I think at 73 years of age, I have finally left a couple of recurring dreams behind. I had these dreams until sometime in the past 10 or 15 years.

The first was driving in a car at a high rate of speed between home and town. Home was at Smithwick and town was Marble Falls.

Everything would be fine as the car would float along because a turn or dip caused you to let off the gas, but when you topped out at Winn Hill, there was a long curve and a mostly straight stretch down through Mesquite Flats until you got to Hamilton Creek, which could cause you to let off the gas. But for that mile or so, it was clear sailing.

I can’t tell you why, but I started dreaming of the car leaving the roadway along that stretch. It would start rolling over and over and then would flip end over end. I don’t remember the dream ever lasting until it came to a stop. And I don’t remember dying either. I guess I was lucky.

Those dreams happened from when I was a teenager until a few years ago.

I think that was borne out of a time that Big Jimmy Palmer and I was following Kenny home from town late one night. Kenny dodged a deer and went of the side of the road and rolled over several times before that old Ford Pickup came to a stop. It happened right there in Mesquite Flats.

Of course there was more to that story. It being a nice moonlit night, we would turn our lights off and speed home that way. Our reasoning was the headlights were what excited the deer that grazed under the moon and by driving without lights we were more likely to not jump out in front of us.

That particular night there was a herd of deer out in the highway so Kenny flipped his headlights back on just as he started to roll over. It was a sight to see, with those lights resembling strobe lights.

Jimmy pulled up there and stopped we ran up to give aid. The pickup was lying on its roof. Kenny’s main complaint was Jimmy reached in a jerked him through the window which wasn’t really big enough to crawl thru at that point.

Kenny stayed with the wreck while Jimmy ran me on to Smithwick so I could get a dump truck and a chain so we could turn it back up on its wheels. To think that all that happened without a single vehicle ever coming by, speaks to a much less traveled road back in those days. But it was between 1:00 and 2:00 AM.

All turned out okay. We had to get up early the next morning a get up there and pick up all the tools and stuff that spilled all over the place.

They built those pickups out of better metal back in those days. I think we made it a convertible and used it around on the place after that.

I think that incident imprinted me to have those dreams for years to come.

Now the other dream that kept happening for decades was getting some place and then realizing I had forgotten to get dressed. Usually it was me arriving someplace in public and discovering I didn’t have shirt on. I think a few times I had forgotten to wear pants. My dreams never lasted until I got back home to finish dressing. Weird huh?

I think that series of dreams, which happened regularly for years came out of an incident where I had too much to drink and was left completely unclothed up at the old roadside park on the hill. I was still unclothed when I woke up in the Burnet County Jail the next morning. But there was a fairly good reason that happened. I wasn’t but 15 or maybe 16 years old and hadn’t learned all that much about life at that point.

I was a fast learner. I never went back to visit Sheriff Riddell again.