serves me. If my memory serves me. What did I order anyway? As I was saying, if my memory serves me I visited Jakarta in January 1978. My ship, well, the Navy’s ship, or the taxpayers’ ship, spent about three or four days there on a port visit just after two months of different port calls in New Zealand and Australia. Those “down under” countries were somewhat of a shock in that they were beautiful and had some of the nicest and friendliest people one might see outside Texas. Indonesia was a whole different load of cargo.
Of the places I visited that year on my deployment, which also included Fiji, Taiwan, Guam and our “port away from homeport” Subic Bay, the Philippines, Jakarta was the most foreign. In fact, Indonesia was the most foreign country I have ever visited.
Perhaps I should only mention one of the odd experiences I had in Indonesia. This happened on the very first day in port.
My shipmates and I were loaded on a bus, purportedly, on our way to a compound at the American Embassy. There was a fairly major problem, however. Our driver spoke no English and no one in our crew spoke whatever his language might have been. While some of my fellow squids tried to use sign language or Charades to determine just where the hell we were going, I heard a “thump” which was followed by a very disturbed-sounding murmur by some of my mates.
The street on which we were riding had an outside bike lane and apparently our runaway bus driver pulled into this lane and struck a bicyclist, then just kept going. I couldn’t see it because I was on the other side of the bus and there were guys standing in the aisle. Those who did see the spectacle said it wasn’t pretty. About six or seven of us finally had enough as we were driving through what appeared to be a central business district, what with skyscrapers seemingly as far as the eye could see. (Jakarta is quite a large city which had a population then of about 5-6 million people. Today it has nearly 9 million.) Those of us who got off the bus went into the lounge of a Sheraton and finally found an English speaking man with an old car who agreed to be our combination “taxi driver-tour guide” that day for what was a very reasonable sum. The rest I shall not divulge other than to say it was an adventure of “sailors being sailors.”
I actually had kind of a cultural overload during my time in Jakarta. I saw some unbelievably majestic structures which, I can only suppose, had something to do with Indonesia having the largest Islamic population in the world. I also saw some of the most abject poverty I had ever witnessed including sights you’d only see in “National Geographic.” On a pedestrian overpass crossing a major highway sat an armless and legless woman on a cart, with a can next to her for donations. Then, of course, I mentioned the hit-an-run by our bus driver. In more recent times, these memories have kind of made me wonder if President Obama viewed such scenes when he lived in Indonesia?
Fortunately, I rarely have bad or even disturbing dreams thankfully. So my foray into Indonesia in slumber was more detailed with concerns about time or other engagements, those things we deal with in routine. All in all though, some of those things which go on in your brain during downtime can yield some pretty fascinating stuff. Written on the bathroom wall of our thoughts: “For a good time call 1-800-THE-MIND.”
