ArcaMax

Writers are weird people, and we start out as weird kids.

I was a weird kid. Worse yet, my family moved quite a bit, so I was often the weird new kid.

Our last long jump of a move was from Baltimore to a suburb of Kansas City, Missouri. Before that, we'd banged from town to town in Massachusetts.

And I was a weird new kid, and I was 12 and already reading more than most people do, and I didn't talk about that with the kids in my school.

The suburb where we lived was bright sunlight, hot weather, flat streets, autoworkers and Southern Baptists. None of those were familiar to my family.

We were from "Back East," Catholics, and my last name is French. My father was the child of French-Canadian immigrants and we spoke to each other in French sometimes.

And I built a fantasy life, the way I always do, especially when times get tough.

I'd never been to Biddeford, Maine, but I read about it in one of my mother's homesick copies of Yankee Magazine, a publication she read so as not to become one of the people we lived among, all of whom she called "rednecks."

And, at 12, I decided that Biddeford was where I should live. The magazine story said it was a real town, not a suburb built so white people could escape black people.

There were a lot of French-Canadian people in Biddeford, the story said, and their language was heard on the streets. Winters were snowy, and I've loved winter all my life.

I kept the magazine the way I'd later keep pirated copies of Playboy. When I went to bed at night, I'd read the Biddeford story. I'd picture myself living there with French people and snow and no weather hot enough to soften the tar at the edges of the road, a thing that happened all the time where we lived.

I used to drift off to sleep in my apartment bedroom and picture myself walking up the front walk towards a white, two-story house with yellow light in all the windows and a lit-up evergreen tree on the front lawn.

It was a good way to fall asleep, but a bad way to wake up since morning brought another friendless, hot day of being a weird kid.

As an adult, I've used the just-before-sleep fantasy to help me drift off many times. When I worked for a troubled Massachusetts daily newspaper with bad management, I put myself to sleep with an intricate fantasy of being a newspaper columnist on the same newspaper in 1934. My wife Deborah was in those fantasies as the paper's first female reporter, and we went out for chop suey on the weekends and window-shopped our way home along Main Street, the store windows full of model train sets for Christmas.

It's not good to live in your fantasies too much. The homeless camps are full of people living in some torn, painful fantasy of government mind control and worms in their brains. Those fantasies just make you use even more fentanyl.

Twenty minutes of sleepy fantasy in your own bed won't harm you, though. It's just a secret place you can briefly go where it's always Christmas and people speak your language.

I live in a country now where ICE agents in masks shoot your sleepy little fantasies and leave them dead on the street. And your language, the one you speak in addition to English, is one of the ways they know it's OK to shoot you, and it's not Christmas, and howling voices tell your little daughter that you deserved what you got.

In America, a terrible reality kicks down the flimsy door of my fantasies and comes in shooting.

To find out more about Marc Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. Dion's latest book, a collection of his best columns, is called "Mean Old Liberal." It is available in paperback from Amazon.com, and for Nook, Kindle and iBooks.