Forty Days In The Life Of A

I wake up. Immediately I have to figure out who I am.

I was not sure how to begin today's entry, for I have indeed forgotten -- or at least forgotten to mention -- so many things over the last few days. This Mother's Day weekend for Martha as well as us was especially fantastic; yesterday after church five of us (Martha, Sarah, Jeffrey, their cousin/our niece Josceline, and I) went out to Ground Round for our Mother's Day "tradition" where the mothers get to spin a wheel for a discount on our meal or a free item or prize package AND (this one happens every Sunday, 11-2 local time) where kids ten and under get their meal for what they weigh! So Josceline, Sarah, and Jeffrey's component of our meal came to three dollars and ninety cents. Martha and I came to slightly more, of course.

It's not just the body -- opening my eyes and discovering whether the skin on my arm is light or dark, whether my hair is long or short, whether I'm fat or thin, boy or girl, scarred or smooth.

We went home that afternoon and caught the movies Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day (based on one of my favorite books, and I have to admit it's a GREAT job!) and Look Who's Talking. More about that one later; let's just say it kind of wipes out the ... Mystique (my apologies, Nightcrawler) and fudging when your kids ask you where babies come from! Still a great movie, and I'd forgotten that too. I must have taken a nap some time that afternoon for Martha warned me to get ready for something awesome that night, AND yesterday was the first day we were free, Free, FREE of the paper route we've delivered the Minot Daily News on for the last year! I turned in the remaining bags we had at the office after I'd delivered the keys for the van that we're FINALLY getting the brakes fixed on and also learned there are sixteen steps to putting on a kimono ... as though the Japanese aren't intricate enough!

The body is the easiest thing to adjust to, if you're used to waking up in a new one each morning.

Maybe. Thank God I don't have to handle a situation such as A's in David Levithan's novel every day (ISBN 9780307931887) where the main character wakes up in a new body every day that's roughly the same age he is now, about sixteen-and-a-half. It's quite a bender of a story, with the main character never knowing where or who he's going to be next -- to the person whose body he inhabits, it's like a day-long blackout. As the story begins, A wake up in Justin's body and falls in love with his girlfriend Rhiannon, whom apparently Justin doesn't treat very well and over the next thirty-nine days, in various male and female bodies, tries to figure out how to meet Rhiannon again (one day he even becomes her) without interfering too much in the normal lives of the people whose bodies he's using. Though sometimes THAT is unavoidable or undesirable.

It's the life, the context of the body, that can be hard to grasp.

As I write this I just heard about what it will cost to restore our van to any semblance of safe working order ... oy vey. Saturday as I was getting off work Sarah got to go to her friend Scottie's birthday party up at the Grand Hotel, and Martha had committed herself to being one of the adults there, but then Sarah said (according to Martha) that she could go. It was the way she said it that made me laugh; in any event, at the same time as Sarah's friend's birthday party there was a Family Fun Night going on at Bethany Lutheran, 5-8, and after eating taco in a bag and various treats -- my blood sugar is still suffering from that -- we settled in to play various games. At first a group of kids played Clue while the adults played a Bible trivia version of Apples to Apples and we couldn't stop laughing! It was a relief for me, to see that I'm not the only adult who feels awkward about it at times.

Every day I am someone else. I am myself -- I know I am myself -- but I am also someone else.

Later at church the kids played ga-ga-ball (I'm probably rendering that wrong, but I really want to get done with this piece), which from what I heard is the opposite of dodge ball, you don't want to get hit below the waist instead of above it in a confined space. And Friday's a blur, even though I spent part of the day re-reading one of my favorite plays, Thomas Heggen & Joshua Logan's Mister Roberts (copyright 1948, so I don't have an identifier) set on a WW2 Navy cargo ship that I remember reading because I wanted to read it in high school, I didn't have to! You can say that of a lot of reading I do these days ... maybe not all of the books I read are the ones that wound and stab me -- you hear me Kafka? -- but at least they get me seeing connections.

And that is a most awesome thing any day, David