WINDY DREAMS

I don't know if it was because I'd read a newspaper article about tornado warnings yesterday or because I'd watched a Eureka Tornado wrestler on TV last night win a State Championship title, but I had a dream this morning about tornadoes. This is a recurring dream theme of mine, for some reason, but today's was crazier than usual.

I was back in high school marching in the Neewollah Parade in Independence, except, for some reason, the parade was in Parsons, about thirty miles away. Adding to the weirdness of this dream, we were marching out in the country at 3 AM. Being the loud mouth that I am, I kept hounding our band director, a large woman and not the man we actually had back in the 196os, why in the world we were performing before absolutely no one in the middle of the night. Her response: "We're warming up!!"

Now when I was a band member, I played the flute. But in this dream I was on the drill team behind the majorette. No twirling or waving flags, though. Here's what we were doing, and this makes no sense whatsoever: we were holding a configuration of Tinkertoys precariously attached, and we were supposed to be doing a little routine with them--lifting them, moving to the left, moving to the right, all the while staying linked. Ridiculous! And I kept telling the band director, "This is so stupid!" And difficult, as well. A real challenge in eye-hand coordination.

Well, finally, dawn arrived and we could see to the east that a series of tornadoes were blowing across the horizon. Hallelujah! I had an excuse to toss aside the Tinkertoys, jump into a ditch, and save myself from being in the band! Others joined me. We safely watched dozens of tornadoes scatter across the sky. When they were gone, my pal Windy (I've blogged about him before---he was my junior prom date and railroad rider back in the day), who played trumpet in the band, drove up in his old Mercury, picked up some of girls, and away we went. The end.

Figure this one out, Sigmund Freud.