Clinton, South Carolina, Thursday, February 22, 2018, 8:01 a.m.

This morning I awakened from a dream that concerned pickup basketball, Daytona International Speedway, a friend from high school, and trying to get back into the track without benefit of either shoes or my hard card.

I haven’t been to Daytona Beach in more than five years. I haven’t played basketball in nearly thirty years, and I haven’t seen my friend in about forty. I do, however, have shoes, and I think my one-time real friend is now one on Facebook.

Thus did the dream have some small basis in fact.

I never got back to my basketball game, which was somehow being played in the infield of the speedway somewhere. I walked for a long time, losing my sense of direction several times. Near the gate, I discovered my hard card was in one of the back pockets of my khakis. It ended with me riding through the security gate on the back one of the red pickups used by the safety crews at the speedway.

I don’t know what the dream meant. I don’t want to know what the dream meant. I don’t particularly care about genealogy, either. I’m going to write about a basketball game tonight. I’ll need no hints about the significance of the past in order to write about the events of the present.

As Iris DeMent expressed in a song, I’d prefer to let the mystery be.

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