I woke up this morning from a technicolor dream. I was walking through my childhood neighborhood on the east side of Newark, seeing the old haunts with new eyes. I walked past the gin mill where my dad and his buddies used to hang out. The place was still there, open for business in the gray hours before dawn, and one man who was walking up ahead of me turned in there. "They're open that early for guys who work nights," my parents would say. Not this guy. He was an all-day boozer on his way to work.

I crossed the street with my dad next to me; he was limping along, grumbling about something. The tenement house across from the bar had been torn down, leaving a grassy lot with a dog house on it. Just then I noticed that I had a large, but incredibly light, stuffed animal draped over my shoulders. I looked down the street, across the railroad tracks, toward the three-story walkup where an old girlfriend lived. It was raining, and the street was flooded. The walkup was gone, and there were rows of apartment buildings up there in the distance. Cars slowed down to try to get through the water.

Along the avenue that ran behind ours, there were slices of processed American cheese scattered on the wet pavement. I looked inside some garages that lined the sidewalk, and there was solid cheese everywhere, six inches deep. "They are going to have a mouse problem," I thought as I picked up my step. It was that marbled blend of white and orange cheese.

I passed another tavern on the corner. The one where the black people used to drink. The place with the apartments upstairs -- where people had died in a wintery Friday night fire. The place was still there, painted green, but the windows were all boarded up, most of them with a neat, white X painted on the boards in the window.

I don't know what any of that means. And I'm pretty sure I don't want to.