My Glass Menagerie

I'm going to tell you a secret.  I hesitate a little, because I fully expect everyone who reads this to poo poo it.  Your rational mind will tell you it was just a child's fantasy. And isn't that the problem with our rational minds?  I mean, yes, of course, we need them.  We could not navigate our lives without them.  But they also demand a price for their survival imperatives.   Before I accepted this, I could fly. My first memory of this goes way back to when I was 4 or 5 years old.  I would awake in my room as the morning sun was sending its golden light through the cracks in the blinds.  It was important to not open my eyes fully or stir out of bed.  Rather, I needed to let myself first see all the sparkling sunbeams floating around the golden hued air-space through squinting eyes.  And then, if I was very careful, very quiet, very gentle in opening my eyes the rest of the way, I could begin to see little fish emerge. ...

One of the ideas that I hope to advance with my writing is that of meaning.  How humans assign meaning to things.  My friend, Marion, tells me that I have an unusually good memory.  I don’t know if that's necessarily true.  I don’t have any way of objectively comparing my memory to those of… well, anyone else.   Back around 1977 or so, I stumbled upon NPR (National Public Radio).  I was in high school.  At night when I retreated to my bedroom, I would listen to the news and other programs, intrigued by the content and discussion of current affairs.  Unlike other media, NPR opened a door into a broader, more adult world than was readily available in my little hometown of Flat Rock, Michigan.  And nobody else I knew knew anything about it.  Which definitely added a sort of clandestine intrigue to the whole thing. When I moved to central Kentucky in 1979 to attend college I eventually reconnected with WBKU out of the University of Kentucky....