Heaven is a place with lots of angels, fluffy clouds, and no paperwork.

Because I'll be working at a hospital, the pre-employment screening is fairly extensive. I'm having flashbacks to the sea of forms my then-husband and I had to fill out to get him legal entry into the U.S. Like then, my reaction is a mix of "none of your business!" and "Yeah, I see why you need it, but who the hell has records of their last TB test?!?"  My only recollection of a TB test was being about five years old and watching the pediatrician draw a smiley face around the spot on my arm where he'd done the pricking thing that was the test. So if I'd come back positive, the smiley face would have looked leprous. (Also, what kind of a chump was I that I could have my flesh pierced and be placated so easily.) I can tell you the doctor's name, the town his office was in, but the exact date? Maybe my mother has records in some dark recess of the clutter she's accumulated over 70 years, but if so, the likelihood of her finding it by tomorrow is somewhat lower than her quitting smoking.

The badass in me takes some pleasure in responding to questions about measles, mumps, and chicken-pox vaccinations. ("I got my immunity the Old School way -- I had the diseases. My immunity? SURVIVAL, yo. That's right -- Holla!")

One of the drawbacks to the kind of peripatetic life I've led is that the documentation that defines me is fragmented. The number of doctors and medical centers that have to be involved increases with the lookback time. "Yeah, I now have this doctor, but we only met once. The doctor who really knows me, knows my soul, is two doctors back. We had a good run together, until an HMO drove us apart. Oh, and she's in another state."  You'd think the online patient portals they have now would solve this, but turns out my main records site is being closed down and replaced by another, for which I may or may not have been sent the access code. I've got digital and paper records, but I liked thinking that I could always access my records from a site legally obligated to keep them under top security.

I'm also not good at remembering things like the dates I traveled. I can remember the weather and approximate the time of year, but geez. I've even tried looking back through blog posts, but I disappoint there, also. I'll call SP, since he was there for most of it. He is much better at these things than I. I attribute this to his genetic German love of precision.