I Had A Dream.

No, that is not an attempt to one up Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. My dream is in the past tense (it occurred on Wednesday night) and it doesn't pertain to hopes I have for the world. But it was a pretty interesting dream. Let me tell you about it...

In the dream, I was the age I am now, but I was living in the house my family occupied when I was just a kid: 137 Jackson Drive in Lake Heritage, for those familiar with my childhood. Anyway. In this dream, my mother and some friends (not real friends -- dream friends) had just returned from an evening class in which they were required to compose an interesting obituary. There were five women in my mom's group that night, but she only brought two of them home for talks afterward. One of the women in the kitchen was tall and slim with a head full of silvery-white ringlets; the other was short and squat with hair that was cropped close and (obviously) dyed blonde. Both of them were very nice and, what's craziest of all, is that the woman with the silvery-white ringlets was actually a professional writer of obituaries!

Now, despite Ms. Ringlets being an expert at her job, she allowed the rest of the group to come up with the opening line to the fictitious obituary they were writing in class. I don't remember what the opening line was, but I'll admit that it was rather drab. My mom's instructor didn't like it and she criticized the group for it. She said no obituary ever would open with such a line.

Ms. Ringlets promptly put the professor in her place, however, because she started reciting these incredible lines that she'd once used as the openers for obituaries. (The drab line was among them.) The thing I remember most about this portion of the dream is that almost absolutely every sentence was beautifully unique.

It was as if each sentence was a firefly.

It was as if I was suddenly surrounded by paragraphs and paragraphs of fireflies that all lit up at once and I had a solitary glass jar and was desperately trying to fill it with magical sentences.

That's when I woke up, and I'll admit that I woke up in a bit of a panic because I really wanted to capture those sentences.

Fortunately, I was able to snag one. I've recorded it in my phone and have so far shared it with Mary and my mom and both of them were pretty impressed.

That sentence is going to be the opening line of the book I'm intending to write this summer, so stay tuned...

In the meantime, Uptempo, Down will be available for purchase tomorrow! You can find it at Amazon as a paperback and an ebook for now, but the audio will eventually exist. I'm also hoping that my friend Marc will allow me to have a book signing at his ice cream shop sometime this summer. Lime-vanilla ice cream, anyone???