If it was one concept that my beloved grandmamma and I agreed on, it was pipe dreams. Pipe dreams, she explained to me, where the hopes and the wishes we had at one time in our life. Pipe dreams kept us from despair when fate confronted us with circumstances too harsh to face. Grandmamma was a realist. Her pipe dreams dealt with reality. All she ever wanted was the harvest grain unspoiled by wind and rain. With seven children to raise she wanted good health for the children, well-being for the cattle and above all, a time of peace uninterrupted by war and conquest. In exchange she was willing to spend the days, the weeks, the months, the years working from sunrise to sunset. Monday through Saturday belonged to the pipe dream; Sunday was the Creator’s day.      

Grandmamma never knew the fruition of her pipe dream. Brief periods of peace were followed by violent wars that brought with them death and disease and destruction. The grand old dame gave me to understand that pipe dreams sometimes turned out to be smoke rings, carefully constructed by breathing in smoke and air and letting it out again. The only thing she told me about my grandfather was that he spent solitary time creating smoke rings. He called it "Thinking Time" and she referred to it as an "exercise in futility".

I had my own kind of pipe dream. Like Grandmamma’s it was born of despair. I remember that moment very well. I was walking past the residential area of the Americans. Americans were the conquerors then and I was one small part of a devastated conquered nation. Americans had everything and I had scarcely enough food to keep body and soul together. But there, in the American sector stood this beautiful car neither green nor blue, somewhere in between and having a metallic glow. That was when I told myself that I would someday have a car like that, a house of my own and a country where peace had a chance. I would give myself two years to make the dream a reality.
 
What neither Grandmamma nor I realized was that pipe dreams exacted a price. I gave up my birthright, my family, my homeland in exchange for the chance, the opportunity for my children to forge a future of their own choice. Like Grandmamma I worked days, weeks, months, years and decades to bring the pipe dream to fruition. Somewhere in it all I salvaged enough time and effort to do what I loved; to create pictures, poetry, to write to hand on to others what I found worth loving.
 
Grandmamma agrees that a pipe dream takes its beginning from the past, demands all energy from the present to build a bridge to the future for the sake of future generations. We all have our pipe dreams maybe we dream of fame and fortune, and adventure. But it all turns to dust if we want it for ourselves.

Well, the spirit of my Grandmamma came along for the ride when I opted for America. Life in America has not been a tiptoe through the tulips, but rather a ride on a bucking bronco where falling off was always part of dusting myself off and getting back on. And Grandmamma was always along for the ride.

Then along came the computer. Never in my wildest imaginings did I ever dream of having a computer, of typing and correcting without wasting a forest of trees on paper. No did I dream that I could use that computer to bring alive those faded photographs of days gone past. Nor did I ever dream that the same computer allows me to travel via Google Earth back to the village of my mother’s birth or forward to see the distant stars, the nebulae, the universe, and the cosmos. My computer allows me access to other minds in other places, minds that create the sound of music, the written word, the painted dream.

Grandmamma and I agree that a computer was not part of that original pipe dream. That part came to be when a friend of mine persuaded me to buy a computer and another friend, Frances Murrah introduced me to ICON. ICON gave me Clarence who taught me computer essentials. Clarence also connected my own access to the internet directly to the ICON website.  ICON has become my portal to wherever my mind wants to go.

While we are all allowed to have countless pipe dreams, it usually takes just one good and worthwhile pipe dream to last a life time. But if I had another pipe dream allotted to my existence I’d like that to include a life time long enough to experience the reality of the famous Star Trek Command:

"Beam me up Scottie!----"