A Matter of the Heart

About the Book

While recovering from a heart transplant, a strange dream kept returning. Bob Hunter found himself once again on a small lobster boat bobbing up and down in the ocean in front of a beautiful lighthouse he had never seen before. A number of colorful lobster floats and a stack of lobster traps were on the boat in front of him. Waves crashing and exploding against a rocky shore in front of the lighthouse, sending giant sprays of white foam into the air. A girl in a white dress was standing on a rocky ledge to the left of the lighthouse and waving. He knew that somehow she was waving at him. As the sequence of dreams returned, he would find himself walking up to her as she opened her arms to greet him. She was one of the most beautiful girls he had ever seen. Her long auburn hair and white dress were gently flowing in the breeze off of the ocean. He would always wake up just as he approached. Over a period of time, he developed an unexplainable and obsessive love for her, even though he knew she could not possibly be real.

Bob Hunter was an artist and a naturalist and painted a picture of both the lighthouse and the girl in his dreams. A new acquaintance saw the painting of the lighthouse and told him it was real, as she had visited and photographed the same lighthouse. She encouraged him to travel to the area to see if he could find a reason for his dreams. The dreams had no rhyme or reason. Bob had never seen a lobster boat and could not believe that the lighthouse in his dreams actually existed. The only way he could rid himself of these dreams was to follow his friend's suggestion and travel to the lighthouse and begin a search for the lady of his dreams.

About the Author

T.D. Burns was born in North Carolina in 1926. He is a veteran of WWII, having served aboard a Landing Ship Medium (LSM-299) in the Pacific. He and his wife, Jean, founded the first all-science retail store in the nation in 1961, called Science Hobbies, Inc., which was located in Charlotte, North Carolina. Their store featured products relating to astronomy, biology, chemistry, mineralogy, paleontology, and all of the earth sciences. They later founded Science & Nature Distributors, Inc., a wholesale distributor of science and nature related products to museum gift shops, nature centers and science stores all around the United States and several foreign countries. Their third successful busines was known as Science Educational Products, Inc., wherein Burns continued to develop numerous educational products and kits in the science and nature fields.

He developed and patented an atomic demonstration device that portrays a three-dimensional atom in motion, used by schools, museums and nuclear power plants to teach basic atomic structure and to demonstrate the source of electromagnectic energy. He was listed in Marquis 1997 Silver 25th Edition of "Who's Who" in the South and Southwest.

Burns is a prolific writer. Five of his science and nature related books for children have been published, along with a book about the history of an amphibious ship identical to the one on which he served during WWII. He has also written and produced a large number of multimedia documentaries. He is a frequent contributor of articles to magazines, newspapers and other publications, and is the editor of a newsletter to a group of WWII Navy veterans.

He is now retired and enjoys writing as a hobby. He and his wife live in Matthews, a suburb of Charlotte, North Carolina.