5:44 p.m. And now, today here I am breaking all my own rules. I'm checking my email first before writing, just because sometimes I've been known to get the nicest letters. I know I should be strong and brave and write first, look for fun in the mail second, but today is a weak day.

That's it: today is a weak day. So weak, in fact, that I didn't even get the pun until the period was on the sentence. So weak, believe me, that once a sentence is up here, it's going to stay up. Less work for mother.

So here it is, quitting time already. The day has clouded over, and I hear it's even rained on the parched East Coast for the second or third day in a row. Lightning and thunder, even. Talking about the weather, now, are we? And I've already talked about what I want to write today to two, maybe three people so far -- and the old wive's writer's worry about letting the air out of your tires and the pressure out of the hose -- well, I'm just going to pretend I don't believe in it.

You know, though, it's true. It's a curse. Not that I believe in gypsy curses, of course. Or fortune telling, palm reading, or most divination derived from entrails, contrails, and tea remains. It's just that I had one of my most classic repetitive dreams last night, and this time, I think I might have figured it out.

Do you ever dream about the end of the world? Nuclear annihilation? A big red-white flash and that's all there is? Maybe this is a nightmare shared only by those Cold War kids crouched under their flimsy school desks in yet another nifty experiment in public education. You hear that siren, you'd better hope there's some molded Plexiglas nearby.

I used to have the dreams all the time when my kids were little. Gathering them up like chicks, accounting for water and cracker and and toilet paper needs, crouching in the coal bin. Then there would be the big red flash and then I wake up and make their lunches and send them off. Only now they're all grown up and I'm still counting heads and throwing my body on top of their little tucked-up selves and then there's the flash and I wake up.

If only it were that simple.

If I believed in reincarnation, I could be convinced that I was whistling on my way to work or school in 1945, at around 7:30 or 8 a.m., when suddenly there was a flash. People who are active in the reincarnation belief system have all sort of rules about such things, wouldn't you just know it. They say there's a twenty-year wait between one life and another, for instance. So logically, I couldn't have been in Hiroshima one minute and then, just two years later, show up in Chester, Pa. in the middle of a snowstorm, now could I?

But you know, with that many souls fluttering up to the light like a million rice paper cranes, no two alike, maybe there were exceptions made. Express lines might have been created. Rules bent or even broken, maybe. It's a thought.

Dreams are just mere thoughts, too, if you're one who doesn't place much stock in the hereafter. My ex-mother-in-law, who oddly enough turns up in my dreams more than anybody else, including movie stars, used to look out at my little kids playing in the surf at the beach and tell me that once she became a mother, she could never look at the waves the same way.

Waves could take a child in a heartbeat if you so much as blinked. She often had nightmares about huge waves coming and snatching up her children and leaving her behind, drenched and soaking wet with tears.

Who needs a dream interpreter when you are a parent? No matter that we all got through those years intact and my kids are big and strong now. Sure, they're thousands of miles away, but we have phones and email and digital photos. It's almost real. And in that strange boundless place that I visit every night, there are no rules. They are fragile and shiny and still wear sleepers with feet and climb all over me the minute I sit down for even a second.

I can dream, can't I?