I had a dream this morning in which I was flying to a football game. And when I say flying, I mean without a plane. I was swooping through the air along city streets, like a superhero, but never more than a couple of dozen feet above the ground. I soon realized that I wasn’t in the air under my own power—the only reason I appeared to be aloft was that I was dangling at the end of a wire attached to a moving crane.

When I got to the stadium, it suddenly came to me that I wasn’t just there to attend a game—I was actually the new owner. And I was the coach as well. I know nothing about football (or any other sport, really; that’s just the way I am), so luckily my pal Gene O’Neill, with whom I attended the Clarion Writing Workshop back in 1979, was there to advise me. Good thing, too, because I desperately needed to pick his brain. For some reason he was dressed quite formally, in a business suit, as if ready for church or a wedding, while I was my usual casual self.

As we spoke, I was sitting at a table and flipping through the sports sections of various newspapers, trying to glean as much information as I could about football, but also trying to figure out the name of the team of which I was now in charge, because I couldn’t seem to access that memory. I woke while doing that, riffling the pages and scanning headlines, just as I realized that the team for which I was now responsible was the Bears.