From time to time I think of quitting the magazine and coming back out to do a column. Though I’m sure it’s too late for that now. (The local sports boys never take kindly to the national magazine writers because we make more money. And in fact, I’ve been given haywire information from a few old beat writers, which, if I’d used it, would’ve made me look stupid in print.)

It has the feeling of an odd morning, despite the friendly anonymity of the hotel. A distinct buzzing has begun in the pit of my stomach, a feeling that is not unpleasant but insistent. Several people I saw in the lobby have reminded me of other people I know, an indicator that something exceptional’s afoot. A man in the checkout line reminded me of—of all people—Walter Luckett. Even the black shop girl put me in mind of Peggy Connover, the woman I used to write in Kansas and whose letters caused X to leave me. Peggy, in fact, was Swedish and would laugh to think she looked a bit Negroid. Like all signs, these can be good or bad, and I choose to infer from them that life, anyone’s life, is not as disconnected and random as it might feel, and that down deep we’re all reaching out for a decent rewarding contact every chance we get.

Last night, after Vicki went to sleep, I experienced the strangest dream, a dream I’ve never had before and one I would rather not have again. I am not much of a dreamer to begin with, and almost never remember them past the moment just before my eyes open. When I do, I can usually ascribe everything to something I’ve eaten in the afternoon, or to a book I’d been reading. And for the most part there’s never much that’s familiar in them anyway.

But in this dream I was confronted by someone I knew—a man—but had forgotten—though not completely, because there were flashes of recollection I couldn’t quite organize into a firm picture-memory. This man mentions to me—so obliquely that now I can’t even remember what he said—something shameful about me, clearly shameful, and it scares me that he might know more and that I’ve forgotten it, but shouldn’t have. The effect of all this was to shock me roundly, though not to wake me up. When I did wake up at eight, I remembered the entire dream clear as a bell, though I could not fill in names or faces or the shame I might’ve incurred.

Besides not being a good collector of my dreams, I am not much a believer in them either or their supposed significance. Everyone I’ve ever talked to about dreams—and Mrs. Miller, I’m happy to say, feels exactly as I do, and will not listen to anyone’s dreams—everyone always interprets their dreams to mean something unpleasant, some lurid intention or ungenerous, guilty desire crammed back into the subconscious cave where its only chance is to cause trouble at a later time.

Whereas what I ama proponent of is forgetting. Forgetting dreams, grievances, old flaws in character—mine and others’. To me there is no hope unless we can forget what’s said and gone before, and forgive it.

Which is exactly why this particular dream is bothersome. It is about forgetting, and yet there seems to be a distinct thread of unforgiving in it, which is the source of the shock I felt even deep in sleep, in an old town where I feel as comfortable as a Cossack in Kiev, and where I want nothing more than that the present be happy and for the future—as it always does—to look after itself. I would prefer to think of all signs as good signs, or else to pay no attention to them at all. There are enough bad signs all around (read the New York Times) not to pick out any particular one for attention. In the case of my dream, I can’t even think of what I ought to be anxious about, since I am eager—even ascendant. And if it is that I’m anxious in the old mossy existential sense, it will have to stay news to me.

It is, of course, an irony of ironies that X should’ve left me because of Peggy Connover’s letters, since Peggy and I had never committed the least indiscretion.

She was a woman I met on a plane from Kansas City to Minneapolis, and whom in the space of an afternoon, a dinner, and an evening, I came to know as much about as you could know in that length of time. She was thirty-two and not at all an appealing woman. She was plump with large, white teeth and a perfectly pie-shaped face. She was leaving her family with four children, back in the town of Blanding, Kansas, where her husband sold insulation, to go live with her sister in northern Minnesota and become a poet.