One of my writer-idols, Sandra Cisneros, says she dreams or day dreams scenes before writing them. I fear I may have taken it one step backward. I thought I wrote a scene but seem to only have dreamed I did. I wrote it sitting in bed in the Royal Plaza Hotel on Scotts Road in Singapore. The memory is so vivid I can picture myself plumping up the pillows—and even stealing one of Curtis’s before settling in to write. My legs are still singed from the heat of the computer on my legs—or at least I think that’s what it is…although it could be prickly heat….. It was a really good blog posting, too. One of my best. A follow up to my stuck-on-the-deserted-highway-with-a-flat story. In engagingly prosaic prose it revealed how I climbed out of my car to walk up the road to read the highway sign facing the other direction even though I know one is never, never, never, ever supposed to leave the car, but rather should roll up the windows, lock the doors and wait for help. In it I brilliantly described how the late afternoon sun reflected off the shiny black pick up that pulled to a stop while I was walking up that lonely road and how I knew, even as I kept walking closer to the pickup that I was signing my own missing persons report and how I hung up on the AAA operator after telling him we would “try to fix it ourselves and call back if we ran into trouble” (the “we” being the stranger heroic enough, or brazen enough, or demented enough, to stop for a damsel in distress). Those inspired words and phrases I recall typing: the way the condensation on the Pabst Blue Ribbon 12-pack nesting on the passenger side seat glistening in the gloaming, how trepidation about accepting the curly-haired strangers offer to change my flat was overridden by my fear of missing dinner and drinks with Liz and Dorothy; the way his curls leapt each time his head snapped up to check for oncoming traffic; how for perhaps the first and only time in recorded history, during the entire, seemingly endless, clock-stopping, fifteen-but-felt-like-fifty minutes it took him to change my tire, not one single, solitary vehicle cruised down that side of I-45, how his teeth glistened as he cranked down on the tire jack, were too vivid, too perfect to be just a dream. The posting was so near perfection I almost cried when I discovered it gone. After searching every file trail I knew to search, I implored Curtis to apply his arsenal of file recovery tactics. All to no avail. My brilliant blog posting may be gone, but the flat-tire-on-the-deserted-highway will never be forgotten, nor will my hero, Rick Rochelle, hopefully not the last man in Texas brave enough and heroic enough and kind enough to stop to help a traveler in distress. Okay, so maybe, after being stuck there on that long, lonely stretch of I-45 far from anything that way and even farther the other way, depending on how long it took the AAA assistance to arrive—despite my way cute short black dress and matching leggings which I thought I looked so cute wearing—I might have unearthed the jack myself and tried changing the darn flat tire on my dang rental car. But thankfully, I never had to try. Thank you, thank you, Rick Rochelle of somewhere near Fairview, Texas.

• KELLY BENNETT •