Notes From A Bear's Journey

      Dungeons and dragons.  Never played it.  The other night's dream had me looking out a window in a large gathering and telling everyone that something unusual was coming...and fast.  It was a dragon, one as red as Dorothy's shoes in The Wizard of Oz, and it swooped in and grabbed me even as I hid under a table; but somehow I held onto the legs of the table and used it to continuously flay at the dragon's feet, whacking away as if the table was little more than a pie plate and me strong enough to lift it over and over.  And somehow, it worked.  The dragon dropped me in a corner as it flew out the other side.  It was then that I found myself holding a tall rod, a "magical" spear of some sort and one which I knew nothing about other than I had to blindly sit up and heave the spear out the window and with force, which I did.  Bulls eye, I heard someone say, which puzzled me because I knew that I had simply thrown it out the window, aiming at nothing and, since it

     "Hello darkness my old friend; I've come to talk with you again," wrote Paul Simon, a bit ironic since the 81-year old went completely deaf in one ear four years ago.  As he told The Times (UK) , So everything became more difficult...I'd think, 'You're like a Paul Simon cover band.  You should go home.'    Simon was one of many prolific songwriters (another, Cynthia Weil , recently passed away), but perhaps not as good as the scout and producer who "discovered" him; at the time Simon was paired with his high school friend, Art Garfunkle (who sang but never played an instrument or composed any material) and were strictly an acoustic duo.  The producer agreed to pick them up but only if he could embellish their song, The Sound of Silence, with an electric guitar and some drums (you'll have to listen to the song to hear just what and when that was added)...the rest as they say, is history. Norman Catwell by Lucia Heffernan      The topic of

     Mark Twain once said: It's not what you don't know that kills you.  It's what you know for sure that ain't true.   There's a lot that I don't know, and also a lot that I think I know only to discover that when  someone asks "why," or "how" or "who said that," well the answer is that I don't really "know" the full  answer.  The Marx Brothers summed it up best when their cocky boss says, "I don't think. I know !" to which Groucho quickly replies, "Well I don't think you know either."  That's me.  It's all in the details, as they say, and often I find that the things I tend to "know" are often only the highlights floating on the top.  Information comes, but what stays in my head seems to be only bits and pieces similar to how data is transmitted, "packets" of information condensed but never arriving as a whole (our eyes and brains, for example, cannot see the &q