Living the Dream (World)

The other day, something hit me. Now, this is not news, really. Not at all. But the impact of this realization was stronger than it's been in maybe forever: I live in a dream world. Like, all the time.

I can stare out the passenger window of a car (passenger window; I drive quite attentively, really I do) and be a million miles away. (When my husband's driving. If it's anybody else I feel less freedom and thus more duty to make conversation.) This dreaming goes way back, of course. When I was in sixth grade, and the in thing to do was play dodge ball every day at lunch recess, I always played, if by "played" you mean pranced around my side of the court and, on such rare occasions as I'd catch the ball, lobbed it with no particular aim at the opposing team. But that wasn't the real game, as far as I was concerned. Because, the whole time, I was observing the kids as characters and noticing how they threw the ball. One girl -- tall, skinny, tough -- cocked her arm straight back at waist level and threw bullets. Another, a "cute little thing," used both arms to swing the ball to her left and shot high, graceful arcs. During the game, I mind-wrote descriptions of  the kids and how they handled the ball. Everyone did it differently. Everyone had their signature throw. I couldn't just play dodge ball. I couldn't even mostly play dodge ball. It wasn't that I consciously thought there wasn't enough fun in an earthbound game. It's that I mostly don't know how to do something in the concrete, physical realm only. (And maybe that's why I'm always the one who can't work contraptions.)

The real world, so concrete, so full of things and tasks and jabber, has just never had much hold on me. Rather, the events of the real world have been doors into the games I really want to play, the scenes I really want to live -- and happily do, through imagination, and sometimes, I think, through spiritual, if not physical, reality.

Oh, and the the tall boy who didn't play dodge ball much, but the day he did, hit me "right in the numbers" with an overhand hardball that my surprised arms flew up and caught, causing my friend to scream, "Marcia? You caught that?" and causing me to zing, for once, fully into the moment? Him? He appears elsewhere in this story. Can you find him?

As for that recent event that caused me to realize how fully I live in a dream world? I can't remember what it was. The dream is ever so much more enticing.

Ice Dogs, by Terry Lynn Johnson

I know, I know -- it's May. Winter was long enough! But I just have to squeeze this one in.

Fourteen-year-old Victoria is one of Alaska's top junior mushers. She takes after her father, an award-winning musher who taught her everything she knows and who tragically died in a wilderness accident the previous year. Her mother, on the other hand, doesn't understand the love for dogsled racing.

So when Vicky qualifies for a big race, considers a new lead dog for her team, wants to look at the dogs her neighbor has for sale, and Mom turns thumbs down, Vicky hitches up six of her dogs and goes anyway. It's only thirty-five miles, and she'll be back by afternoon. Except she's hit by an unexpected blizzard. That, and she finds an injured boy about her age who has crashed his snowmobile. The extra passenger weighs her sled down,  knows zero about the wilderness (having just moved from a big city), and is unwanted company in any case, but in trying to bring him home she gets hopelessly lost. The rest of the plot follows the humans and dogs as they fight to survive the all-but-unsurvivable.

The emotional story progresses, too, as Vicky slowly discovers that a greenhorn city-slicker might have some value as a human being after all, comes face to face with the way her father died, connects with her dog team in an even deeper way than before, and begins to imagine and have compassion for what her mother is going through now that she, too, is missing in the Alaskan wilderness during a terrible storm. Victoria is a prickly, snarky character whom I didn't always like, but found fully believable. Definitely recommended, especially for readers who love action but prefer some depth along with it.

One-week Blogcation

I'm taking a break this week only, for family visiting. See you all on May 1!