Last night I had a dream about a new Disney park called Life. One of the attractions within the park only admitted the dads, and it was called Work. Once I went in, I couldn’t get out.

Ordinarily I’d be bothered if I found myself dreaming in clichés, but this one got me thinking. Why, eight years into retirement, was I dreaming it now? Never in my life have I felt particularly trapped by a job. In one instance, while working for the Social Security Administration, I saw the potential for entrapment, so I quit after six months. Thirty-five years later, when I personally felt the growing bureaucracy of higher education start to creep in on me, I retired. I have been lucky in this regard.

Two possible reasons for the dream come to mind. One, I recently spoke with a good friend who started his own business and, while not trapped at retirement age, has obstacles to overcome before he feels like he’s leaving his professional legacy in good hands.

My friend’s situation made me look back on my own handing over of the reins. In my final job at the university, I had almost the opposite situation. In those last few years, I split time between two different divisions of the university. With both, there were competent people patiently waiting for me to leave. I’d done good work in both positions, but my energy was waning, and there were topnotch people ready to take over from where I left off.

The other possible reason for the dream is that I have felt a little bit trapped for the last two months. Not at work, but at home. Usually when Manyu leaves for Asia, there is a sense of freedom. I miss her, of course, but this is offset by having no one making demands on my time. This year has been different. With an aging and confused dog, I’ve become a caregiver. Jack deserves all of the attention I can give him, but it means that I go to the gym and otherwise stay home. I have not gone ice fishing all winter. I haven’t spent a morning in a coffee shop. I still play cards once a week, but the games always take place at my house.

As I look back on my dream, I now wish that I had a few more details.* For the past two years, most of my dreams have been lucid dreams. This means that I know when I am dreaming and I can wake myself up if the dream is unpleasant. I was not far into my Work dream when I intentionally cut it short. Would I have learned something valuable about myself had I let it play out?

* I vaguely remember a series of turnstiles in the dream. None of the dads wanted to pass through them, but the only two options were to go through the turnstiles or stay where we were.

I recently read Ian McEwan’s new novel What We Can Know. A full week has passed since I finished the book, and I still don’t know what I think of it. At times during the reading, I was impressed with the quality of the prose and totally taken in by the storyline. At other times, I felt that the plot had lapsed into a soap opera account of a not particularly likable character’s love life, and I was tempted to quit reading.

What We Can Know is on several literary critics’ list of the top ten books for 2025. This is usually an indication that I won’t like  it. In my experience, critics tend to prefer books with complicated prose and lengthy periods of introspection. I prefer simple prose and a straightforward story. Last year the critics and I basically agreed on James by Percival Everett, but otherwise we liked very different stuff.

I was, however, drawn to What We Can Know for its unique premise. The story is about a historian from the 22nd Century in search of a long lost poem written by an early 21st Century poet. The book is not so much science fiction as an imagining of what a scholar from the 22nd Century might think about the role of the liberal arts at a time in history when humanity could have saved the planet from climate change, but did not.

The first third of the book was very good. Except for a weak attempt to sneak in a sentence that any reader of crime fiction would recognize as an important clue, the first one hundred pages were solid prose about one man’s hunt for a missing poem. Then abruptly, literally from one page to the next, the novel became a completely different book. Rather than the future, the story fell back into the present. Gone was the future, gone was the original narrator, gone was the search for the lost poem. In its place was the wife of the 21st Century poet describing her love affairs with three different men.

If not for a curiosity as to how McEwan was going to bring these two stories together, I would have stopped reading. It was good that I kept on. McEwan not only brought the stories together, but did so in a way that I did not see coming – even though he’d put down clues throughout the entire book pointing out what the inevitable end had to be. I even think that the obvious clue early in the book that had bothered me was put there to lull readers into thinking that they had the book figured out.

I remember only two other novels where I finished the book and felt totally outwitted by the author. One was Agatha Christie’s Murder of Roger Ackroyd. The other was Scott Turow’s Presumed Innocent. Now I have a third.