The first car I ever drove was a 1967 Renault R10.  It was the car I was going to learn to drive in.

It was white and boxy and small…but the thing that was going to make it really interesting was that it had a manual transmission.

It was hard to learn to drive a manual transmission with my sister and an 8-year-old cocker spaniel in the car.

The second car I drove was a 1967 Fairlane station wagon.  It was big and yellow…and had an automatic transmission.

It was easy…even with my sister and an 8-year-old cocker spaniel in the car.

The first car I owned was a 1972 Volkswagen bus…then after that, it was a 1976 Datsun B-210.

Last night, I had a dream about the B-210.

In my dream, I was driving the little green car up a mountain trail.

The trail looked a lot like the trail at Looking Glass Falls…steep and twisting, rocks and roots, lots of switchbacks.

It was some pretty hairy driving.

I think I was slipping and sliding some…white knuckled and holding on…hoping I’d be able to crest the top of the hill and rest on the big chunk of open rock at the summit.

I was hoping the summit would come soon.

In my dream, it felt kind of inappropriate that I was driving this little foreign car up a trail like that.

Anyway, about 2/3 of the way up, I overheard a hiker say, “I tried that once…you can’t do that in that…”.

It was like a magic spell had been broken.  I started sliding backwards, riding the emergency brake, trying to slow down…going down a lot faster than I’d come up.

I think I woke up before I got to the bottom.  It was a wild ride that I was glad I wasn’t around for the end of it.

Dreams are so weird…and so good to wake up from sometimes.

Now I don’t always know what vehicle I’m going to end up in. I know how to drive a manual transmission now, so my possibilities are limitless.

I could end up driving just about anything.

You never know what’s going to happen.

But if I choose to veer off into the allegorical or abstract, I never know what “vehicle” I’m going to be in when I do just about anything.

I don’t know what path my efforts will take sometimes.  I try to be directed most of the time, but sometimes I feel like I’m slipping and sliding a little.  Where I point and where I stop can be two different things.

The thing about it that makes it weird is that I have a hard time ignoring the people who say, “you can’t do that in that”.

I always start sinking when they tell me that I can’t fly.

I always sink.

I suppose that one of the real advantages of being “crazy” would be that the voices in your head are usually louder than the screams of the naysayers. Your crazy drowns out doubt.

I guess that would be an advantage.

I wouldn’t know about crazy, though.  IT IS NOT IN MY LEXICON.

I don’t want to drive a little green car up a mountain trail.  I’ll save that for dreams.

I’ve owned a lot of different cars…each with it’s own quirks and limitations, good points and bad.  They’ve all moved me a little farther down the road…no matter how many times a hose or belt broke, radiators leaked, or tires went flat.  The journey is what I remember…not the obstacles.  I don’t remember the breakdowns as vividly as the new sunrise.

My memory is selective.

I can do a lot of different things in a lot of different vehicles.  I can do it in that.

I can do it in that.

That’s what I’ll tell myself this morning.