Oboe dream

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When was it? 2004? I dreamed that my old friend, Richard, a carpenter, had made an extraordinary musical instrument out of a variety of woods. He brought it to show to me. He looked more at peace than I had ever seen him since he returned from Vietnam in December of 1970. He demonstrated how the instrument worked by touching one type of wood at a time. When he touched the first one and we listened to the sound, he looked at me joyfully and said, "Oboe." That was all he said during the dream.

It must have been 2004 or later, because when I woke up I went to my iBook G4 and Googled "oboe." Sooner or later I came across Prokofiev's "Peter and the Wolf," which had been a favorite of Richard's as a small boy, and I learned that the oboe was used for the duck's theme:

In the story's ending, the listener is told that "if you listen very carefully, you'd hear the duck quacking inside the wolf's belly, because the wolf in his hurry had swallowed her alive."

Reading those words, it occurred to me that, as a child, I always thought the duck somehow found its way out of the wolf's belly. For me, it may have been the end of the story but not the end of the duck.

Anyway, in late September of 2006, I decided to go to an animal shelter and find and adopt a cat that resembled the wood that Richard had touched in my dream and name him or her "Oboe."

That is Oboe sitting in the July morning sun just after 7 a.m. She will be approximately 6 years old in next month.

More about Oboe.