[The following is a true, true story, except for the part about Jodie Foster and the wedge of brie, which has never, ever crossed my mind before.]

********************

"I had a weird dream last night."

I chuckled. This line has become a private joke between my wife and me during our 21 years of marriage. Denise is one of those people who seem to think that only she has "weird" dreams, as opposed to mine, which frequently involve Jodie Foster and a giant wedge of brie. And Denise is always absolutely certain that I desperately want to hear every detail. And so, my rote, sarcastic-as-heck response:

"Can you share?"

"Well, I had this dream that we adopted another kitty," she continued.

This was not a new dream. Throughout our marriage we have always had at least one -- and sometimes as many as four -- felines that we both adored. At present, we were down to just two cats, a recent low. As a result, every few weeks Denise conveniently had a dream about the merits of adopting another cat.

"What's so weird about that?" I asked.

"This kitten was sooo unusual. He was grey, but with white, well, white spirals. And he really needed us," she said.

I thought nothing more of it as we lay in bed that Saturday morning in June.

*******************

I'd been going through a rough patch in my career. I was counting the days until I would be checking out of a high-stress fundraising position with a think tank in downtown Washington. I spent most of my workday debating with myself whether the two and a half hour roundtrip commute sucked more than the nine hours spent working in a job that left me feeling numb. At least the debate kept my mind active.

The Friday following my wife's latest weird dream, I woke with a jolt. Unlike Denise, who can amazingly remember (and recount) all of her dreams in vivid detail, I have always had a bit of a memory disorder in that regard. Other than the Jodie/brie sequence, which I can always recall with excruciating clarity, I tend not to remember my dreams.

This morning was different. I had a distinct but fleeting image of a little grey kitten, with spiraling white circles, reminiscent of the dog on the old Little Rascals show, except his spiral was black and zeroed in on his eye, as I recall.

I immediately put it out of my mind, and again began debating the suck-worthiness of the commute versus the job as I got ready for work.

*****************

My commute from Southern Maryland into the heart of Washington, DC essentially consisted of one continuous construction site interrupted only by occasional stalled and sometimes abandoned cars. The construction projects on the freeways south of the city, through which I traveled daily, were projected to take 12 years and cost $4.3 billion to complete. I was fairly certain that I, personally, could have completed the building projects in less time and for much less money.

As a notorious do-it-yourselfer, the heavy equipment lining the freeway would sometimes lead to fantasies while I dragged along my daily commute route. If I had won the contract for this highway construction, I told myself, I would start each day by picking up a dozen sacks of Quickcrete at the local Home Depot. Arriving on the job site, I would empty my thermos of coffee and greet passing commuters with a subtle toast of my coffee mug and a warm smile. Once the morning traffic had cleared, I would lovingly mix each bag of Quickcrete, and haul it caringly in my wheelbarrow to the far end of the ever-growing expanse of freeway. After adding it gently to the butt-end of the eight lane slab, I would carve my initials and the date in the still-liquid stone, and break for the day before the heat got too bad.

Sure, I could do this project all by myself in less than 12 years, and certainly for less than $4.3 billion. And, I'd establish a friendly, lasting connection with passing commuters to boot. The kind of easy going relationship that motorists would actually miss once I'd completed the final flyover bridge and packed up my wheelbarrow and thermos and headed on to the next project.

On this particular Friday, traffic was particularly heavy, particularly for a Friday, particularly in the summer. The stream of barely moving cars in which I sat inched along an endless row of concrete ìJersey barriers,î which walled off the construction area along the roadside. At the same time other cars zipped by on the shoulder, bypassing the slow moving traffic as they merged onto the adjoining freeway headed in the other direction.

It made me a little nauseous, the flash of cars moving so quickly by in my peripheral vision, while I stared intently at the bumper of the nearly motionless car in front of me.

The Allman Brother Band was blasting from my favorite classic rock station -- F1 on my radio preset buttons -- but my mind was on scan. I fingered the yellow post-it note on the dashboard that I used to mark off the days I had remaining in the job that I so hated. Five days after today. I thought about the sun deck I was building off our kitchen, and how much time I'd be able to devote to it after next week.

I thought, just for a moment, about the morning of September 11, 2001. It was on this very stretch of freeway that I sat, stuck in traffic, when the station on F1 had interrupted its normal morning menu of head-bashing rock and roll to report on the first plane crashing into the World Trade Center. Within an hour, the other planes would crash, including the one that hit the Pentagon, just across the Potomac River from where I sat now. And then that tragic thought brought an equally positive one; the morning after I asked Denise to marry me, and we called our parents and friends from Windows on the World, the spectacular five-star restaurant that use to sit atop the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

And then I saw him. At first I thought it was just a dust ball, blowing along the narrow strip of road filth deposited alongside the Jersey barriers. But then I realized that the grey blur was headed against traffic, just inches from the cars whirring by on the shoulder. It was inconceivable that any inanimate object could blow into the turbulence of the oncoming cars.

A moment later I saw the face -- the panicked, precious, perfect face -- of the grey dust ball. It was not a face like out of a dream; it was indeed the face out of my dream. The tiny grey and white kitten tumbled head over long as it scurried frantically down the foot wide berm, scared senseless by the whir of the oncoming traffic, yet irrationally it kept coming.

****************

Like most people, I've rarely been placed in a position where I have ever had a chance to do anything truly heroic.

Once, a few years ago, I saw an elderly man collapse at a local Oktoberfest celebration. Having just completed a first aid course, I was convinced that the man was having a heart attack, and I was rather oddly excited by that prospect. As is often the case with heart attack victims, I noticed upon closer examination that he had vomited on himself. Despite my initial enthusiasm for saving the manís life by performing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and CPR, I admit that I hesitated at least momentarily when I noticed the fresh, bratwurst-based vomit.

In that moment when I knelt over the white haired man in indecision, his wife, a substantial woman, rushed up.

Pulling him to his feet by the collar of his coat, she bellowed "God damn it Harry, I told you you'd puke if you kept drinking all that damn Lowenbrau!" and off they went.

I reassured myself later that, if needed, I would have done what was necessary, but I was left wondering, as well as relieved, by that interrupted brush with heroism.

So, in light of my limited and questionable prior experience as a hero, I still don't fully understand the motivation for my actions that Friday morning in late June. Without even a split second of conscious thought, I swerved my Toyota pickup off onto the shoulder, swung open the door, and jumped into the freeway traffic. I ran with all the morning speed I could muster down the narrow berm alongside the Jersey barriers, retracing the route traveled by the grey kitten.

Oncoming cars swerved, horns blared, and breaks squealed. More than once a car came so close to hitting me that I was forced to flatten myself against the Jersey barriers and hope for the best. Amidst the chaos, a well-dressed black woman in a car that had been behind me in the slow moving center lane traffic rolled down her window.

"God bless you sir! Save that kitten! Please save that kitten!" she yelled, giving me the thumbs-up, a somewhat similar yet entirely different hand gesture than the one being offered by other passing motorists.

Bolstered by my new supporter's admiration, but mostly by the lingering image of panic and pain on the poor kittens face, I continued sprinting down the shoulder. For a moment I saw no sign of the kitten. I thought the worst. Perhaps he had been pulverized by and imbedded in the tire tread of a passing SUV.

Just as I was losing hope, I saw the grey puff ball of an animal, cowering under the shredded remains of a radial tire on the shoulder. I scooped him up in my right hand, still not certain if he was dead or alive, but fairly certain that I would be dead shortly if I didnít make haste. Before I reached my pickup truck, he began struggling in panic against my grip and I knew I had arrived in time.

********************

Unlike every other cat we have ever adopted, in this case there was no debate whatsoever about a name. "Lucky" (full name: "Lucky 2B Alive") was named the same day we found him, after our vet confirmed that he would live, despite a broken pelvis and other signs of a short but hard life in the urban wilds. And, to our great relief, our other two cats welcomed their new brother with uncommon hospitality and generosity.

*******************

The following Friday I finally crossed the last day off the countdown calendar taped to my dashboard. I had ended a chapter in my life that seemed as if it would never end. I was free to begin a new chapter, once I figured out just what that would be.

In the following months, I granted myself the luxury of pursuing all kinds of things I'd always wanted to do but never had the time. I spent long overdue time with family and friends. I undertook home improvement projects on a scale rivaling the $4.3 billion one I use to endure every day. I started a small antique business, and even tried to turn my longtime passion for raising bonsai plants into a cottage industry. But my bonsai business, as I was fond of saying, was "small and slow growing," an appropriate business model for such a venture, but not one that would put a lot of bread on the table.

I also began spending time writing. Not the kind of business writing I had spent so much time doing since I graduated from college and my nose met the grindstone, but the kind of story telling that was once a passion of mine. In the beginning it was just another hobby I indulged, but gradually I began to think it would be my next career, as far fetched as that seemed at the time.

Lucky became part of my new daily ritual from the very beginning, napping most of the day on my cluttered desk, fittingly next to the mouse pad, while I pecked away at the key board. Despite very limited interest from the outside world in my writing, I remained undeterred and uncharacteristically optimistic that this was the course I should pursue. In fact, it was with more a sense of fate than surprise that I reacted when my big break came, nearly a year after my interest in writing began to reemerge.

Lucky stirred slightly from his nap when I opened the mysterious email and a let out an audible "Huh."

As a result of a contest in the Washington Post that I had entered -- and lost -- the NBC Today Show had indirectly learned about me and seen some of my humor writing related to personal finances. Within a week I was appearing live on the Today Show, chatting it up with Matt Lauer, and suddenly literary agents were anxious to work with me on a book project and national magazines were approaching me about buying exclusive rights to my previously unpublished work (fortunately, the vast majority of my portfolio).

I want to think that that morning, when I opened the life changing email from NBC, Lucky actually winked at me before he fell back asleep.

****************

Often times, as I watch Lucky sleep on my desk, my mind wanders back to that morning in June when I rescued him from the freeway. I always recall the horrific sight of him running into the oncoming traffic - toward me - and wonder why that was. Why didn't
he run to safety, away from the frightening rush of the traffic? Where was he coming from, and was it possible that he was in fact coming to me? And his name, the name we agreed on so easily and that at the time seemed a natural fit for him, now seems more fortuitous for me and the new direction our lives have taken since he came to live with us.

Of course, I also think a lot about the dreams. And as he lay sleeping on my desk, I often wonder, "Do cats dream?"

---

"Lucky," along with 27 other feline related short stories, is now available in the 208 page volume Amazing Cat Tales published by Linden Hill. To purchase a signed copy, send a check (payable to Jeff Yeager) for $15 plus $3 shipping to: Ultimate Cheapskate / Jeff Yeager, P.O. Box 760, Accokeek, MD 20607, or visit his website: ultimatecheapskate.com