Dolnick Center (Revisited) | The Dreamweaver

I was at the Dolnick center where there was a lot of activity going on.

I was upstairs in the auditorium and zayde was downstairs near the kitchen working on a small table with all kinds of papers.

There was a caretaker and the young woman assistant and my daughter Cassia was there with a friend, playing or doing something in the downstairs area.

Then, a woman who apparently was a friend of my grandmother’s came up to me accompanied by my grandfather and they proposed that she rented a car to take her to the airport and that I go with with my grandfather so I could drive the rented car back to the agency. She said it would be cheaper than paying for a taxi for all of us. Then my grandfather suggested I take Cassia with me so I wouldn’t have to drive back from the airport alone, which made me assume that my grandfather was going with this woman wherever she was going, so I agreed and convinced Cassia to come with me and she left to take her friend home.

Next, the woman and my grandfather went to pick up the rental car and as the center cleared out, I was alone with my zayde, who eventually left as did the caretaker and the assistant who went into the office to leave her key in a box by the door and said goodbye and left; then the caretaker began turning off all the lights and was starting to say goodbye, assuming that I had a key and when I told him I didn’t that I had left mine at home, he didn’t seem concerned and he left and locked the door behind him.

I was now alone in the center when the few lights that were still on started going off one by one, presumably as they were on a timer.

I sat there on the stairs there in the dark, wondering how I was going get out when my grandfather and the woman came to pick me up.

At one point, I stood up as I saw some car lights approaching the building, but it turned out to be a party trolley that was driving on the sidewalk and filled with tourists; it came very close to the to the building and for a second I thought it might crash into the glass doors.

I eventually remembered that the assistant had left her key in a box by the office door, so I went into the office thinking that I would find a key there to be able to let myself out and lock the door behind me when my grandfather and the woman returned, but when I walked into the office, there were a bunch of keys, and one in particular that was taped to a ledge of a shelf that had a woman’s name and the word “cook” written below the name. As the key looked familiar, I took it from that shelf and walked over to the door to see if it was the key to the front door and it was so I was satisfied that I’d be able to get out when the time came.

I locked the door and sat back down on the bottom stair, but then I found myself on the outside of the building—around the south side—and there was a woman walking there talking on a phone, an older woman asking someone if they were the person who wrote some song about the Dolnick Center back in the 1950s. I smiled, knowing who that woman was or at least remembering who she was from my childhood, and I walked past her and nodded.

Then I woke up.