Weatherman

The parking lot at work is about 5 blocks away from our office, so we have a bus that ferries us back n' forth. Bus Driver is a good guy, I like him, but sometimes... well, you'll see.

Friday of last week, the bus stopped at an intersection. While we waited for the light, Bus Driver turned to face a lady near the front and asked her, "D'ya ever dream about the dead?"

I don't know about you, but I figure the less my bus driver talks about death, the better.

It took a while because we were so shocked by his question, but he eventually explained that if you have a dream about the dead, that means it's going to rain. At least, "... that's what the old folks say."

Sidebar: This is actually not what *my* grandparents say. Quite the opposite. My grandparents trust the TV weatherman to such an extreme that they take shelter when they hear there's a tornado anywhere in the tri-state area. We rarely see them in May.

Anyway, the lady he questioned blinked away her shock and then embraced the conversation. To my horror, they began to discuss death-dream interpretation while he was bouncing us along the busy downtown streets. I gripped my seat and held my breath, hoping that Bus Driver was paying more attention to the lights and traffic than his own mortality.

"See, what *I* heard," said Crazy Lady, "is that if you talk to a man on the phone in your dream, a woman is gonna die, and if you talk to a woman on the phone in your dream, a man's gonna die."

Predicting that somewhere, somehow, a man's going to die today seems like a bit of a gimmie, really. It's like predicting earthquakes in California, stupidity in Congress, or beer in NASCAR fans.

For the record, it did not rain on Friday.

Never trust the dead.