I got the weirdest phone call tonight. A private investigator from Oklahoma (his name was Ken or Kent; I wish I had written down his last name) just called to see if I had given up a child for adoption in 1985. He said that a guy was trying to find his birth mother; supposedly the mother's name is Gayle Brandeis and she lives in California. So now my mind is doing all kinds of strange flip flops. What would happen if I had given birth in 1985 and had somehow erased the memory of it? Of course the fact that I was still a virgin that year makes it pretty unlikely, but what if I only think I was a virgin that year, what if my brain has been injected with fake memories of my earlier life? What if I had some sort of wild past but it's all been washed out of my head? I know this isn't possible, but those "what if?"s are spinning around in my skull like crazy. It's those "what if?"s that give birth to stories and novels, I think. What if I wrote a novel about a woman who gets a call from a private investigator who asks if she gave a child up for adoption and she later finds out this is true even though she has no memory of it? Food for thought...