I was sitting at lunch today on the outdoor covered balcony that we always eat lunch on, surrounded by snorting and tittering boys, watching the drizzly rain come in fits and starts over the campus, dipping my French fries in my warm split-pea soup and ignoring my grapes and half-eaten hamburger (punctuated by ruffly pickle slices like delicious lily pads suspended between water and the sky as they reflect each other, except that hamburger patties with the cheese scraped off do not reflect very much at all), when it occurred to me that everything is going to be ok.
I've been getting a steady stream of wrong-number calls for a girl named Danielle Nelson lately. My name is not Danielle Nelson, I have never met a Danielle Nelson. I think she's a college student at some other college. I always feel bad when I miss important calls for her from business offices and things that she needs to call back and they leave a message and I'm like "oops."
I received one of these calls for her last Wednesday, just as friend Shelli and I were heading off on a walk. I took it and informed the woman on the other end that she had the wrong number but not to worry because I get wrong number calls for Danielle Nelson all the time. She asked me if this was not number-number-number number-number-number-number number-number-number-number. I said that yes, that sounded right, but I am still not Danielle Nelson. We said goodbye and hung up, and I apologized to Shelli and explained about all the calls lately.
"What if," said Shelli as we descended the curving stairs, "you really are Danielle Nelson, but it's been blocked from your mind somehow?"
That would, I expect, explain a lot.
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| Here is a ladybug on friend Jim's neck. From a beach on spring break. |
