The canteen was tin and it was housed inside of a cloth casing with a button at the top. Old things, tokens and artifacts were there and each told a story. There was the divers watch, long ago broken, but kept for its look and the memories it brought. It sat on a table with its white numbers still ready to look at. Various books that the old one had kept- books about the saints and their lives and what they had undergone and partaken to do. Medals were there tied to strings- Holy Medals- blessed, - and they were thought to keep away bad spirits. The couches were soft and welcoming and someone played the news on an old television with comics on top- stories of war and space, of the underground earth and the cities of the future. The old man dozed. No, he did not die then. It was not his time. It was not like that. It was just a rain laden afternoon. He drifted to a dream wherein he was in the town of his birth. A southern continent. - dirt roads and patched and thatched and broken rooftops. A hen, a horse, an old set of pots and pans. There was a hill beyond where feral flowers grew and bragged up their purple and yellow and orange banners. Beyond that the ancestral burial grounds. That is where the spirits that got stuck to the earth roamed. The earth bardo. Ah. All this and still there was a peace, a certain poetic peace because in the dream the old man was a boy and slept again and had the dreams of youth. A dream with in a dream. And if the world is a dream, is Maya, - then it was a dream within a dream within a dream within a dream. Ah. And in the present was the rain tapping against the window. The canteen was tin and housed in cloth with button at the top. Might God grand the world the time to come to a peaceful and creative and proper fruition. That is what the man thought also somewhere in his dream.
