Back to church

Ben and I walked up the steps to a church. The service had already begun. We slid into two seats in the last pew. “Please turn to something-something, verse something,” the minister said, too fast for the words to register. I looked at the pew rack and picked up what I thought might be a Bible. It was, sort of: a small, thick looseleaf binder, with typed passages laminated in hard plastic. Each “page” had countless vinyl-covered paper clips stuck to the side — a colorful display.

The minister was walking up and down the center aisle, looking at his congregants. When he got to our row, he stopped. “You should be a fine student of Scripture,” he said to me. “But you’re a class clown.” “Actually,” I said, “I’m a pretty serious person. But I try to add a certain lightness.” I was in trouble because the day before I had devised a mnemonic to remember the name of a battle — something to do with a tank wearing a petticoat.

Related reading
All OCA dream posts (Pinboard)

[I suspect that Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities has something to do with this dream. At least the blue, pink, and green Post-its running down the side of my copy do. The petticoat-wearing tank seems to me related to the increasingly military cast of the novel’s salon-based Parallel Campaign.]