The wife of my wacky across-the-street neighbor in MD needed to borrow my tongue. She's a bit dotty herself, but not as gregarious as her spouse. Anyway, she had to use a longish gun (I think I know where that element came from, at any rate) to converse with the folks who moved in two houses down and across the street. Problem was, she had the kind of gun rack that you either hang on a wall or set on top of a refrigerator. It was made of milled spindles set horizontally on a frame with a cheap colonial look to it, as if 18th-century Americans returned home and stowed their firearms in the complimentary display rack shipped with your first order of commemorative muskets from the Franklin Mint. And yet aesthetics was not the problem; this was the kind of rack that required a tongue. If you took a gun out (and she only had one) you had to put a tongue in its place right away. So, pal that I am, I grabbed my tongue, unhooked it from the back of my throat and put it on the rack for her.

I went back to my interrupted project, which involved working with a team of three unfamiliar people near a large, almost empty pool. I had been reading a long, prescient quote from 1866 regarding race relations when Carol first asked for my help. I could no longer read aloud so I tried to get someone to take over that role but everyone drifted away and I puttered around for a while until she came back to say she was done with my tongue.

I went back to her house to retrieve it, but now it was in two pieces and I wasn't sure how to put it back in my mouth. Carol had gone, but there were three boys in the house and I asked one of them to open his mouth so I could see how his tongue worked. The first kid wasn't old enough to understand my request, but another kid was very helpful. I thought I had it all figured out but as I held the pieces together and lifted them to my mouth, they grew and changed from tonguestuff to corrugated cardboard, with tabs at the back. Since this was a dream, I was not disturbed by the transformation. I continued my attempt to shove this big, dry mass in and then I woke up. First thing I did was wiggle my tongue and I was sincerely relieved to discover that it was again part of me.