– Time For A Tiara: Column by Ginna Young – - Soup’s on! And on…and on…and on…

– Time For A Tiara: Column by Ginna Young –

Now that the weather has turned cooler, I’ve slipped into soup mode, envisioning a pot of homemade goodness simmering on the stove burner. On dreary, rainy days, I can almost smell it.

Maybe that’s why a recent dream I had, was the way it was.

This dream I speak of, lasted the entire night; I even missed the storm we apparently had, so out was I. Despite tossing and turning, I just couldn’t shake myself out of this dream.

So, here’s how it went: I was in my own home, but it was midnight (in reality, I went to bed at 9 p.m., falling right to sleep), when suddenly – in my dream, I was awaked – and in possession of what was referred to as a guitar, but was quite obviously a mandolin. But, I digress.

Some lady appeared in the hall outside my room and said there were 56 souls trapped in the hollow of the guitar that she now magically held in her hands. She seemed like a flesh and blood human, so I have no idea how she got in the house. Dream loophole, I guess.

How they got trapped in there in the first place wasn’t made clear, but it was made clear that if I didn’t act, by dawn, all 56 innocent souls would remain trapped in the guitar forever. Of course, even though I didn’t understand fully what was going on, I couldn’t just let those souls languish in torture for all eternity.

The funny thing was, you could clearly see the souls sitting there in the hollow of the guitar, so, to my way of thinking, if you simply tipped the guitar upside down, wouldn’t the souls fall out and be free? Of course, it was never was tipped, so there we are.

Anyway, in order to free the souls, I needed to consume 56 cans of cream of chicken soup by dawn, all by myself. I tried to argue to the person who stood holding the guitar, that I couldn’t possibly eat all 56 cans of soup before dawn. Oh, but I must, it turned out.

Couldn’t someone else help me eat the soup? Split it up between, say that fellow and that lady over there? (A bunch of people had turned up by this point.) Nope, only I could save the souls and only I could eat the soup to do so.

Well. That was that. I began eating the cans of soup, one at a time. It didn’t go too badly for a while, but then I started to drag, as time went on. I begged someone to help me, but again, the crowd insisted ’twas only I who could free the souls.

One helpful lady informed me that if I would stop heating up each can of soup, it would go much faster. OK, lady, I get that human souls are on the line here, but time wasn’t the issue, fullness was. And there’s no way I’m going to open a can of soup and eat it cold; and, yes, each time, I added milk to make it creamy.

After every can was finished, you could see a blue, transparent soul, that looked like a traditional Halloween ghost shape, complete with the round black eyes and gaping mouth, lifting out of the guitar, rising toward the Great Beyond, dissipating as it went.

Needless to say, adding to the drama, no one thought to turn on a light in the house; instead, I had to go by the night lights stationed around the house in real life, so I don’t wipe out when going to the bathroom in the middle of the night.

Eventually, as the sky lightened and dawn approached, I had but three cans left to go – three souls left to save. By then, I was stuffed to the gills with soup and crying, telling everyone I couldn’t finish the rest of the soup. Those ever helpful people told me that I had to, that those three souls were counting on me.

“And one of them is a child!” That, of course, made me feel even worse and I tried to choke more soup down, sobbing my eyes out, as the sun rose over the horizon. “I caaaan’t doooo itttt, it’s toooo laaaaaate,” I said, bawling and then...my alarm went off.

Talk about a disheartening start to the day. Not only was I exhausted from that night-long ordeal of unpeaceful rest, but I can’t help feeling as those I failed and as weird as it sounds, I felt extremely full, even though I had no supper the night before. I know it was just a dream, but still, it bothered me the entire coming day.

The only thing I can find to be thankful for, is that in the dream, the soup I was eating, was not an off-brand, but was Campbell’s. Anything else really would have been a nightmare.