Imagination Gone Wild

"Perhaps imagination is only intelligence having fun." --George Scialabba

I came home one day this week from a morning jaunt (thinly disguised as exercise :-) to an innocent question from hubby: "How was your walk?"

Well, I had rehearsed what I was going to say most of the way home. This is how it went:

"Oh, nothing unusual. Except...well, I saw a cowboy, got accosted by a bandit, was quizzed by a tax collector, and had a four-legged senior citizen teach me a life lesson."

What's that all about, you say? Did my imagination get the best of me?

Or did I run with my imagination?

Imagination: n. "the action of imagining; power of forming pictures in the mind of things not present to the senses...the ability to create new things or ideas or to combine old ones in new forms...a creation of the mind; mental image; fancy.

This is what really happened. At a point, I heard a noise behind me. I turned to see a guy riding a black horse and leading a spotted gray one across the road. Now once upon a time my neighborhood consisted of a few little farmhouses dotted randomly about, but no more. Most have been replaced by newer homes. So where did these horses come from? Where is the barn? Where was the rider going? He was not wearing a cowboy hat.

The bandit? Bandit--the name of a white yappy dog--ran toward me just after the horses passed from view. I swear this noisy thing was going to nip at my ankles. The owner, an older guy who had great difficulty walking, came out and tried to round Bandit up, all the while assuring me his dog would not bite. Yeah, right--did he get Bandit's word on that?

A friend drove up shortly afterwards, slowed down and kept pace with me for a little while. "Say," he said as he kept an eye on his rear-view mirror for any cars that might be coming, "you know your taxes are going to go up." He had noticed we recently had a new patio put in at the back of the house. "You think so?" I responded, and waved as he went on down the road. Not really a tax collector, but curious all the same.

And the four-legged senior citizen? I greeted Cindy who was walking her slow, meandering lab, Cameo. "At least she's still moving," Cindy said of her 17-year old dog. "Ha," I replied. "I think there's a lesson in there somewhere for us, too!"

Don't know if I'll try to weave a story from any of these elements or not--but it was fun to craft a draft in my head and test it out on hubby.

It's sort of like something Thomas Edison said: "To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk."

Or Dr. Seuss--"Think left and think right and think low and think high. Oh, the thinks you can think up if only you try!"

Where did your "thinks" take you this week? Any plans to stir the imagination in a new and fun way in the days ahead?

*photo: sxc.hu/