Caitlyn Jenner

I'm reading Thomas Hardy, 'The Mayor of Casterbridge.'

In the first scene, surely among the most shocking in post-Greek scribbling, our anti-hero, drunk at a county fair, sells his wife and baby daughter to a sailor for 5 pounds.

Where can a story go from there? I'm determined to find out, but it will take awhile. Hardy writes long sentences in proper early 20th century english cadence and the type is small, a Penguin Classic paperback edition.

Last night out walking in Portland, I said to my partner, Lea Ann, what if you became a man and I became a woman and we spent however many years we have left as a married couple with our original genders reversed?

We agreed it might be exciting, but that the practical considerations were daunting. New ID's, credit cards etc.etc. And how would we word the press release?

Hardy took almost all his material from stories he read in the little country newspapers of his time, and turned the little stories into novels of heft and consequence. If Lea Ann and I, a couple who'd pretty much lived our lives according to the biology assigned us at birth, were to swap biological roles, would Hardy be interested in telling our story? Is the material adequately shocking? Would it 'stop the reader in his tracks,' the old adage copywriters in the glory days of American advertising were told they must follow?

Perhaps Thomas Hardy would find our story interesting, perhaps not. Better to keep such a private matter private anyway.

So many people's lives can be read as disturbed literature in which there's no beginning or middle, there's only the end of what they wanted to be in the first place. We don't want to be one of them.