I had a powerful dream last night. I dreamt my ex R was living in my parent’s house in St. Louis and that she’d been living there month to month without signing a new lease. In the dream the roles were reversed and it was me who had moved out. I came over to assure her that I did not have the lease, that it had been almost exactly two years since we separated and she must have signed a new lease of her own in order to keep living there. She wanted me to help her look for the old lease and while we looked we gradually got over all the tension that’s built up between us and we remembered how much we used to enjoy each other’s company. Oddly enough in the dream she was involved with Karen’s boyfriend John, who spent much of the dream on my parent’s old couch watching football. If I can’t have reconciliation in the actual world it’s nice to have a dream world in which I can work out my shit. It is almost exactly two years since we split. She moved out in early October and Brad moved in to cover her share of the rent on the tenth.

I stayed up until 3:30 last night discussing possible theories on the formation of the universe and the meaning and implications of discreet consciousness. We talked about the newer theory that attempts to include the five competing string theories by suggesting that there are twelve dimensions of which all the other mathematically possible dimensions are a subset. Into this mix we threw Pascal’s wager (which Phil has always seen as cynical and I somehow have not – perhaps it was the hopefulness to which it was employed by Kurt’s father in Kurt’s funeral sermon), intelligent design, and the relative utility of confirmation class for children who need moral grounding to reject later in life as evolution becomes increasingly obvious. Phil’s pastor, “What do you think of evolution?” Phil, “That’s how God did it.”

My niece Erica spent three years in confirmation class and at the final one on one meeting with the pastor last year she told him, “You know what? I can’t go through with this. I don’t believe any of it.” Erica kicks ass. So what then are the implications for Sarah, who starts confirmation class today? An open question, but I do believe it’s Sarah’s open question, to wrestle with as do all of us who were raised in a paradigm that most of the world was done with two hundred years ago.