It is a wet and cool Monday morning. The light is so rare I could barely read the newspaper out on the porch. The coffee is weak (What the hell happened last night when I ground the beans?) I have little to report, other than that we are in for a couple of colder nights before Spring rears its beautiful face again. I must roll the electric radiator back into the bedroom or freeze my Budgerigar tonight.

Next week on May 5 I will turn another year. At this age "getting laid" means becoming too intimate with the undertaker. It means being too conscious of cracks in the sidewalk and no longer caring about matching colors when you put on clothing.

It also means looking backward a lot. I do that most Monday mornings.

I know precisely where my life took strategic turns. As I wrote in a previous post, everything that has ever happened to me is directly due to decisions I made. Growing older (or should that be 'shrinking older?') brings reflection. It makes me an instant memoirist.

I pondered doing a memoir about those turns. What would my life have become had I made the better decision(s)?

The memoir would have fiction sprinkled into it, of course, to titillate the reader. Most memoirs do. In fact I am sure there never has been a totally nonfiction memoir. Even Churchill sprinkled a few fictives among those battle scarred words.

I love that word: fictive.

So where do I begin?

Maybe with Kimberly? The only girl I ever met in a book store? Now that was an omen! I should have know she was a godsend! I was standing near the reference shelves when,

"Excuse me, but I think I know where you work..."

I turned into the face of a future that I would soon deny myself. I saw a glimpse of paradise and it locked its brilliant eyes on mine.

Ah. It is all about dreaming. It is all fraught with fiction because memory and its bedfellow - age - dissipates the truth.

Maybe it was the New Fiction shelf.