Dill

Dill's voice was his own again: "Oh, they ain't mean. They kiss you and hug you good night and good mornin' and good-bye and tell you they love you- Scout, let's get us a baby."

"Where?"

There was a man Dill had heard of who had a boat that he rowed across to a foggy island where all these babies were' you could order one-

"That's a lie. Aunty said God drops 'em down the chimney. At least that's what I think she said." For once, Aunty's diction had not been to clear.

"Well that ain't so. You get babies from each other. But there's this man, too- he has all these babies just waiting' to wake up, he breathes life into 'em. ..."

Dill was off again. Beautiful things floated around his dreamy head. He could read two books to my one, but he preferred the magic of his own inventions. He could add and subtract faster than lightning, but he preferred his own twilight world, a world where babies slept, waiting to be gathered like morning lilies. He was slowly talking himself to sleep and taking me with him, but in the quietness of his foggy island there rose faded image of a gray house with sad brown doors."

To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee

Dream

It is night.
Rain pelts the roof.
The soul awakens
To a flooded Earth
A sea of storm
Roaring,
Then passing.

In that short moment,
Shifting lines and shapes,
Fleeting,
Barely seen.

Before the passing moment tilts
And falls to melancholy,
Laughter sounds,
In quite raindrops

Thich Nhat Hanh
----


It is as though a memory from childhood. The rain, the water. The feelings take the form of the breaking waves. It is night and I am looking at a white swan... It is like walking on a rope carefully, but you die to fall.

Gentleman

"Nav, Scout, it's something you wouldn't understand. Atticus is real old, but I wouldn't care if he couldn't do anything - I wouldn't care if he couldn't do a blessed thing."

Jem picked up a rock and threw it jubilantly at the carhouse. Running after it, he called back: "Atticus is a gentleman, just like me!"


To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee