What's happening is that I grew up in a big city back East, and my parents for some reason have decided to move to a suburb in California. Well, they pick a part of town that reminds them of their neighborhood in the old days, and my mother asks me to do her a favor: could I please get our new poodle puppy baptized? I take the little white poodle and begin walking down the street to the church. Even though at the beginning I was supposed to have grown up in New York, reality flashes in for a moment and now I think: good thing I grew up here or I'd never find the church. I make one left, one right, and I walk down a huge corridor of brownstone buildings. Now I begin to descend into the church area, and now the little poodle has been transformed into a little black kitten. I approach the church and its yard, which is filled with people doing things. It looks more like a firestation than a church: it too is made out of brownstone, it is blocky and square, and right in front there are four square fountains, filled with people doing all sorts of outrageous things: playing water polo, having sex, performing religious ceremonies. Well, I start to walk down thinking: it ought to be easy to get the kitten baptized in all this craziness. But right as I begin to get near a pool, one of the Hillside library patrons, a woman I've never talked to or heard talk to anyone, steps forth with her finger out, shaking her head. "No. No. No kittens are allowed in the church." I argue the point with her for several minutes, pointing out the water polo, the sex. She responds that those are human activities, not kitten activities, and that if I wanted the kitten baptized I'd have to go to a kitten church. I'm pretty annoyed by all this, and as I leave I see another one of the library patrons, a big Middle Eastern guy, shaking his head. "Don't you hate that," he laments. "Oh, I don't really care." I had resolved to tell my mother I got the kitten baptized anyway, because it didn't really seem to matter. "Senile old women," he says. "They are all senile." "Well," I try to think of a diplomatic way to disagree. "Some women are old, but not all are senile." At this point I dreamt that I woke up in Laura's mom's house and began to tell Laura the beginning of my dream, which I lost by the time I woke up for real. We have apples and orange juice, (as we'd agreed on the night before for breakfast) and as I'm telling her I keep getting interrupted: people are arriving. An odd assortment of people: Brad's younger brother Stephen, who begins to set up a computer in the corner and some homeless hippie types with boxes of leaves. The hippie types had come up in Hannah's car, and Laura and I sat in the back of her grey station wagon sorting through the boxes of leaves with tweezers. Finally I get to the part where I'm trying to baptize the kitten, and the hippie types demand their boxes of leaves, so we go back inside. I retell dramatically the part where the woman pushes me away, saying 'no', and at the whole discussion involving kitten churches, Stephen just erupts into laughter: he thinks what I'm talking about is real, because he missed the beginning. As he laughs, he begins to drool, and when he wipes his mouth on his sleeve, he accidentally stretches his lip so that it hangs to his chin. Whoops.