My 60^th birthday is today. I don’t feel old. I feel like I’m gaining strength, physically and creatively. I’ve got a new maniacal husky as a sidekick. I have someone in my life who cares a lot about me. I’m working on publishing a book written by my mother. My dad continues to do well in assisted living and our relationship deepens. I have several great friends of the type I’ve never had in my life before. I’ve started cooking meals that are foreign to me. Borscht anyone? I’ve finally let go of the idea that a couple of special people from the past who vanished without a word will ever reappear and explain. My country seems on the precipice of dictatorship and disaster but I know I have the right mind and spirit to survive if that happens. I’ve got money in the bank and have zero debt. I never went on a journey of revenge. Recently, I drove hundreds of miles to honor dead friends. I hold the record for building the most driftwood forts on Oregon Coast’s socialist ocean beaches. And I’m so close to getting my homeless friend into housing after nearly three years of trying.

A young bearded man sat at a piano in a coffee shop and played it softly and with considerable skill. Two backpacks rested on the floor near him. He exuded the unmistakable vibe of homelessness. It’s pretty easy to recognize these days if you pay attention.

I walked past him and up to the counter to order. I took my coffee to a table that faced the assisted living center where I would visit my dad in half an hour. In his studio, we would discuss current events and some of the poems written by homeless men and women that appear regularly in the weekly newspaper advocating for the homeless. It is my and my dad’s contention that we can learn something valuable about homelessness by reading these poems. I think he’s right although I would like the poets to try some new directions with their thoughts and images. Right now, most of what I read is angry and that really isn’t a great place from which to write poetry.

My coffee tasted scorched. I pulled out my journal and began to write. I found it in no way surprising that a homeless man was tickling the ivories in this establishment. The baristas here have very soft hearts for the homeless people who come in for coffee.

I heard the piano. The man started quietly singing. I stopped writing and listened. The tune was unfamiliar to me. Maybe it was an original. I heard him sing the word “yesterday.” Maybe he had a written a song about parallel universe to The Beatles’ “Yesterday.”

He sang pretty badly, but he was singing nonetheless.

A minute later he stopped, stood up, gathered up his backpacks and shuffled away.

Elmer the husky and I crossed the tiny footbridge that crossed Crystal Springs Creek in the park a few blocks from my home. It was approximately 5:15 in the morning and we were out gallivanting on our routine morning walk. Weak rays of light from street lights illuminated the bridge and creek. In the distance, freight trains squeaked along the tracks.

As we regularly do, we stopped on the bridge to check for wildlife lurking in the creek below. I’ve seen otters, nutria and beavers from this bridge, not to mention all manner of ducks.

Something glided our direction. A head came into focus. It was an old beaver and he was gray in muzzle and whiskers. That’s how close we stood to the creek.

Elmer saw the beaver too, and jumped up a bit but didn’t bark.

I saw gradual movement behind the beaver and then heard SLAAAAAP! BOOOOOOOOM!: a deep sound reminiscent a fat kid landing in a swimming pool tucked in the cannonball position.

I’ve seen beavers in the wild many times in my Oregon life, saw them munch a stick and tree, saw them around a lodge and dam, but I had never heard the sound of their flat tail flapping the water (a danger alert to other beavers) that I’d read so often about in articles and books.

The sounds was so loud that I hopped up and exclaimed something exuberant aloud that I no longer recall.

The beaver swam under the bridge. We walked across and took a path that paralleled the creek but brush partially obscured our view of the channel. The beaver disappeared from my sight.

SLAAAAAAAP! BOOOOOOM! The beaver flapped again! Five seconds later, another SLAAAAP! BOOOOOOOM!

I was cheering by now and could see the ripples in the creeks. Elmer was in full alert mode and stared at the creek.

We walked along the path but heard no more slaps and booms.

It occurred to me that I might never hear the sound again, and to think I heard it in the big city. At least Portland does urban nature right.

Elmer and I picked up our pace. I felt wildly energized. Seeing a beaver in the wild can do that to a man. (I’ve got to use a variation of that cornball sentence in a short story.)

Rarely, do I record my dreams in my journal. I almost never discuss them with anyone. Whenever dream sequences appear in fiction, I skip right over them (except the story of Joseph in the Old Testament). I did read Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams and subscribe to many of its assertions. I once taught an extremely popular dream-themed writing workshop to my English and creative writing students. It produced remarkable material full of deep reflection and insights. Dream life and visions in many indigenous cultures fascinate me. Imagine plotting a tribe’s immediate future after a shaman interprets a persona vision. (That would certainly present a better method than what currently unfolds as leadership in Congress.)

Despite some of my statements above, I feel compelled to explore in writing a dream I had a week ago, a dream that I cannot stop thinking about and is easily the most important and possibly consequential in my lifetime.

To begin with, it was not a traditional dream where I interacted with other people, dead or alive, real or imagined, or my long lost dogs. There was no place in this dream. There was no designated time. There was no physical action. There were no emotions. There was nothing of sex.

I was the only person in the dream and it was me as I am now, a 59-nine year old man living in Oregon who has spent the last eight years trying to rebuild and recreate his life after a total extinction of self and the loss of almost everything I held dear.

In the dream, which was more of a metaphysical meditation than any kind of narrative activity, I was presented an opportunity, a choice (by some unknown being or force) to turn back time and have what happened to me in 2016 not have happened and my life gone on the way it probably would have, meaning living in Astoria in my new house, teaching a few more years, writing books, gigging, and not really present in my family’s lives or cultivating deep friendships.

I chose to turn back time and have what happened NOT HAPPEN. Then the dream unfolded my life as it would have unfolded with that decision and it went pretty much the way I described above. It was, boring, flat, repetitive, intellectually listless, creatively stunted. Nothing really new or unexpected happened. Everything was old hat.

As the dream unfolded, I was able to compare my life with what actually happened in those eight years and even to look beyond. I was conscious that my subsequent life after the catastrophe, was much more rich and interesting and totally unpredictable in a good way.

In the choice not to have what happened happen, I wouldn’t have:

Volunteered at a senior dog shelter and met Bonnie and Clyde.

Got out of teaching for good.

Met the best friends of my life, Jennifer and Holt.

Met the extraordinary couples of Earl and Carolyn and Kevin and Wendy.

Worked as a construction laborer, and found it to be the best and most practical job in my life.

Discovered the Southern Oregon Coast and RV life.

Taken care of my elderly father and got to know him.

Published Smoky Eplely’s book.

Published my aunt’s collection of memoirs.

Published Pete’s epic novel of the Vietnam War.

Become a substantive writer of Oregon fiction.

Built more driftwood forts than anyone in Oregon history.

Had a tarot reading in a driftwood fort.

Produced the Oregon Tavern Age publication.

Reconnected with AG and MT and almost RD.

Met Kelly from the Bay Area and Kelly from Portland.

Found out who my real friends were.

Learned what friendship is all about.

Learned how terrible, ineffective and cruel our justice system is.

Written a book about a group of homeless men and women in Portland that seems to have connected with many people.

Discovered what phonies most writers are.