Living in the Shrike's domain*

Nobody ever hears me the first time I say "Hello" when I answer the phone. (This never happened before I moved, so I blame my new phone system and not the phone.) Likewise, nobody ever hears me when I say I'm 32 years old, possess two master's degrees, have a real-life, big person job, and have been living apart from my parents for over 10 years. For some reason I can't understand, they all assume, no matter how many times I correct them, that I'm 23, perky, and an undergraduate. I have had student workers in the library ask if I could sub for them over the weekend. (My answer: "No, because I'm actually one of your supervisors.") I have had a number of people at church ask me where I want to move after I graduate. (My answer:"I guess I'll just stay here and keep working at my real-life, big person job, unless something better comes along.")

This is doubly funny because, when I actually was an undergraduate, people routinely assumed I was much older than I was. I remember going to the university bookstore when I was 18 and getting called "Ma'am." (There's an episode of Mary Tyler Moore called "Today I am a Ma'am" where Mary has this happen for the first time. The difference is that she was 30 years old.) So how can I be that much younger than I used to be?

My working theory for some time has been that, like Merlin, I'm aging backwards. This works quite well if you assume that I aged normally until I turned 27 and then the process started to reverse itself. Every year after that a year was removed instead of added, until now I've actually just turned 22 instead of 32. I hope this doesn't continue or one day I'll be in the high school class again!

A different theory is that I'm getting all the right parts of my life, just assembled in random order. First I was in high school and then I went to college and then I got married and then I went to grad school and then I got divorced and now I'm doing the part between college and grad school that I skipped over the first time. This theory also works in a lot of different ways. I always did feel that I'd missed out on something, and now that part of my life is finally here at long last. Late night pizza and group dates and parlor games and random trips to Perkins (ok, really Bob Evans because they have no idea what Perkins is here.)

Now, as if to confirm this theory, I've gotten "adopted" by a family at church, a family who owns several local stores. I was at their house this afternoon reading the funny paper while my "mother" and my "grandma" talked while getting Sunday dinner ready, and I realized that this is the part of my childhood I missed because my real grandpa and grandma died too soon. If my grandpa had lived longer, I would have gotten to hear in excruciating detail all about the business aspects of his store. And if my grandma had lived longer and stayed in her right mind, we could have had many more Sunday afternoons together like the ones I remember from my early childhood. And now those times have come back to me as well.

Joel 2:25 says, "I will restore to you the years that the locust has eaten," and now I feel like that is coming to pass for me. It gives me hope for the future. Who knows what other of my dreams will be restored?

*The title comes from the Hyperion series by Dan Simmons. In this series of books, the Shrike is a mysterious central figure whose domain is full of time disruptions, making events occur in seemingly random order, or sometimes backwards.