For reasons that were unclear, I had to get an artificial heart. The surgeon first gave me a temporary one, for use until the custom-made one was ready. He said that I had to take it easy as this one couldn’t keep up with heavy exertion. The thing was outside my body, [...]

I had just purchased some new shoes, and was wearing them as I went to the airport to fly to Denver. At the security checkpoint, I was hassled so much over my carryons that I forgot the shoes, and didn’t notice that I was walking around in my socks.
A friend asked me to watch [...]

I was on a freighter that was transporting a load of live chickens across the ocean. It wasn’t very fast, so it was going to take months to get to our destination. The chickens came down with some disease, and we had to slaughter them. They were still OK to cook and [...]

My roommate’s girlfriend Claire called, and asked if he was around.  I said that I’d go get him, and she said not to bother as she would drop by in a few minutes.  When she arrived, she asked me to help carrying something in from her car, but it was a pretense to talk privately [...]

I was going somewhere with a few friends.  We stopped to pick up Dan.  Instead of getting in the car, though, Dan climbed on the hood, and was clinging by his fingertips.  We had no idea why he chose to do that, but we proceeded.
At one point the driver had to brake suddenly, so Dan [...]

I returned to a city I once lived in many years ago. I was trying to drive to a friend’s house, but the highway exits had been changed somewhat, so I got confused about where to turn. I saw a branch of my bank, and needed to make a deposit, so I stopped [...]

One of my friends decided to undergo rejuvenation treatments, which would revert his physiological age to 18.  However, the process also would erase all his memories of events that happened after that age.  Since I didn’t meet him until he was 20, he would no longer remember me.  He warned me about that, and told [...]

I had to go back to junior high school to take four classes I’d somehow missed, in order to satisfy requirements for my degree program, though I was worried that they might not accept them. Outside the school on the first morning I met the teacher from one of my classes back in 1978, [...]

My grandfather asked me to accompany him to the airport to examine a new exotic grass species which had been spotted there.  It was superficially similar to zoysia, but rather than a root structure forming conventional sod, it tended to grow along a line (not necessarily straight), with thousands of blades growing from a single [...]

Because of the war, I was drafted into the military.  I tried to explain that I could best serve in a technical capacity, but they insisted on trying to make me a grunt.  They tried to get me into better physical condition by making me run while carrying fire extinguishers, and berated me for not [...]