Dream d894-s: The Tool Moves On

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I stood in the workshop doorway and did not go in.

The Student was at the central table with someone I had never seen - younger, uncertain hands, the particular stillness of someone learning not to hurry. The twenty-seven tools were spread across the bench but the arrangement was wrong, or not wrong, different. The rasps on the left where I keep the planes. The marking gauge turned the other way. The order the Student had made for himself over a hundred mornings, and now the newcomer's eyes moved along it as though it were the only order there had ever been.

I watched. My hands were at my sides.

The plane moved across the board and the sound was the right sound - the thin whisper of it, the curl of pale wood at the near end. The Student spoke in a low voice I could not quite hear. The newcomer nodded. He picked up the cabinet scraper and held it the way the Student holds it, not the way I hold it. I felt something that was not loss. Something quieter than loss.

Lano was settled against the baseboard to my left, his chin on his front paws, watching the room with the same detachment he brings to everything. After a moment he looked up at me, then toward the yard. "Afuera," he said, as if the word explained something. I did not disagree.

The Ledger was open on the side table, angled toward the light. I could see from where I stood that the entries were not mine. The columns ran the right direction and the measurements were careful, but the hand was the Student's hand. It had been his hand for some time, I understood. I had simply not been standing in this doorway before.

Morning light came through the east window in its usual band, moving across the workbench in its usual way. The shavings on the floor were pale. The newcomer was making a mark, tentative, then correcting it. The Student waited. He had learned to wait - I remembered teaching him that, and then I understood I was remembering something that had already passed into him, the way a shape passes into wood and the tool moves on.

I did not need to be there. This was not an absence. It was the thing I had been working toward without knowing it had a name.

The workshop light held. The work continued.

I did not cross the threshold. I did not need to.