Keanu Reeves is my neighbor

Last night I dreamt that Keanu Reeves was my neighbor. Actually, Keanu was only a small part of a more complex landscape, but not surprisingly, he's the part I remember. In real, waking life, Mr. Reeves did appear a number of times on a streetcar in my youth, before he was famous. He was striking, as he is now, so that I noticed him and recognized him when I saw him a second time. When he began to turn up onscreen, I remembered seeing him on the streetcar. Many years later, I now remember that striking young man as like an apparition, with a dreamlike quality, which is why it never seems strange when he shows up in my dreams. Last night, he lived two doors away and came over when my house was in an uproar over something, and we hung out for a quiet moment, like having a cup of tea, in the doorway.

Stopping for a cup of tea in a doorway is something I miss. The form it actually used to take was more like a glass of wine from a carafe on a patio with a friend, but the feeling was the same. There is that long sigh, that dust-speckled ray of sunshine, that you can enjoy with a friend on a warm afternoon, when the reason you've met at this cafe is not to catch up, not to make plans, and not to meet in preparation for some other event, but just because it's a warm afternoon and a glass of wine would be nice.

Now, my best friend lives here with me, and the closest we get to tea is when I go down to the cafeteria at lunchtime, and he closes the book he was studying, and we open our little plastic containers and eat lunch together. It's nice, but because our life is one ever-evolving project, we meet for tea between tasks, always on our way to something else. The exception is when we travel, not to visit family or friends, but just to go. Then, every moment is a cup of tea or a glass of wine, and I am in heaven.

I miss my Toronto friends. I miss the way my life used to be about catching one of them on the phone, and stopping somewhere on the way home and then just not moving on until hours later. That's not gone --but those warm afternoons have been transformed into long weekends that are far too few and far between, when my best friend and I get into a car, and turn onto a freeway, and just don't think about turning back.