Not a huge story, but true

Get just a little more sleep than what I am accustomed to run on, and (curiously) the creative batteries get fully recharged.

In strange ways, sometimes.

I was dreaming, and there was a clerk in a shop (a shop which later became the office of a service station, but never mind) who was always on the phone (quite possibly a cell phone, as he was moving around all the time, but I did not closely mark the device he held to his ear), and at intervals one of the words that kept cropping up in his talk on the phone was “Tibet.”

When the shop had somehow changed over into the office of a service station, there appeared two customers who were tailing him as he walked about on his mysterious phone call, and the three of them would variously mutter “Tibet,” or “not Tibet.”

(Why am I suddenly thinking Ernst Lubitsch?)

All the repetition of the word Tibet had my dream-brain (do I have a brain? in my dreams) toying with the idea of a limerick. And as I heard the speech of the roving trio getting more animated, in hopes of keeping the tone light, I decided that I would complete the limerick, and share it.

Since it was a dream, one of the odd happenings was, that any piece of paper I found for the purpose of writing my limerick down, was large enough to accommodate only a single line. At the last I had found five slips of paper, had written the five lines, and arranged the five slips in order on the counter:

Out East where the first sun is settin
Lives a rare and athletic Tibetan
She speed-meditates
On her saffron ice-skates
She’s the Tibetan Mary Lou Retton.

Paradise Lost, it is not; ’tis only the stuff made out of a dream (and, why yes, I did recently watch The Maltese Falcon).

Of course, it will be pointed out that Ms Retton was a gymnast, not a skater; but the poet was somnolent, and in such circumstances, will not be held accountable for inaccuracies in matters of athletics.