At Barnes & Noble

Elaine and I went into a nearby Barnes & Noble and found a baffling arrangement of retractable-belt stanchions, making the entrance to the store look something like a small airport. A security guard nodded for us to enter.

I went off to look for other versions of Illinois, the great Sufjan Stevens album, and found an entire aisle devoted to his work, with everything packaged in enormous black boxes, looking more like elaborate board games than CDs, just three or four boxes to a shelf. I reached up to the highest shelf and took down a package labeled Dice. Inside, a deck of cards and a device that looked like a cross between a corkscrew and a flower press. The gist of the game: place cards under the corkscrew/press until it drops. Then add up the values of your cards.

Then we met Ben. We didn’t know he would be at Barnes & Noble. We made plans to go get ice cream.

And then I met Skip James. We seemed to already know each other. Skip wore a bright plaid shirt. I asked him if he was playing anywhere and where he was living. He said he was living in Newark, Music City, and I wondered if he had meant to say Nashville.

A one-time colleague and know-it-all approached and asked, “Michael, did you know that Led Zeppelin recorded Skip’s [some song title]?” “Okay,” I said. “But what about Cream and ‘I’m So Glad’?” Skip said he may have already had COVID and moved over to a wall to lie down. I then realized that none of us were wearing masks. “We should probably socially distance,” I said.

We never got to the ice cream.

Related reading
All OCA dream posts (Pinboard)

[To the best of my knowledge, Led Zeppelin never recorded a Skip James song.]