Family Visit, Finished Book, and Two Dreams

As I have informed my readers several times, my family came to stay for about two weeks recently; they arrived on Saturday the 18th of July and left on Friday the 31st of July. The group that came consisted of my cousins, Autumn, Tim, and Bethany, my grandma, my uncle Alan, and my uncle's dog Shadow. Due to an unfortunate and unforeseen clash between our dogs and Shadow, the latter was mortally wounded and was put to sleep on the 20th, a Monday. Despite this tragedy, which I don't think anyone will have an easy time forgetting, we had a very nice time together as a family.
For most of the trip, we simply talked together at the house or took my grandmother to Borders to sit and drink coffee, as she loves to frequent her local bookstore Books-A-Million back home. However, we also went to the zoo, walked around Bethabara and Reynolda Gardens, and rode the two bikes almost every day. We visited my grandfather in Durham, and it was the first time that he had seen my cousins, uncle, and grandma for several years; we dined, as is the odd family tradition, at the Golden Corral. My cousins and I were collectively disappointed by the lack of candy corn.
I also had the honor of taking my cousins to the hot guy movie store, where I was pleased to point out the famed hot guy on our first trip there. It was hilarious, because he wasn't there at first, but Curious George (the guy who looks like him) was.
Disappointed, I became absorbed in my search for a movie, when suddenly I heard my mom whisper, "Robyn!" When I looked over, she was trying to discreetly gesture over behind one of the movie racks, where the pretty guy was replacing a movie; he had appeared out of nowhere.
When I pointed him out to my cousins, they were in the opinion that Curious George was more attractive, which was Shannon's opinion as well.
After checking out our movie, I told him to have a fabulous day, to which he responded, "Good word!" Everyone started laughing at this dorky compliment as we exited the establishment; we started to plot about which word we might use on our next trip to the movie store (In case anyone's interested, the word we decided on using was "super," though we did not receive a compliment for this word).
And so, all in all, it was very sad when they left; my mom cried, and so did I. It is likely that no one else did, as my mom and I are apparently the only saps in the family.
I then went over to my dad's house, where the separation between him and Heather is becoming final; half-packed boxes now dominated the majority of our very large (let me repeat this: very large) house. My dad and I have been frequenting many furniture stores, haggling and getting pretty awesome deals as a result of the recession. I will be staying over at my mother's house until Heather has moved all of her things out.
Now for the two dreams: The first one was very short, and only contained an inner monologue that I seemed to be trying to convey to a doctor of some sort who was having difficulties understanding me. What I said, over and over, was, "Part of my heart is missing; not like George, who's missing his entire heart. I'm just missing the part of my heart with my soul in it." This is what kept repeating itself in my head, and for the record, I have no clue who George is.
The next dream actually had images in it. In the dream, my cousins and uncle were back in town, and we were messing around with a Google Earth-like contraption on the computer. However, the difference between Google Earth and this device was that with the one we were using, you could actually visit the places that you typed in. My uncle let us each pick a place to go to. Autumn wanted to go to Alaska for one reason or another, and so typed that in; we watched as the screen zoomed in on the portion of the Earth that contains Alaska, as that white landmass grew larger before our eyes until Autumn turned to us, said she'd come back in a bit, walked through the screen, and disappeared.
Tim, Bethany, and I agreed that we wanted to see New York; Tim and Uncle Alan went to Utica and Frankfurt, which are the cities in Upstate New York where part of our family lives. Bethany and I wanted to see New York City, more specifically: Manhattan; she typed in 'Central Park' and disappeared through the screen. I thought about all of the places I could go, and decided that I wanted to see the 59th Street Bridge, which, in case you all aren't dorks like me, is the title of one of my favorite Simon and Garfunkel songs, "The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin' Groovy)." So I typed this in and watched the screen zoom in on a rather non-descript bridge at the end of what I took to be 59th Street. I walked through the screen and began to walk down the street, away from the bridge, toward the clustered buildings and skyscrapers of Manhattan. The song "The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin' Groovy)" was blasting from these speakers that were mounted to the lampposts which stood on either side of the road, each separated by about five yards (This is ironic because in the song, there's a verse that goes, "Hello Lamppost, what'cha knowin'? I've come to watch your flowers growing. Ain't you got no rhymes for me? Do-be-do-doo-dloop feelin' groovy!") As I was walking down the street, gazing around in awe, my mom came walking out of a coffee shop nearby and crossed the street to meet me.
"Everyone else is back home." she told me, "We need to go." Then we walked back to the 59th Street Bridge and departed through a whirly sort of portal that awaited us there that no other pedestrians seemed to be able to see.
Last bit of news: I finished this amazing book, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers. I highly suggest it, particularly if you have read and loved To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. I mentioned to my dad one day how I found the two books similar, and then he informed me, as though this is common knowledge, that the two authors are both "Neo-gothic Southern authors." And so I nodded solemnly with a scholarly look on my face and said, "Of course; Neo-gothic. Hence the similar writing styles."
Two things that are similar about the writing styles: both make you involuntarily love the characters and feel as though you are living with them. I don't know how it happens, but by the end of both books, I felt as though I was being shut out of a world to which I had moved and grown accustomed. I didn't want either book to end. The other thing is that they have similar main characters: one finds many identical traits in Scout Finch and Mick Kelly, just as they see the misunderstood but larger-than-life qualities of Boo Radley and John Singer, the latter of which is my new fictional husband, by the way. So this means that I am currently wed to Jonathan the stuffed cow, Tom Bombadil from Fellowship of the Ring, and John Singer from The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, as well as dating Boo Radley.
O.K., now here's the general summary of the book I've just read: Two deaf-mutes (John Singer and Spiros Antonaupoulos) who have lived together for ten years, are suddenly separated because Antonaupoulos's cousin doesn't want to become responsible for him someday if he goes to jail (Antonaupoulos goes through a shop-lifting phase). So the cousin sends Antonaupoulos to a mental institution several miles from the town where he had lived. John Singer moves from the house where they lived into a boarding house, and gets to see his friend (the only one who truly understands him) once or twice a year. Others begin to flock to Singer for comfort, and tell him of their dreams, since, on top of his deafness, he possesses a certain quality of appearing to be omniscient, all-knowing. They believe that he is the only one who truly understands their own struggles with loneliness and stifled moral beliefs. However, Singer cannot take the same comfort from his friendships with these people, as the only one who truly understands him is very far away.
This book will make you feel the huge spectrum of human emotion, from breathless joy to that hollow feeling of loneliness. If you read it, pay special attention to Chapter Seven, Part Two, which (I think) is the best example in the entire book of both of these emotional extremes. This book gets a gazillion stars. Read it.