I am watching a soccer practice, and the guys are strangers, and some of them who come late are foreign and quite good. I see Mrs Mary Jo Lipscomb, my favorite parent growing up. She is smiling and happy, and she seems to recognize me. I give her a big hug, though she cannot quite call my name. (Mrs Lipscomb, I heard the last time I was back home, is in a nursing home. I say, I'd like to go see her, and her son says, she probably wouldn't recognize you. Not often do real characters and situations enter my dreams.) I am crying quite openly. Later I hear her enthusing over another, and she calls that one by her name.

I'm standing with Rusty McDonald. (This is the fringe kid I drove to Dallas the first time I had control of the family Ford for going to school. That privilege lasted one day, because I blew the time coming back because Rusty was running away to live with his uncle and I had to take him clear to Oak Cliff. We found the house and I left him in the garage of one of those dense downscale neighborhoods of the fifties and drove off lost and took too long coming back and was taken to school for some time after same as when I was in elementary school. I saw Rusty back in school the next Monday. He said, my uncle had moved. He was hanging around the garage of strangers.)

Rusty is driving me, now, a huge box truck, maybe a big rig, and he's backing up beside my own grandma's old house on Chestnut Back Home. He is backing by the southside and I just sit and watch. All of this goes on like the earth spinning without my question or input.

It is the house of a doctor, I do hear that. I wander around again with strangers. I must leave, because I have to go home, because Niki J is expecting me. I cannot find the way out of the large rambling mansion. I do not want to ask, because that would make it obvious I don't belong there.

The doctor comes by. I'm in the room where he sits and pulls off shoes and prepares for the next act. I ask him, and he points the way. He's friendly but not at all solicitous.

I find a phone. I pick it up, and it's one of those trick numbers for special purpose I don't understand. An inside line. I look for another.

Then it's shoes. I have lost my shoes. I cannot leave my shoes. (They are the ones I wear downtown, the very ones over there on the hearth right now.) I begin a new search, leaving off phones, now it's shoes, my own pair of shoes.

I wander around without a plan, which is what I've been doing all through this dream, and this life.