Public Art

I watched for a few minutes as a crew installed the latest works in City Hall Park.

Based on the list of art on display in all the city parks, I gather the current exhibit features works by Sol LeWitt. Apparently, some assembly was required:

(The artist unfortunately died in 2007, so I'm guessing he is not the man standing with arms akimbo in the photo above.)

I really liked this sculpture. It reminded me of the crayons my brother and I (or maybe just my brother) left in the back seat of our parents' wonderful orange Volvo when we were kids:

I used to have a lot of dreams -- or more precisely, a recurring nightmare -- involving the orange Volvo, when we lived in Illinois. If I knew why the dreams started, I might be able to pinpoint when they began, but the only thing I know for sure was that it was some time between the ages of 8 and 12. Probably toward the older side of the range. The dreams always started the same way. I had learned somehow that there were bad guys around, burglars who were also murderers, who would take over the bodies of the people they had murdered. I needed to warn my family about this. Urgently. (For some reason, I knew our house was pretty much next on the list.) I would slip into the house to warn my family, and I would hear noises overhead, the murderers talking in the voices of my family, discussing their foul deeds, and I would realize, to my horror, that it was too late. I needed to escape and get help. I could never outrun them. My only hope was to drive away. Terrified, I would quietly open the door to the garage and get into the orange Volvo. I didn't have keys for it, and even in my dream I knew I didn't know how to drive. And maybe I was also worried about engine noise or something. So I would sit there in the driver's seat (in my dream), feet nowhere near the pedals, and my life depended on being able to will the car to move. And by focusing my mental energies really intensely, it would happen. The car would slowly float out of the driveway, two or three inches off the ground. I couldn't go off-road, but I would silently direct the car out of the garage, down the driveway, left onto the road (never right), and to safety. I think I always woke up when I got to the first intersection. The bad guys never caught me (in fact, I never actually saw them in my dream), but I also never found out if my family could be restored (this possibility was definitely left open, perhaps like Red Riding Hood's grandmother).

This recurring dream was very specific to the orange Volvo, even though my parents had a second car as well. The other car was a two-seater hatchback Triumph in British racing green, which I absolutely loved (in real life). But to the best of my knowledge, it never featured in any of my dreams.

When we left Illinois, we did not take the Volvo with us, and I never dreamed about the Volvo again. (Contrast that with the recurring dreams - not nightmares - I had about our house in Ohio, which continued for many years after we moved away. In those dreams, I floated through the house, probably six to nine feet off the ground, often up or down the main stairwell.)