The night before my birthday I dreamt I was back at school. University or some such thing. Sitting in a comfortable study lounge in a dormitory in the evening having a meeting. The room was full of people I knew. We couldn't think of the word for "shipwreck" in German. Nobody knew it. We were stymied. But a number of people had dictionaries: Langenscheidt German-English/English-German dictionaries. I could see them under chairs and next to bags with their distinctive yellow covers and the big blue L for Langenscheidt. I demanded, "Would someone who is not mentally retarded please hand me a dictionary?" My old friend John H handed me his. Weirdly, the back cover was wet. It was just water. But why? I didn't know. I looked inside it. It was actually not a regular dictionary, but a picture dictionary. I looked in the table of contents and found ships. There were a few pages on ships, but no word for shipwreck. I handed the dictionary back. "I'll find i...
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