I'm shopping for a car, so I ask my friend Tom "Do you like yours? It's an Opel, right?"

He says "Yeah, it's an Opel. Nice little car except it only gets 8.5 miles per gallon."

I'm astonished. "German engineers can't do better than THAT?" I just can't believe it. Opel's are small and not especially powerful. Uphill it nearly stalls---slow as my old VW bus, which was notoriously underpowered, but at least it got 25-30 mpg. Seems like Opels have a VW's flaws without the benefits--an underpowered gashog!

I go home, and find... more opals. Gemstones I inherited from my mom's father, in a sealed jar on my window. Usually those opals are full of rainbow fire. But the jar's overgrown with algae! Flashes hidden in olive murk. Masked.

NEXT MORNING

I wake puzzled. Tom doesn't own an Opel. I do have some opals in a jar from my grampa. But why dream of them now?

Is there a message common to the two images beside the word opal? Well, yeah. Both disappoint! Just like my suburban life. I've been tentatively planning to quit my job this fall, leave commuting and the middle class, and move to San Francisco to be a dream artist.

But I can't retire till my 36th birthday, in three months. Till then, gotta work. So I bike to the Stanford Library.

My route's blocked--someone's fenced off the shortcut over the train tracks at the station. The only alternative's a dark smelly tunnel on University Avenue. In it, a clump of pedestrians--loud white guys--totally hog the path, won't let me through, make me trail them on foot for minutes. Rude. I'll be late.

I eavesdrop--not that I have a choice, not at their volume. They talk on and on about a friend who got a wedding gift of... you guessed it... opals.

YEARS LATER

I did retire at 36, move to the City, and start a cooperative house full of artists. Never had a boss again. That jar of opals stands on my desk as I write this--clean now and full of fire.

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