MORNING SERIAL

AFTERWARDS I was not worried or disturbed and perhaps I thought this sort of thing happened to everyone from time to time. I did not have the capacity, the vocabulary even, to talk to anyone about it, and I have not ever spoken of it until now, until I put down here the words I can best muster to describe what happened that day.

I sometimes wonder if the small boy I was that day were somehow to talk to me as I am now, a man in my fifties, and ask me what I thought had happened, then what would I say? After all my schooling and studying and all my experience of life and all the many people that I have learned from, and all the hundreds of books I have read in all those years, what would I tell him?

I would have to tell him that I knew no more than he did about what had happened and what it meant, or if it meant anything at all. But I could tell him that this momentary change in how the world was, and how he was in the world, would happen just one more time, while he was still a boy, and never again after that. I would tell him that this second episode would, I think, teach him something. And I would tell him not to worry, not to be fearful. But that last part he would know, in any case.

I climbed down off the shed roof and planted my feet on the solid ground of the concrete garden path. I strolled slowly back to the back kitchen of the house in the warm air of that late summer afternoon and I could hear my Uncle Wyndham washing the dishes and humming along to Sing Something Simple on the transistor radio. And I was wholly content.

I was a happy child. Even so, around this time, when I must have been six or seven years old, I dreamed, for the first time, a nightmare that would revisit me several times, and would lodge itself vividly in my memory. In the dream I stood at twilight at the entrance to a rutted and uneven roadway made of muddy black earth.