Day 3,702—Summer Stories V—

Today, it was raining when I started, but a good kind of rain. The kind of rain that is refreshing and hits you softly as it collides with your body. It was also nice not to see hardly anyone else out running. I got almost all of Grant’s trail to myself. I saw one other person but that was it.

Yesterday, I went over to my parents’ house and saw my niece and sister-in-law. My niece is only 1 month older than my youngest, so they both have recently learned to walk. We got them together on some tiny rocking chairs and they sat by the window and laughed and giggled as they rocked back and forth. My mom had a lot of vegan options for us to try and I had some seaweed snacks that I had never tried before. I don’t know how about seaweed; somehow it still tastes like seafood to me.

20 years ago, I started reading Ulysses. I asked my mom to buy it for me as a graduation present. I remember starting it around Easter because I was reading it while waiting in line to see the Passion of the Christ. Even though it was a book that opened with a scene about how the main character refused to commit their life to Jesus on their mother’s deathbed, nobody I knew had read it or even heard much about it, so I was in the clear. Even though I had to hide that I was reading the Harry Potter novels from my family, I was freely able to read Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses without any pushback. But who knows? Maybe if my parents were more encouraging of me to read the classic, I never would have. It was nice of my mom to buy it for me.

I remember wanting to try to read Joyce because I read the short story “Eveline” as part of the AP Lit test I took that year. It is still weird to think about how I scored advanced on the map test that year, so I was allowed to take the AP Lit tests for free even though I wasn’t in the class. Yet, when I started college in the fall at the Community College, the school forced me to take a remedial English class, but in a lot of ways, that has been the story of my life. In some situations, people considered me advanced, and in others, they saw the same person and decided that I was dumb. Now that I am older, I think some people really aren’t listening to me at all when I talk.