Diary Day 7
October 1, 2019
As I compile my diary entry from mental notes in my head, I realize it represents a very “typical” day in a very “typical” place: Middletown, i.e. the “typical” American city.
Tuesday began like many other Tuesdays with my kids at home, with an alarm clock, shower, reminders to my daughter to get a move on, and reminders to my early-riser son to put away his breakfast things. From there I will get my clothes pressed and ready for work, my daughter’s lunch packed (my son chooses the daily variety of the school lunch), and our morning journey through the BSU campus to Muncie Central. From there it is on to work, where a pretty “normal” day awaits.
Following work, I drop my daughter off at her work in one of Muncie’s litany of fast-food franchises, a place nicer, cleaner, and more efficient than most, but I am biased. From there I report to my barber, a friendly, conversational sort who has cut my hair almost monthly for 37 or 38 of my nearly 47 years. Four years out-of-state in college and six or so years in the western U.S. were the only time we did not regularly see each other and catch up. Before my haircut there is a small matter of settling an ongoing baseball bet, based on which of our favorite teams had the better record for 2019. I believe I am paying the stakes of this bet (a 2-liter of Coca-Cola for you high rollers out there) for the third or fourth consecutive year. Our teams’ successes seem to be fluid in opposite proportion to the other. The upcoming playoffs represent a chance to parlay the bottle into a double-or-nothing proposition.
All bets and haircut debts settled, I’m home to figure out dinner with my son. We ultimately decide to return to my daughter’s place of business for sandwiches and French fries. We know this is not an ultimately healthy option, but we have been good to eat at home earlier in the week.
Following dinner, I am out for a walk while my son completes his homework. I enjoy walking the neighborhoods or in tonight’s case, the Ball State campus, in the early evening before dark. One of my favorite perks of a college town is seeing the young people, hopefully enjoying the best four-five year stretch of their lives. I feel much of Muncie still sees the college kids as a nuisance, and old attitudes die hard. I get especially prickly with those who see the university as some kind of drain, or taker, from the community’s resources. Despite my general snarkiness toward its traffic patterns and its athletic fortunes, I may be one of the biggest at-large, non-monetary community boosters BSU doesn’t keep on its payroll.
My oldest daughter is a BSU senior, and selling some of her crafts in the YART festival at the end of this week. She is due to graduate in Fall 2020, and has earned some extra money and gotten exposure selling her handcrafted jewelry at local fairs. On my way to pick up her sister from work, I am dropping by her house to deliver a card table for use in Thursday’s sale.
Back home at last, there is some postseason baseball on TV and a chilled Jameson in hand. All in all, it wasn’t bad for a typical day!