Mardi Gras Dreams...

 It's not even Advent yet and I'm having Mardi Gras dreams. 

I dreamed that I was standing on Raguet St. in Lufkin, Tx waiting for a parade to pass. Raguet St. is a long street running all the way through Lufkin north to south (I always thought The Raguet Street Ramblers would be a good band name but I've kind of learned my lesson on those band names with too much backstory) and I was standing with a group of people in the area of what used to be the old Junior High School but is now Pineywoods Acadmey. 

Weird thing is the neighborhood is all turned around with the school on the opposite side of the street and a little south of where it is now. I was standing, waiting on the parade with a small group of maybe a dozen people. We are all bunched up, there's is not that many people there for the parade and there is plenty of room where we could have spread out along the street more. 

The parade starts to pass and even though the real parades in our town have improved impressively the past decade or so this one is small East Texas town stuff. People are driving vintage cars and riding in the back of big wheeled mud pickups of the kind I'm not sure what they do with the rest of the year. The drivers and passengers are tossing beads but it's like they are not really looking where they throw so the beads are landing in the street and against the curbs of each side of our bunched up group. No one chases down these beads they lay where that fall.

The beads, are very colorful flashing in the sunlight as they fly through the air. They are the cheap imported kind that child labor makes in dreary factories that have stolen any imagination that the kids might possible use to think about the reason the world needs such beads. When these beads hit the ground to the sides of the gang of spectators they break rendering them impossible to wear around your neck. 

Finally I put my hands up and with one finger I clumsily catch a string of large green, gold and purple beads interspersed with plastic crawdads. I look and there's a girl on my right. She's cute but it's a washed out pale and skinny with no muscle mass cute. I hand her the beads and say, "Have you ever been to Mardi Gras?"

She says, "Not in New Orleans but once in Baton Rogue I sat in an enclosed glass viewing grandstand with my parents and watched a parade pass. Because we were inside I never got any beads." 

The thought went through my head, "This is not the girl for me." 

And then, I woke up.