When I was eight years old my grandfather told me this story:
Quite a few years ago I was driving on a narrow, winding Missouri backroad, racing a thunderstorm home. Suddenly… BANG! … I blew out a tire. I had passed a large mansion with lights on a hundred yards back, but I knew I could fix the tire quickly and beat the storm. My flashlight was dead, yet I was able to quickly remove the lug nuts using the illumination of the approaching lightning, placing the lug nuts in the hubcap.
As I quickly grabbed the spare, the lightning also revealed a figure, dressed in white standing on the other side of a high fence, watching me. A bit creepy I thought, but I continued, getting the spare in place. Just as I reached for the lug nuts…. Whoosh!… a sudden gust of wind caught the edge of the rounded hubcap and flung it into the ditch. I retrieved the hubcap, but the lug nuts were lost.. somewhere in the tall grass and mud of the ditch.
Defeated in fixing the flat myself, I walked over to the figure in white. I asked him, “Do you have a phone I can use up at your house?”
He replied, “Yes, but no one is allowed in here”.
“Why not?”
“Because, this is an insane asylum”
“Can you call the auto club for me?”
“No, they don’t allow me to use the phone. But you don’t need the auto club. Just remove one lug nut from each of your other wheels and use them to mount your spare. That will work well enough to get you on down the road ”
I was impressed and responded, “Brilliant! I never would have thought of that! With a mind like yours, I can’t imagine why you would be in an asylum.”
To which the figure in white simply said, “I may be crazy, but I’m not stupid”
For all these decades, “I may be crazy, but I’m not stupid” stayed with me. I had always thought it to be true, until a google search showed that the origin of the story was published years before my grandfather spun the tale to me.
How does it relate to Michigan Dreams? Perhaps someday, one of my grandchildren will as fondly remember one of the books I will write.