a musician friend of mine died years ago, he was around forty years old. it shocked many people at the time, as death of a before-their-time person always will. you can’t know who will die young, but among your friends some will, it’s likely. after picking up my daughter from school we crossed the street for the park and plugged into the chaos of kids free to swing and run or climb. time passes, you see your face change in pictures or in the mirror you can understand something about aging differently than what you knew when you were young. i can even understand it backwards when i look at strangers i see what they looked like ten or twenty or thirty years earlier. it’s just my imagination but it never seemed so understandable before. she’s playing piano now, where’s my gold star for not being the kind of parent who forced the music thing on their kid and forever turned them off playing. in grade one or two i don’t think mrs. smith or mrs. reichbart bestowed any gold stars on my notebook ever. my dead friend was in my dream last night. the coolest thing about dreams that feature dead people, is that you don’t necessarily remember that during the dream. like all that time between his death and now didn’t exist and we were hanging out enjoying our friendship and that’s when he told me this koan, he said the brain knows it’s lying to itself.