Once upon a time there was a little boy named Reggie and his constant sidekick, Nugget. Poor Nugget had extraordinary mental powers but was unable to communicate this fact to his master. (As the dog's name might suggest, Reggie was not known for his powers of imagination.) To help cope with his leashed existence Nugget self-medicated with snackings on the garden poppies. Nugget's days of idle opiated dreaming were happy ones and calm, but eventually he starved to death from lack of appetite. Reggie, cast into sudden extreme poverty by a Republican-initiated reversal of the Union victory, was forced to eat his dead friend. He sat in sadness after the meal, staring nowhere as his digestive juices silently engulfed the thin strings of retriever meat in his stomach. A strange thing soon took place. The branches of the tree outside his window began to flap up and down; the tree pulled itself up from the earth, leaf-wings straining toward the clouds, shaking off cobwebs of power lines and throwing them with an electric crackle down to the street below; roots yanked up from under sidewalks, buildings, around sewer lines, snaking up from the bowels of the earth and shaking themselves free of dust and dirt and broken chunks of concrete. YOU! said the tree to Reggie. This day, February 23rd, is the date of your rebirth! You shall be one of the chosen! One of the sons of Imagination! Go forth from this day and share your visions with your soulless fellows! Imbue them with dreams and fill their minds with questions and hopes! Captivate their hearts with your poems! Do this, and you will never die. And the tree flapped up into the heavens and Reggie went forth and dreamed of the world.

Happy Re-Birthday, Reggie. May it stand out in your endless life!