Armageddon.

A letter to someone who was once a friend:

I had this really disturbing dream last night. We (I'm not sure who all was there) were in Delta, standing in the meadow in front of the house. We had taken the maypole out of the ground, and it was lying on its side, and this was all part of us preparing for winter.

There were other people in the woods, I think, somewhere nearby.

Dad pulled me to the side, and we walked toward the cabin, leaving from behind the picnic table at the corner of the meadow. It was that sort of blue time in the evening, just after dusk.

He said,"What can we do with the teapots and things that we want to keep? I was thinking that we should put them all in boxes and bury them in the ground, but then I think the boxes might deteriorate, and everything might be ruined." He was asking this, because very soon there would be people going through our houses, taking and destroying things, and when this was all over, he wanted to make sure we still had some things to retrieve; things they hadn't found because we had buried them in the ground.

I suggested that we get some visqueen (how do you spell that?) and line the hole with it, place waterproof boxes inside, and then wrap it all up in the visqueen before covering it with dirt.

Dad said, "The believers are complacent, but something is going to happen within four weeks from this coming Thursday, and they will not be able to be complacent after that. I know that I've been saying for a long time that something was coming, but now I'm telling you that it will be very soon; within four weeks of this coming Thursday."

I got the impression that he might be talking about months instead of weeks. Whatever this thing was, he didn't know the exact date, but the latest it would happen was four weeks from this coming Thursday.

Whatever he was referring to was something like...I don't know, like the Russian invasion of Israel, or something bad happening to the Dome of the Rock. Something earth-shattering like that. I got the impression, though, that it was something that would affect people here in America, because of him talking about the effect on "believers." So it seems that it would either involve a crisis of conscience on a large scale, or a major setback to civil rights and personal freedom. It was very unsettling.

Then I woke up, because the telephone was ringing. It was my sister, calling me in the middle of the night to make sure I was all right.

...end of letter.

I'm feeling a little...thoughtful, I guess. I had this dream about a week ago, and now tomorrow is September 11, and Yom Kippur starts on Sunday night. Yom Kippur is the Day of Atonement. The time between Rosh Hashana (Feast of Trumpets--it started Friday night) and Yom Kippur is supposed to be a time of self-examination and reflection, and then Yom Kippur is the day set aside to acknowledge one's faults, experience remorse, make amends, and resolve to do better. The idea is to do this before God, who sees all, and from whom there is no hiding, and to whom there is no possibility of lying.

There's been so much death, so much ending, and so much sorrow. It's more than just the deaths of my parents and friends and those around me. Sometimes I wonder what this life is for.

People say that if you live a good life that you get rewards at the end of it. I don't care. I don't want rewards. I want my friends to live. I want the people I love to make the right choices.

I want people to be able to change. I don't want to believe that this world started out in a perfect garden and is headed inexorably toward Armageddon and that nothing can stop it. I don't want to believe that peace can never be achieved in the Middle East, in Northern Ireland, or in Bosnia.

I want to believe that just one person I love has decided to live his life differently, to care more about being kind than about being comfortable, to live for more than the moment, and to place more value on the content of a person's character than on their physical appearance.

If I live my whole life in a futile attempt to convince just one person to choose that path, I don't care if there are rewards at the end of my life; I don't want them. I don't want anyone to say, "You've done well, you worked hard in the face of obstacles, he didn't change and yet you didn't give up and didn't become bitter," or whatever version of "you did the right thing" might be said. I don't care, I don't want that.

No reward I could get at the end of my life could be anything but emptiness. No reward could take the place of the redemption of someone I love.