BY RICHARD VAN ORNUM - DREAMS OF FLYING AND OVERCOMING OBSTACLES

When I was little, I dreamed I was flying.

Each night, I was up in the air, though never over the same landscape. Sometimes in the confusion of early morning, I would wake up thinking it was true and I'd leap off my bed, expecting to soar out of the window. Of course , I always hit the ground, but not before remembering that I'd been dreaming. I would realize that no real person could fly and I'd collapse on the floor, crushed by the weight of my own limitations.

Eventually, my dreams of flying stopped. I think I stopped dreaming completely.

After that, my earliest memory is of learning to count to 100. After baths, my mother would perch me on the sink and dry me, as I tried to make it to 100 without a mistake. I had to be lifted to the sink. An accident with a runnaway truck when I was four had mangled my left leg, leaving scars that stood out, puckered white against my skin. Looking at the largest of my scars in the mirror, I imagined that it was an eagle. It wasn't fair, I thought, I had an eagle on my leg, but I couldn't fly. I could hardly walk, and the crutches hurt my arms.

Years later, in Venice, I had the closest thing to a revelation I can imagine. Sitting on the rooftop of the Cathedral of San Marco, I wasn't sure what life had in store for me. I was up on a ledge in between the winged horses that overlook San Marco square. To the left, the Grand Canal snaked off into the sea, where the sun cast long crimson afternoon shadows across the city. Below me, in the square, pigeons swirled away from the children chasing them and swooped down onto a tourist who was scattering dried corn.

Somewhere in the square, a band was playing Frank Sinatra. It was "Fly Me to the Moon," I think. Up on the roof of the cathedral, it seemed to me the pieces of my life suddenly fell together. I realized that everyone is born with gifts, but we all run into obstacles. If we recognize our talents and make the best of them, we've got a fighting chance to overcome our obstacles and succeed in life. I knew what my gifts were:

Imagination and perseverance.

And I also knew what my first obstacle had been:

A runnaway truck on a May morning with no compassion for preschoolers on a field trip. But I knew that the obstacles weren't impossible. They could be overcome. I was proof of that, walking.

That night, for the first time in years, I dreamed I was flying. I soared through the fields of Italy, through the narrow winding streets of Venice and on beyond the Grand Canal, chasing the redding sun across the sea.