They want to publish my Story of Cashmere, which was a sort of bedtime story that I told to Misty to explain why cashmere sweaters are so expensive:
Their hair, the sacred Cashmere Goat Hair, can only be collected after it sheds from the goat naturally. At least two monks attend each Holy Goat at one time--one monk to place a gold-embroidered white cloth in the path of the goat as it walks, so as to catch any sacred Cashmere Goat Hair that falls naturally from the goat, and one to walk behind and gather up the hair as it falls on the cloth.
Since the goats are cared for so religiously, they actually shed less than they would if they were left to their own devices, so very little hair is collected, only a few hairs per week, in fact. It takes almost a year to collect enough Sacred Goat Hair from the five Holy Goats to spin the wool to make one sweater. And only the very holiest of the monks are allowed to spin the wool. Only one monk is chosen every year, and it is considered a very great honor to be chosen to be the Sacred Spinning Monk.
Each year, if enough hair is collected for a sweater--and it doesn't happen every year--the Sacred Goat Hair is brought to the chosen Sacred Spinning Monk, who spins the hair into fine yarn which is then wrapped in one of the gold-embroidered white cloths that are used to collect the Sacred Goat Hair. The yarn is carried down the mountain in a golden casket and handed over to the best knitter in the village, known as the Sacred Cashmere Knitter.
The Sacred Cashmere Knitter knits the yarn into a sweater, using special golden needles that have been blessed by the Dalai Lama. When she has finished knitting, the Sacred Knitter's husband goes out into the valley and calls the monks back by blowing the Sacred Cashmere Horn. The monks then come back down the mountain, collect the sweater, and Federal Express it to a store selected by secret lottery, where it may be purchased at great price.
And that is why cashmere sweaters are so expensive.
I was flipping through a horoscope calendar today, and my horoscope for the 9th said, "Dreams and visions can prove prophetic as Mercury conjuncts Neptune."
So I looked up the 9th in my dream notebook, and that night I dreamed that I stepped out of the bathtub into a flood. The water was several inches deep and I had to splash through it to the bedroom, where I woke Bob up and told him, "We have a water problem."
The reason this is interesting is that during the brief period when I was home today after Bob brought me back from lunch, I was finishing up the journal entry and uploading it, sitting at my desk, and I heard water dripping. I went to investigate and found water dripping out of the light fixture in the kitchen. [Another interesting aside--the lightbulb in that fixture burned out yesterday, and I didn't have the right size bulb to replace it, so there was still a bulb in it, but it was dead.] I grabbed a bowl and a towel to place on the floor to catch the water, and ran upstairs to see what was causing it.
There was a spreading pool of water between the toilet and the bathtub in Bob's bathroom; the shower curtain was sitting in water, and the rugs were wet. There was water dripping out of the bottom of the toilet tank.
I turned off the water, flushed the toilet to get most of the water out of the tank, then ran and got several bath towels to start soaking up the water. Once I had most of the water up off the floor, I bailed out the rest of the water in the tank with Bob's toothbrush cup, then put one of the towels in the bottom of the tank to soak up the rest of the water.
Once I had done everything I could, I called Bob on his cell phone--he was at Barley's, which is loud, and apparently didn't hear the phone ring, because I got his voice mail. I left a message, "We've got a problem . . ."
It turned out that one of the bolts holding the tank to the toilet had rusted through, letting it loosen and letting the water out. He ended up buying a whole new toilet and installing it this afternoon while I was at the grocery store. So much for a nice, quiet Saturday afternoon.
So anyway, I had completely forgotten about that dream until tonight when I ran across the bit about having prophetic dreams. I'm always delighted when a dream turns out to have some meaning in my waking life. It's just really hard to tell which ones to pay attention to, though, and the prophetic ones don't come often enough, and aren't (I don't think) reliable enough that I notice them. Last night I dreamed about getting into a tug-of-war with a woman in a store over a teddy bear that we both wanted.
This morning I asked Bob if I had told him about dreaming about a flood in the bathroom, and he said no. He said, "When you dream these things, you have to tell me for me to get any use out of it." I guess I could report my dreams to him every morning, and he could decide which ones to pay attention to.
Bob and Pyewacket share a bowl of popcorn very late last night:
