and she said.. "how you interpret the dream is probably more important than the dream itself"

.. is now behind me in my rearview mirror as if I had hardly noticed it passing at all.

Once upon a time a long long time ago I was looking forward into this summer from the sad drippy eyes of a wallowing springtime and thinking thoughts of beaches and sunshine, beer and wine. I planned - gasp, planned.. you know, like, ahead of time - hiking with my sister deep into the woods of Maine. I planned Montreal Jazz Fest trips and Connecticutt beach house trips. I planned long weekends at camp and I planned weddings.. weddings - the most fleeting of all weekend journeys.

And now, here on the eve of Old Hallowell Day (a traditional small-town Maine celebration of summertime and spirits) I can sit and look backwards into the past like an old man flipping through a book of ancient history, nodding every now and then in a knowing way.

Yup..yup.. drank some beer that weekend.. way back when on the last weekend of June. Drank a lot of beer and did some sailing and saw some good friends and gosh, that was a long long time ago.

Spent a whole three days at camp in early July, uhuh. Went into town and oogled at the girl behind the deli counter, swam in the clear waters of a chilly spring fed lake, drank beer and played cards and watched old spaghetti westerns on the old tv.

Or was it June? Early June? July?.. it was such a long time ago.

And as if I could see, down to the microscopic level of my cells, I could feel my cells breaking down, getting older.. DNA strands unravelling at the ends like so many split ends on an old woman who, once beautiful, is now simply "elegant".

There isn't anything wrong with being elegant. Brian Greene called his first book The Elegant Universe because, as you look out across the microscopic landscape of this earth - for it is truly microscopic in the realm of this universe - you can see beauty - old beauty - everywhere you look. You can look up at the stars and every one of them, twinkling through space and time just to say hi to us, they are more ancient and regal than even the highest Incan priest, even more so than the longest ruling pharaoh.

And here in this petri dish of earth we sit, looking upward, outward, into the laboratory of the universe and what we always always see - we see ourselves. We see a hunter, a string of stars his belt. We see Leo, the lion lying in wait. We see, in the stars, our very own existence.. twinkling like a tiny candle that could, at any moment, blink out.

This is beautiful in an elegant sort of way.. as if we know, deep down, we are here for but a brief second yet we would desire, hope, wish, that maybe - just maybe - there is something of our lives left out there in the stars, there is remnants that prove that - YES - we were here, we existed, and once upon a time..

..a long long time ago we were young, foolish, drinking beer every weekend all weekend living life to it's fullest as if bills and responsibilities and old age were not a factor at all, as if we would live quite literally forever in that tiny corner of the petri dish playing out our fantasies as a party animal, a raver girl, a midnight dj, a lone-star-solo-around-the-world-sailboat-racer, a hiking fool.

And in these thoughts, these prison cell words inside our heads, we every once in awhile find the point of it all - briefly, like the wink of an eye - yes, YES, there is sense in it. There is meaning. There is no meaning and in that there is meaning. Somewhere, something references us - our existence, like a footnote at the bottom of a graduate thesis and in that brief mentioning lies our right to life, our proof of existence, our handle we might grasp, with knuckles white, for all eternity...

until someday in the middle of the night when the tv is playing static and we are snoring with our tv dinner set off to the side and our hands crossed on top of our large full belly of life .. we, with very little pomp or circumstance, will blink right out of existence.

.just like that.