Pickup trucks and Dealey Plaza

In just a day and a half, as I alluded to in my previous post, I have come to the realization that a man needs a pickup truck. All the struggling with cargo, renovation materials, hauling tools, furniture, etc. could all be solved if I bought myself a truck. Just yesterday, I drove my father-in-law's pickup exactly one block to the local building supply store to buy some drywall sheets. The dang things fit just lovely in the back of the truck. No fussing, no removal of seats in the back of the minivan trying to make something fit that is not going to fit anyway, no cursing under my breath as I load at the store or unload at home.

I am now on the hunt for a decent half-ton. I'll keep y'all posted.

------------

This section really should be its own post, I know. More than one post a day, or more than eight or ten a month, is asymptomatic of this blog. So I'm shifting gears now and sharing the details of the strangest, most vivid dream I have had in years. This one occurred in the early hours of Saturday morning.

In the dream, I had access to a means of time travel. Not a machine per se, but simply some means of moving the entire world's clock to whatever date I wanted it to be. I somehow felt I was limited to the 20th century. I don't know why.

I chose to go back to the early 1960s. Dreams being what they are, there were all kinds of inconsistencies, like the fact that the neighbourhood I grew up in got built in the 1960s, but in my dream it was as it was in the 1980s. That's not important but I thought I'd mention it anyway.

What struck me is that I suddenly came to the realization that the date to which I had shifted the entire planet was none other than Friday, November 22nd, 1963. I had done this entirely accidentally. When I realized what date it was, I felt a terrible chill.

Several other people in the dream were with me - they were friends of mine, and they were from the present day. In other words, they were in on the whole time travel thing. I gathered my friends together in a state of panic and anxiety.

"Do you realize what today is?" I told them.

"Yes." Everyone nodded.

"The Kennedy assassination is two days from now," I told them, for some reason thinking the date was November 24th.

"No, that's not right," one of them corrected. "Two days from now is the Oswald assassination. The Kennedy assassination is today."

"Today? What time is it now?" I asked, alarmed.

"It's 12:30 p.m." came the reply. "With the time difference, it is 10:30 a.m. in Dallas." (None dare say I confuse my time zones when I sleep.)

"We have two hours to do something!" I yelled. "What the hell do we do? Who do we talk to?" About this point in the conversation, I realized I was in the middle of my old street in Nova Scotia with the others, pacing frantically.

The conversation turned as to how the Kennedy assassination could be stopped. We were just about to act, to start making calls to the authorities, when everyone stopped and looked at one another.

"We cannot do this," someone said quietly. "We would be changing the course of history in ways we cannot predict. It could be extremely dangerous." The conversation then turned to the various presidencies and administrations that followed President Kennedy's, and many of the permutations that flowed from them. The sense of panic gave way to resignation, and then the hatching of another plan.

"If we cannot stop it," I said, nearly choking up, "we can at least make sure that the truth gets out." Everyone agreed on this.

The plan was that I was going to call a journalist in Dallas, and ask him to record my call. (Dan Rather was in Dallas that day - I wonder if it was him I was supposed to call?) I would ask the journalist to verify that he was recording my call, and I would ask him to verbally confirm the time of day and his location, so that the call could be verified to have been placed prior the assassination. I would tell him everything I knew or believed about the plot. Part of the plan was believing that he would likely take me for a crank caller and do nothing about the information I was giving him until after everything had happened. At that point, what reporter would sit on a tape of a call like this? The event would not be stopped, but the truth would get out.

The amazing thing is the amount of detail that I had in mind to give to the journalist. I was planning to tell him that there was a conspiracy to assassinate the president; that there were to be gunmen on the railroad overpass or behind the bushes atop the Grassy Knoll, and in the Texas School Book Deposity Building, and in the Dal Tex Building at Dealey Plaza; that the police would arrest the wrong man; that the man arrested would be killed in two days' time by a Mafia-connected nightclub owner; that JFK's Secret Service detail had hangovers and could not be considered reliable today; that the Dallas police could not be trusted to investigate the crime; that the Warren Commission would cover up the conspiracy; that Lyndon Johnson and J. Edgar Hoover could not be trusted; that the autopsy would either be botched or forged; that the CIA had placed agents all over the place who were unwittingly part of the conspiracy; and that the man from California the police would arrest in the Dal Tex Building after the shooting (Eugene Brading) is Mafia-connected and ought not to be released.

I never made the call. I woke up before I could get to a telephone.

Over the last twenty or so years, I have read a few (maybe a half dozen) books on the JFK assassination. Among these include Contract on America by David Sheim and Le Dernier Témoin by William Reymond and Billie Sol Estes. (Le Dernier Témoin was written by a Frenchman [Reymond] and first published in France. It was released in English under the title The Last Man Standing.) Most recently, at our cottage in Quebec, I started reading High Treason by H.E. Livingstone and Robert Grodin, published about twenty years ago. I only got about halfway through it due to being too busy to read very much, and the fact that it is a big, thick pig of a book, loaded with names and information that take time to absorb.

The strange thing is that my dream took information from every one of the books I have read, boiled down the details and the allegations to a summary of a few that I believe to be true or at least worthy of focus, stuck them vividly in my head and then sent me back to November 22nd, 1963. The dream was incredibly creepy, based on the subject matter, the clarity and the emotion.

In time, whenever I get around to it, I'll share some more thoughts on the JFK assassination. Jack Ruby said to a friend visiting him in prison that it was "the most bizarre conspiracy in the history of the world." I certainly don't have the answers about the murder, but some of what has been proved would raise the eyebrows right off your head.

(The photo of President and Mrs. Kennedy was taken at Love Field in Dallas after they disembarked their plane, less than one hour prior to the shooting.)