When I was 20-something years old, during an early Mr. Smartypants era, I was sure that by the time I hit 30 I would have a good handle on what to expect from any situation. I was too young to realize that “the changes” come more quickly the older one gets and that we never catch the present, let alone the future. Only the memories remain, if we can remember them.

It is said that a person’s life flashes before his/her/their eyes just before life ends. Now that I am an old person by most any standard of measure, it is my belief that this reflection occurs not in the last moments of life but over a span of several years, and that dreams play a central role in the preservation of memories, not always in a pleasant manner.

For instance, over the past decade I have sporadically dreamed of not being able to find my truck. The locations of the dreams vary from wandering through flowery pastoral scenery with smiling bunnies to trudging through gritty ghetto cityscapes populated by pushy people, but each ends in a frantic and unsuccessful search for my truck, almost a nightmare. It feels awfully good to wake up.

Freud might attribute these dreams to some hidden sexual desires (the bunnies are awfully cute) and Jung could call into play a signal from the collective unconscious that humans have been plagued by transportation issues for a few thousand years, but applying the principles of Smith’s Soft Psychoanalytics I suspect that the dreams are more likely the lingering effects of Brautigan’s whiskey.

In 1967, Richard Brautigan, a graduate of Eugene High School and the Oregon State Hospital, was living in San Francisco when he hit paydirt with a small book called “Trout Fishing in America,” set in the mountain West. It had little to do with angling and more with bouncing around from pretty spot to pretty spot with his wife and kid. I read and enjoyed it while I was teaching school on the wheaty prairies of northern Montana. He went on to write a bunch more “novels” and poems and lived pretty high on the literary hog as a result.

In 1973, I came down out of the mountains of central Idaho for a winter of magazine editing in Sausalito and included a couple of his poems in an issue of the Coevolution Quarterly. He called me one afternoon and asked if I wanted to come over to his place in San Francisco for a two-person swap meet.

There are 44 hills in San Francisco. Brautigan lived in a two-story apartment on Telegraph Hill, above the Italian section of town. There was nowhere to park my old Ford stock truck up there, so I left it down on the flats and hauled two sawbuck pack saddles (upside down they make pretty good magazine racks) and a pair of cheap spurs up the hill.

He greeted me with a fifth of bourbon, a bottle from a case that someone in southern California had privately distilled for him, complete with his face on the label. He was known to be a heavy hitter in the booze leagues. I haven’t tasted alcohol for 32 years, but in those days I was closing a few bars myself, so we went at it, direct from the bottle.

I don’t remember much of the evening. We talked of Montana. He had bought a small spread south of Livingston where other luminaires like Peter Fonda were building trophy homes. I swapped my bounty for his original fly rod and a 48-star flag. I crashed on his couch.

The next morning there were two empty fifths on the table and I felt like I had been eaten by a coyote and pooped off a cliff. Brautigan was gone, so I washed my face in the kitchen sink, gathered my swag and headed back downhill. Two twisty blocks later I began to realize that I did not remember where I had parked the truck.

It took two hours of wandering foreign streets, asking city folks if they had seen a big red truck parked anywhere, worried sick that it had been towed, all the while carrying a fly rod and flag, until a teenage fellow in a 49ers jacket said, yeah, there was a truck like that a couple of blocks away and it smelled of horses. I thanked him from the bottom of my soiled heart, located the rig and swore never to drive the truck into a city again.

But that morning keeps popping up in my dreamworld and there is nothing to be done about it except recognize that extreme activity can produce lasting consequences, that traumatic memories can infest even the most benign of sleep circumstances. I survived the event long enough to quit drinking. Brautigan shot himself in the head in 1984.