Imagine

Imagination is a beautiful thing on which to feast. It can take one to exotic foreign lands, if only in daydreams. Imagination can join one with the famous, with the neighbor lady who often strutted about her backyard in her red bikini bottoms and a snug wet half-shirt, or, (for the ladies), your paper-delivery boy of yesteryear, now muscled to the nines, clad in black Speedos there on the Lake Erie shore. He's the same sixteen year old you intended to seduce on the second floor landing one hot Saturday afternoon, decked-out in that white nylon slip sweated on bare skin, only to lose your nerve before things got out of hand. You sent him off with a ten cent tip and a memory he will hold on to until the moment death claims him. When blended with bits of reality, imagination becomes the elixir that sends one on flights of fantasy inspired by a sultry look from another parishioner in the pew across the isle from yours, or the clicking of a woman's heels as she makes her way from the Communion rail. With some hesitation, those of us too weak, stumble when we should have fled the scene where a cousin who bloomed ahead of her years, and an aunt who sunned in the nude out on the terrace, offered a long look. Many of us are troubled by imagination, while others revel in its complexity. Some say 'out of touch with reality', some envy. And so it goes...