This obscure tidbit of information was lost to my gray matter decades (oh god...decades) ago -- until last night when it came pouring into my subconscious mind via a wacky dream, a chance encounter with a '58 Chevy Bel Air and my varsity letterman's jacket.
Let's break this down.
The 1958 Chevrolet Bel Air -- while taking the girls (Franny is now included in "the girls") for a bright, brisk Oklahoma February walk the other day my eye caught the glint of chrome on a nicely restored grey and black 1958 Chevrolet Bel Air 2-door that was parked on the street.
I steered the girls in that direction and commenced in my loving examination of the 49-year old Detroit work of rolling steel, cloth and rubber art.
Keep the tri-5's -- I'm a '58 man.
The owner came out of his house and we had a nice, car-guy conversation filled with gearhead shorthand, automotive an-acronyms, and obscure drivetrain facts and figures. Small town old-timer and middle-aged city boy, speaking the common language of car and bonding over an internal combustion engine and a simple mode of transportation. I had a great time.
My varsity letterman's jacket - the other day, I dug out my old varsity letterman's jacket from an unpacked box (2-years and we still have unpacked boxes) and hung it on the back of my office chair.
I knew better than to try it on.
The "closing on 30-year old" jacket fit a much slender, fit and younger whippersnapper who wrestled in the 168 lb. weight class even though he was a good 15 lbs. below the maximum allowed (didn't stop me from going 14-2 my junior year...and I was a mediocre wrestler at best).
There you have it. All the pieces to my wacky nocturnal puzzle.
Only my dream state alpha level brain waves (and maybe that cold slice of veggie pizza before bedtime) could tell you how all those pieces could possibly fit together, but it somehow decided that I should have been driving that same '58 Bel Air to wrestling practice, whereupon I had to open my locker to retrieve my letterman's jacket.
In my dream I was, of course, MY 16-year old self, so MY jacket fit fine, MY '58 Chevy drove like a well oiled machine, and MY locker combination flowed from my fingertips as if it were the most common of activities.
Right 16
Left 2x 149
Right 22
Those numbers probably won't open my old locker anymore, but they did open up some interesting avenues of crosscurrent thought between my past and my present streams of consciousness.
2 comments:
The brain is an amazing thing, isn't it? The best and most perfectly engineered computer known to man, is our bumpy grey matter. Unfortunately, and as far as I know, no one has come up with a deft technical support for us to access detailed and forgotten databases. Maybe that is where dreams come in?
I just hope my brain is running MacOSX or some form of Unix. Can't imagine someone having to deal with MSWindoze Vista in their head.
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