Every summer it happens. I think continually of my friend Roger Zelazny. It's hard to believe that I haven't seen him in the flesh for fourteen years. He has been gone from this earth since June 14, 1995. We moved to Florida one year before that and so the last time I saw Roger was in Santa Fe in the fall of 1994. The dates are not important -- the man and the writing are everything. The man even more than the writing -- to me. But the writing, ah, the writing, too.

I loved the way Roger spun a phrase and I viewed him more as a poet than a novelist although novelist he surely was and to the world a great master of fantasy. It nettles me when I visit middle schools and meet student enthusiasts of fantasy who don't know the Amber novels, Roger's unrivaled span of visonary castle tales. The kids are reading Tolkien and Riordan and Pullman, all fine writers but no one's finer than Roger when it comes to the perfect line of poetry laid alongside casual phrase --

"The princess lies dead on the floor of my cave, amid the strewn bones of centuries of heroes, wizards, princes, princesses, dwarfs, and elves, and the fragments of nine broken swords committed to their task -- another possible reign of sweetness and joy I've clipped before its bud might unfold."

I remember the last time I talked with him on the phone. This was shortly before he died in 1995. I was looking out at the lanai and he was talking about his trip to New Zealand and a Maori rite that he thought I'd find interesting. Shortly after that conversation, he was gone. I was looking out at the lanai again on the day I heard the news. Each time, a white frog was crawling on the screen and the screen was glittering with rain pearls, a scene from one of Roger's stories.

Roger spoke often about reincarnation to me, our conversations were full of afterlife thoughts, out of body experiences and that easiest of elementary exercises, for him, ESP. He did it all the time. Even now when I open one of his books and find a personal message he scrawled inside (never telling me, he wrote these little lines, one or two at a time when he came to visit) I feel a buzz, a bit of kinetic Roger, a spark trailing through the blue coil of eternity.

And that brings me to this . . .

I see Roger in dreams. He is the same as he was in life. I am the one who's different, I suppose, a dreamer moving weightless through his music-filled dreamworld. There he is -- typing on his small manual typewriter which sits on his lap. His concentration is greater than my ability to summon him. I watch him type. The punctilious keys hammering a tune. It's a symphony not meant to be read but to be heard. Roger always did love music and now he is composing it. Typing notes -- that's something he liked too, double entendre.

Roger's rhythms remind me of the Pocomania churches of Jamaica. As I think of the Poco drums in the Blue Mountains, the dream takes me there with Roger at my side. No longer typing, he is standing on a bluff overlooking the twinkling twilit city of Kingston, which is glowing in the mists over Mavis Bank. We have climbed the Jacob's Ladder cut into the clay cliffs and we have supped on cheeseberries sparkling like mini-oranges that nonetheless taste cheesy. The grass at our feet is littered with cheeseberries. We have drunk from running rivulets under a roof of lavender orchids, and now the wind blown grasses of 7400 feet flap against our ankles. The wind seems to want to sweep us up and away and over the bluff like john crows, the dark undertaker birds that carve the skies of the Jamaican heights and lowlands.

Roger turns to me and says, "I always wanted to come here with you."

I add, "And now we're here, what's next?"

"You don't know?"

I shake my head. "I don't."

He says, "Well, it's all coffee from here on." Roger's hand sweeps the lower elevations where the coffee trees spread out like a vast, caffeinated carpet of tree upon tree. Both of us are inveterate coffee drinkers. The sight is very refreshing.

"Got any Scottish scones?" I ask him.

"I've written a new chapter," he tells me. "No scones, no coffee scenes. Just this thin blue air and the Blue Mountains of Jamaica," and saying this, he lifts off.

I hesitate only for a second. Then I join him. The air is bouyant, or maybe we are more bouyant than air. At any rate flying is easier when dreaming. Flying is thinking. You don't do it so much as it does you, and you have only to think of a direction and you are there.

And so we circle the Blue Mountains until the twilight glow is gone and the city of Kingston is all diamonds. Higher and higher, we float. We lose one another. Roger goes so high I can no longer see him. He's up there in the star-spread universe, jack of shadows, jack of diamonds, jack of emptiness. I feel his love. And then it too is gone. I fall to earth, unhurt. I am back where the wind is in my ear. An earthling with eyes jeweled and wet, a body pulsing, a mind born of gravity. I wake.