Our Story

by

Lawrence Abby Gauthier

ace reporter

The Westphalia Periodic News

Go Back to Sleep,

It's Just a Dream

Lots of nights I dream that I’m still out there on the road in my 18-wheeler bumming around the country -- America.

Trucking is how I learned to love America, like one, big, small town with lots of little neighborhoods and woods and deserts.

The trucking dreams are almost always pleasant dreams… rollin’ along on down ancient roads -- I-81 and the Shenandoah Valley, I-84 and the Columbia River Gorge, I-90 crossing the Dakotas… windows down, inhaling the created wind, the Allman Brothers cranked up to the max.

Once in a while I dream that I’m about to crash. Startled, I'll bolt upright, but my wife’s next to me in her own dream world. And the cats. The little one makes purring sounds in her sleep.

Last night I dreamt that I was picking up a load at a giant meat processing plant in Nebraska. After killing and skinning the animals and boxing up and freezing the steaks and roasts, what’s left comes out the facility’s back end -- a bloody mass of ground up protein dumped into large metal bins. Just eight bins weighed over twenty tons. No human would want to eat the stuff.

It was my job to haul the bins of stuff to a pet food processing plant just north of Kansas City where the stuff would be turned into tasty nuggets for cats and dogs.

I know it’s not a healthy habit, but I’ve always liked to eat something and watch some news before going to bed. My dad was that way too and he’s 96 years old now and doing pretty good.

The internet is great. I can get newscasts from all over the world. A friend of mine from Lebanon showed me how.

Last night I saw a short news video on the Al Jazeera broadcasting network out of Dubia -- sort of like the BBC of the Mideast -- showing a young boy, maybe 10 years old, scooping up, with his bare hands, a small pile of stuff that looked like the stuff that came out the back end of the meat processing plant in Nebraska.

It was his sister.