Published May 8, 2004
The dream started out in the hardware store. I don’t remember anything about what I shopped for, because the important part came after I left the store and went to my car in the parking lot. I put my Lexus in drive but went nowhere. More gas, still nothing. Again, and I started rolling. I pulled out of my parking spot, and started to break, but, again, nothing — I kept rolling, into a little hatchback, pushing that car through the front of the hardware store. After offering my apologies to the Latino driving the hatchback, I got into my car to back it out of the mess I’d just made. But I couldn’t see past the water truck parked next to my accident site; I decided to back up slowly. As I pulled out, a black Toyota pickup suddenly appeared from behind the Sparkletts truck; I lay on my brakes but, of course, they didn’t work, and I hit the Toyota. I rolled forward and, somehow, stopped, then got to look at the damage to the back of my car. You could see sunlight poking through the holes in my smashed trunk lid (a lid that, incidentally, looked like the lid of my old real-life Taurus. What a mess!
Of course, it was hard to drive today, and I expected disaster at every moment.