Notes From A Bear's Journey

     The world of dreams is an odd place, odd in the sense that for me it is oddly welcoming as if each night I walk into a grand terminal of some sort and not know where I'm supposed to go.  Recently my dreams have been growing a bit closer to home.  Here's one from the other night, me seeing an old friend (he's been gone for nearly 40 years now) and me saying to him, "It's been awhile since I've seen you."  Or in another dream, I was telling an unknown woman that I'd been in this dream before, even filling her in on the details I had missed (which she agreed was what happened).  Then there was the dream awhile back of my home when I was in grade school, a dream so vivid that I took copious notes about it as if it would have some meaning at a later date.  I used to do that, take notes of my dreams long ago --the dialogue, the changing scenes, the people and/or animals I had encountered-- but it soon began taking up hours of time each morning.  After a

     The new year came and the old year went, although we missed it; our local stations opted to drop the practice of showing the ball drop in Times Square (on the east coast and thus 2 hours ahead of us) in favor of showing the 10 o'clock news and how many highway patrol officers were out and doing DUI (drunk driving) tests.  My wife and I were already in bed reading.  Earlier I had struggled to open a new container of salad dressing, one with that plastic-sealed top that you peel off, the ones that sometime appear to be glued on.   How are the older people supposed to deal with this, I muttered to my wife, and then realized that perhaps I was struggling because well, I was  that "older" person.  Dang.  But earlier we had had dinner, poured a glass of champagne, and settled in to enjoy "our" new year's by watching (again) the old Return to Paradise concert by the 70s group, Styx .  It only added to our break from scanning through all the new shows and inst