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November 10, 2011: I watched Troll 2 for the first time on blu-ray. It was like, everything.

Hmm, gimme a minute.

11-10-92: Sat through a chapel on Martin Luther's birthday, listening to a homily on how "wrong" he and the Reformation were.

11-10-95: My pregnant cousin Dana had a second blood test and I was happy that she and her unborn baby were doing well. I was less happy my boyfriend was having so many worries over his father's imploding life.

11-10-96: I was upset in the aftermath of a fight I saw at a mall. More of an assault. I hate violence.

11-10-97: A nanny named Louise Woodward was convicted in the death of the child she was supposed to be watching, and received a life sentence for it, but the judge hearing the case instead let her go, and everyone was talking about that on that day.

11-10-98: Came home from an overseas assignment and spent time with my boyfriend and was really happy to be home.

11-10-99: Beautiful snow flurries where I was. I watched Buffy and Angel with my friend Rob, who was across the country, by putting my phone on speaker so we could talk in real time. Ha, long-distance get-together '90s-style.

11-10-00: Not a good time in my life, though I was happy that my cousin Magda was flying over for a visit here. She and I usually had fun times together.

11-10-01: Wow, a day highlighted by me doing laundry, though I did get a nice email from the man I'm married to now, and saw my best friend.

11-10-02: The man I am married to now went with me over to hang out with his cousin and his cousin's wife, and even though it was November, severe weather was forecast, and we kind of ignored that, but driving back we got caught in a serious storm that was dangerous.

11-10-03: I came home the day before after being gone with my work for over a month, and Dana's son Tyler, who was four then, came over to be with me and spend the night, and he gave me a hug for every day I was away (I had to tell him when to stop, ha) and I told him a rather good (if I say so myself) tale about knights. So good to be home, and such a sweet day.

11-10-04: Even though I hate tattoos, I drew all these silly pictures on my bare legs while I was sitting home alone talking to my friend Clare.

11-10-05: My best friend suddenly came back from Merida, Mexico, and came to see me, and told me she was pregnant and had broken off her engagement. She kept saying she could not have a child, it would ruin her life, his life, the child's life. I didn't agree, but nothing I said ultimately mattered.

11-10-06: It got up to seventy-four, a record-tying temperature, then that evening my future husband and I met my parents downtown for a performance of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, and I wore a black-scarlet dress said to look fetching.

11-10-07: Norman Mailer died (never cared for him) and because I did not have to report for my job on an air force base, I played three sets of tennis, then that evening I met for the first time the woman who would become my father’s second wife, and late that night I placed a Veteran’s Day Eve call to a former co-worker of mine from Florida, with whom I once ended up in a scary and potentially life-threatening situation. Everything turned out absolutely fine and going through that bonded us ever-after.

11-10-08: My daughter was six days old.

11-10-09: My current husband and I drove to Miami University to hear a lecture by David McCullough, and coming back we passed the spot where my cousin’s bungalow used to be, and though it had been torn down to widen  a road, it brought back personal memories of being there in 1995.

11-10-10: My spiritual advisor gave me an “assignment” to read The Book of John. I went into a convenience store and saw some teenage girl swallow four little white pills with a swig of Red Bull and then sway and announce to her friends, “Head rush!” I remember thinking I hoped my daughter never did anything like that.

11-10-11: My friend Rob's wife reported he was camping out on a sidewalk in front of a Game Stop to get Skyrim. I just went to bed and got mine the next morning.

11-10-12: We had a semi-strong earthquake rock our area, and also my friend Amy, who has since died of cancer, sent me a picture of a supposed ghost in a house in Bangor, Maine.

11-10-13: On a Sunday visit to my in-laws’ house, my two-year-old son ran amok like a typhoon, broke a glass, kicked his sister’s high chair and made her cry, and was really wound up. I had to pick him up and hold him til he went to sleep, much against his vocal objections.

11-10-14: Had a big clash with my husband over my offer to financially help my problem-plagued cousin Celia get out of the area. Biggest quarrel of our lives before or since. Honestly it was wrong of me to make Celia the promises I did without consulting him, and wrong of me to be so recalcitrant about my original position on things.

11-10-15: I had a stressful job-related day meeting with an auditor, and my husband bought Fallout 4 and played it all evening and up to bedtime.

11-10-16: My husband brought our children home caramel apples, but after one bite the apples were revealed to be rotten under the outer coating.

11-10-17: There was a blood drive down from the office where I worked part-time, and I donated. Met my almost father in law at lunch and he told me he could not donate blood because of a risk he might be a carrier of a contagion in his blood. I bought a novel called Shaman, by Kim Stanley Robinson, but didn’t like it.

11-10-18: It was Neil Gaiman’s birthday, my daughter’s soccer team won a game/match after losing several, she had some friends come over and we watched a creepy Doctor Who with the Family Blood on it.  

11-10-19: After a homeless man of questionable mental state was inappropriate toward my eleven year old daughter at the food pantry where we volunteered, a police officer said he’d come by next week. In light of the fact I was suddenly being sent to Turkey on assignment, I also resubmitted an update of my “death letters” which are the letters held in case something should happen to you, and then they are delivered to the intended recipients, who can read you telling them the sort of things you’d never quite bring yourself to say any other place. (Which is wrong, we should say those things.) Little in life makes you feel more bleakly mortal than composing those things.

11-10-20: My twelve-year-old argued with me that straight people should not be allowed to play gay people in films, and I reminded her in that case that great hate-film Brokeback Mountain never would have been made. That stopped her for a while….

11-10-21: My father in law came home after cancer surgery. He did well and remains alive. He asked we and the children please wait a couple days before we came over to see him, which we did. My husband told me he thinks his father liked me better than he does him. I told him of course that’s not true, but honestly… I wonder why so many fathers and sons are distant?

11-10-22: It was the last warm sunny day of the season, and I was outside as much as I could be. Among other things I had leaf fights with my son and I’m still finding dried leaf debris down my clothing.

On 11 November 1965, my birth country of Rhodesia gave England the finger and instituted what later became known as UDI: the Unilateral Declaration of Independence. This up yours tactic was because England had granted independence to Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) and Nyasaland (now Malawi) but refused to do the same for Southern Rhodesia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhodesia%27s_Unilateral_Declaration_of_Independence (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhodesia%27s_Unilateral_Declaration_of_Independence)

11 Nov 2018: An online friend of Kristi's came around to visit. He was trying to persuade Kristi to join in his pyramid selling scheme as he wanted her to join in on the huge amounts of money he was making. I have no idea if she was tempted or not, but I gave the whole thing a flat no. He drifted out of contact with her within a year, but I did hear the whole thing had went belly up and he was having severe financial problems after he had left the orbit of our lives. He was the kind of person who gets people to like him easily, but I always feel suspicious of those types and don't let them get close.

11 Nov 2016. We were on holiday in the US. I offended Kristi's aunt by saying that most people throw out their orange pumpkins after Hallowe'en, not elect them. I pointed out to her that her frequent requests for someone to shoot the previous person in office were a lot worse. She declined to have an argument with me about it in person though. Went out to eat at Olive Garden with some of Kristi's friends and family. It was a pleasant surprise to find I got to eat for free.

11 Nov 2015. I picked out Lilly-Beth's headstone. We disliked most of the available options for children, especially the one that looked like a teddy bear, instead opting for a black marble-looking one with gold lettering. Other people wanted to pay for it and got offended that I insisted that I paid for it myself. The thought was appreciated, but it felt like the only thing I could do for her and come Hel or high water I was going to do it myself.

11 Nov 2013. I went out present shopping for Kristi. I had asked for her to stay at home (normally I had to force her to go outside) so I could get stuff without her there, but for once she decided she was coming with me in a total turnaround of our usual dynamic. It rained as heavily as it possibly could. I was wearing my apocalypse jacket, so named because we are convinced it could survive anything. I put my hands in the pockets only to discover the pockets were also waterproof and had filled up with water, drowning my ipod. Kristi has never complained about the rain in Scotland since this day. We have never seen it that heavy again so far, although she did get upset about seeing what I was buying her instead of it being a surprise.

To be fair though, by the time I actually gave her the presents I'd completely forgotten what I had bought her and it was a complete surprise to me.

On this day in 2000 my cousin Magda was staying with my roommate and me on her visit to this country, and she looked through wedding catalogs with us while my roommate, Jackie, planned for a wedding that ended up never taking place. Jackie got an email from her brother, a National Park Service employee from down in southern Texas, that contained a picture which took us ten minutes to download, of him holding a diamondback rattlesnake, one of many he and a team there had caught to tag with radio devices so their movements and seasonal hibernations could be tracked. We all went to Taco Bell and Magda thought the nachos there were so good she ate a couple orders worth, which in retrospect hinted at the eventual large weight gain that would in time contribute to her early death. While at "the Bell" we got into a speculative conversation about how surely somewhere in this weird world someone was into jalapeno sex. We also talked about how the English language needed a word to tell a male cousin from a female one, so I coined the term "cousinette" which for inexplicable reasons has failed to make its way to the OED. Then we went home and I went to bed and felt puzzled about actually managing to have a good day out of the midst of my months-long state of sadness. Knowing me, I probably felt guilty about it.

November 15, 2000 laid bare.

15 Nov 2016: A dinosaur spat on me.

15th Nov 2014: Kristi said she needed me to make deviled eggs. It turns out my initial guess of boiling eggs, and then drawing little devils on them turned out not to be the right one. At least I made the effort and drawing those faces wasn't easy either.

15th Nov 2013: Kristi woke me up in the middle of the night, climbing over me. When I asked what she was doing, she told me she was going to hearthstone and repair her armour. I told her to get back into bed and got an "Oh ok". To the best of my knowledge, this is the only time anyone has ever played warcraft in their sleep.

15 Nov 2009: I watched Ferris Bullers Day Off for the first (and thus far only) time. I was not impressed. I found him to be an unlikable little s**t, and while he might have gone a bit too far, his teacher was ultimately right. By the end of it, I concluded that I should be entitled to give everyone who had ever told me to watch it, a damn good slap. Maybe even a closed-fist punch.

 :bouncegiggle: :bouncegiggle: :bouncegiggle:

Just for you Trevor, here is one of my masterpiece devil eggs.

(https://i.imgur.com/OvWICkQ.jpg)

November 16, 2009: Had my friends Tara and Rob over to watch Letters From Iwo Jima, then when that got too heavy we switched to Ed Wood, which made me realize to my surprise that unlike all the times I watched the movie in the mid-‘90s, the fake baptism scene was irritating me, because the sacred does have a place in human life. Rob laughed at me saying this aloud, but he’s stuck forever in his teen years, so I didn’t care. Discussed why alcohol changes so many people’s personality for the worse, and whether non-alcoholic beer would have a placebo effect. I told Rob beer makes him sweaty, and his wife Tara said everything makes Rob sweaty. Ouch.

Missed posting this yesterday because I was had the flu.

November 17, 2001 While metal detecting I found a 1920s German coin about three inches down off a well-walked pathway in a hilltop park above the city, and still wonder how it got there. Bad evening when I got home, though, as my next door neighbor, someone I loved, had to be rushed to the hospital, and due to her obesity it took two neighbor men to assist the life squad in getting her into the ambulance. She ended up OK-ish and lived almost precisely another decade, but it was the start of a series of health crises for her. I also had to fill out a stack of legal papers sent over by lawyers concerning my cousins’ monstrous father contesting our grandfather’s will, and the papers were full of mean-spiritedness, part of his campaign to make me feel giving in would be easier than enduring what he was going to put me through. Never surrender.

November 18, 1992 I took leftover tofu Pad Thai for eighth-grade lunch but found it so disgusting to look at I threw it away, though after I did I found out a boy in my class named Brad liked Pad Thai and he said he’d have eaten it. Sorry, dude. At home that night I laid in my room and contemplated how people could ever again look one another in the eyes after they’d had sex with each other. That seemed a great mystery to thirteen-year-old me. Years later I had someone ask why his wife stared at his eyes when he…finished. But I guess that’d be the opposite question.

November 19, 1996 I collected five boxes of donated paperback novels and drove them to my Aunt Christie’s parish in the Valley for a program that sent books to prison libraries. A boy from most of my classes, Roger Morgan, told me I should watch NOVA that night because it was about the science of shark attacks, something he and I had been talking about not long before when he asked me what animal I’d be if I had to be one, and I’d said an eagle, and when I asked him back, he said he’d be a great white shark. Roger Morgan was a very controlling sort of person, undeniably a genius but audacious and unrestrained. His mother was a nice hippie lady who used to smoke pot with him and when I’d go to her house she’d give me “chakra-clearing power hugs” she said she learned in India, but she had encouraged Roger Morgan do basically anything he wanted all his life without consequence, with the result being a perfect super-villain type in the making. I have NO idea whatever ultimately became of that fearless brainiac boy, but if I one day heard he had an island lair and minions to command, I wouldn’t be that surprised.

19th Nov 2017. I spent much of the day searching for the specific term used to describe the murder of a priest. I found many terms for the killing of different ranks of holy men/women.

19th Nov 2016. Went to see the Hoover Dam. This was down to my love of Fallout games. Walking song the top felt like walking along the edge of a piece of paper. There were many other tourists from other regions of the world, some of whom expected Kristi to move out of their way because she was a woman, rather than being gentlemen and stepping out of her way. I simply stood in front of them and glared at them defiantly until they corrected their mistake.

20th Nov 2014. I took Kristi to meet the Queen today. She was tiny. Recently, a co-worker would tell me that it wasn't the Queen, but instead a clone. They'd killed the immortal lizard creature that was the intrusion of a higher dimension being into our reality and replaced her with something grown in a vat. They'd done the same to prince (now King) Charles. If they'd cloned her, why wasn't the clone an immortal lizard person still?

I wonder how they killed an immortal being? And did they just kill the part that was intruding into our dimension or the whole thing? Couldn't they have killed Andy as well? So many questions, and no sane answers.

Regardless of Mark's conspiracy theories, the highlight of the day was when an officer taking part in the parade (who was wearing leather-soled shoes that are specifically banned for use in aircraft hangers for this very reason), slipped and fell. His scabbard and sword were around his neck, while his medals went flying. He then picked himself up and started to sort his uniform out himself which was another mistake.

November 20, 1994 Still not entirely better after nearly cashing in my chips in an accident that October, I stayed home from church for the fourth week in a row (my mom never previously allowed me to miss) and my dad stayed with me and we played Risk. Doctors said I needed to eat more sugar while I was still replenishing lost blood, so my mom brought home the unlikely combination of donuts and orange juice, and said if I mentioned calories she was going to scream blue murder, so semi-anorexic young me actually consumed this sugar-fest with a clear conscience. Then later I was on the phone with a college student and asked him to tell me a story from his life, so he said when he was seven his dad’s company gave out tickets to an NFL playoff game that determined who was going to the Super Bowl, and it was the coldest NFL game ever, about sixty below zero with the wind chill,  and his dad kept him under a thick blanket and kept giving him hot chocolate, so eventually he had to pee but it was cold and the lines were long, so in the best tradition of dads, his father slipped him a big cup and said, “You’re under a blanket, pee in this. Nobody will know.” So he did and they put it under the seat, where, by the time they left, it had frozen solid. That was so inappropriate I thought it was hilarious.

November 21, 1992 It was misty and rainy and exceptionally nice if you like those sorts of days like I do, and I went on a bus downtown by myself to interview for the job I got and briefly kept at a bakery that made (overpriced) specialty cookies sold by the pound. I didn’t think I’d get the job but I must’ve interviewed well after all. I waited for a later bus at the immense main library with its twelve acres of floor space, which I enjoyed very much. Dana and some friends from her college went to the OSU-Michigan game, which ended in a rare tie. She stayed over and partied all weekend, as was her style. (She told me I’d never be a party girl when I was her age so she had to make up for the both of us. Uh, OK…) And it was a bad day for the Queen as a fire at Windsor Castle did horrible damage and made a number of pensioned war widows who lived there homeless. I watched the news and felt down about all of that, though all in all it’d been a good day in the Ellieverse.

Having minor surgeries tomorrow, nothing worth writing home about but I don't know how sore I'll be, ummmm, probably pretty sore, so figure I'll post this now in case it's all a fiendishly clever plot to kill me under local anesthesia.  (If so, respeck, it's going to work!) What the hey, I enjoy the personal archaeology of these like I did the 25 memories thread this past summer, and I like the past. it's safe. It teaches. The present is a masked ball inside a garden where everybody's a got a concealed stiletto. The future is a terrifying place I dread. So looking back is kinda my thing. Guess you've noticed. Why am I apologetically explaining? Sod you. And thanks if you're reading this. And sorry for the sod you thing, just joking, really. But sod you all the same if it applies for any reason. Sorry, I'm jittery, I'm having minor surgeries tomorrow. Have I mentioned? Am I bovvered? A bit, Lauren, a bit. I'll be scarred (two r's) with little tiny skin dimples til they heal.


November 22, 2003 Went to Columbus for my cousin Jared’s annual Ohio State-Michigan party, where the game held my attention for about the first quarter, and after that I mostly just hung out, and in a Schadenfreude way secretly found twisted delight in the collective howls of anguish when Michigan won, which has proven a rare event in this century, OSU going 17-2 in the annual matchup since 2000. Drove back with the man I eventually married and though it was a nice day and I was happy with him, I was also turning a conversation with a man I knew in Austin over in my head, and wondering why I’d said a particular something to him I did, words that were like dropping a lit match near spilled gasoline, and thinking how I should probably back way off in our friendship, because down in Texas this other man’s marriage was not doing well and it was clear he had feelings for me. Much as I could try to deny it I also knew I was not incapable of polyandrous sentiments, and those are no fun for anyone, so that was another good reason to fade from the picture, though I didn’t, and as time would tell, 2004 would get complicated.

Sending good wishes  :smile: :smile:

November 23, 2007 Crazy day. I was promised the weekend off but I had to get up before dawn and drive sixty miles to work in another state to help sort out some miscommunications. That made me have to stand up both my friend Clare, with whom I was supposed to go downtown for Black Friday shopping, and my cousin Alison, when we were supposed to go to a public Christmas tree lighting event near her house, but that evening Landon and I did go to see B.B. King on stage, so that ended up being significant.

Before we went back to his house on the southern riverfront, where I was living half the time, we went up to see the (by then already) lighted tree after all and say hi to my cousin, who lived near the big public square where the tree was, and in this strange moment we passed a giant Krogers store in a cool part of town, and out of the blue, like he was having some inner monologue that accidentally escaped him, Landon, this pretty-boy dick-flinging machine back in the day, gestured at the store and said, “Going shopping there got me laid so many times in the ‘90s….”

He went into this spiel about how he’d meet single women there, blahblahblah, phone numbers, hookups, and I thought…really, dude?

He said I got weird on him after he said that and I said no I didn’t get weird. He said I thought you didn’t care about that stuff and I said I don’t care about that stuff, and he said you must, you got weird when I told you that. I said if I cared I wouldn’t be with you after half a decade considering the first few years I knew you about a tenth of the women we crossed paths with seemed to be someone you’d had something going on with in the past. He said well sorry he brought it up. News flash, I didn’t care about his reminiscence but I did care about being told I cared when I didn’t.
 
We got to my cousin’s and the first thing she said when she saw us in her doorway was, “You two had an argument coming here, didn’t you?” I think I ended up sleeping at my own house that night.

23rd Nov 2019: I discovered Kristi had never watched Slither. This oversight was immediately corrected. I do believe she enjoyed it.
23rd Nov 2016: I made a comment about how people would be so glad to see the back of 2016. If only we'd all known what was to come.
23rd Nov 2013: Kristi bought me a Lego Death Star. It took me 4 days to build it, and a couple of years later the cat a few seconds to demolish it when Dagon leapt on top of it.

24th Nov 2012. I found a rather large spider sitting on my shoulder staring at me. I attempted to train it to sit there regularly, like a parrot, only cooler.

It was to no avail though alas.

November 24, 1999 Couldn’t be home for Thanksgiving the next day but was able to call my family and tell them I loved them. I also grew so frustrated with Clive Barker’s novel Weaveworld that I gave up on the book and left it on a bench with a note half-inside that read: “TAKE ME AND KEEP ME.”  I’ve since liked to imagine it was found by a couple in love, who read it together while snuggling on their sofa in their socks.
I was way too self-confident in those days and used to walk alone at night through some highly questionable parts of town, admiring the brick Victorian warehouses while abandoning Clive Barker novels and thinking philosophical thoughts as I trod along in the dark. Nothing bad ever happened to me on my solitary strolls but looking back I’m surprised I got away with them as many times as I did. Either I’ve had a semi-charmed life or the waterfront area where I was staying wasn’t as dangerous as it seemed. (Because it seemed like a location shot from a vampire movie.)

November 25, 2011 Got dragged out by Dana and Clare to Black Friday shop, which is “interesting” to do when you’re in your second trimester of your second pregnancy in the same calendar year. Got worn completely out and my ankles hurt, so came home and had a marvelously sweet time holding my sleeping six-month old son and watching Shrek the Third with my giggling three-year-old til she too fell asleep leaning against ever-widening me, then I turned on The Clone Wars and relaxed on the sofa til bedtime, the sound of crowds of shoppers still ringing in my ears but otherwise feeling ready to kvell* with contentment at life in general.

*After Clueless came out the summer before eleventh grade, we shiksas at my Catholic school adopted this Yiddish word, which none of us had ever heard of til the movie. We weren’t even sure we were using it right but we said it a lot for a few months to describe being happy. Oh well, I’m certain at some moment in history a Jewish girl in Brooklyn has exclaimed, “Holy Mary Mother of God!” so we’re even.

November 26 1995 We were having spring-like weather reaching into the seventies, and I spontaneously took a road trip with my best friend Gina, nowhere glam or anything, but we drove up I-75 to Lima, Ohio (which we heard stood for Lost In Middle America) without really planning on going there, just…took off. She and I had a blast, even if we did just drive around aimlessly, talk to a few local boys, and then get Burger King before coming back. We made a promise to each other that someday we would road trip Route 66, but so far we haven’t made that long-ago plan a reality. Because I’d just recently learned my cousin Dana was pregnant, Gina and I talked about baby names and I said I thought Note would be a pretty name for a girl. Poor normal-ish Gina, who was long-used to the way my labyrinthine mind regularly spewed out weirdness she couldn’t follow, shrugged and mildly said, “Yeah, Note would be a pretty girl’s name.” I’m not sure I’d ever felt as free as I did that day, taking off on an unplanned trip in the pre-cell era, not knowing where we were heading and nobody sure where we were, but I suspect it’s how our beagle Ernie used to feel in the 2010s when he’d run off into the woods for days at a time. (Til coyotes ate him.)

26th November 2016. We went round to Kristi's brother and sister-in-law's house for a dinner and board games night. I can't remember the name of the soup she made, but it had to be boiled for something like 20 minutes before serving and was on the table to cool down. Her two boys got into a tug of war over a bag of rolls and the inevitable happened. Hali had her back to the table while this happened, but when Mason screamed she turned around to see me running off while carrying him and tearing his clothes off of him.

Gods only know what she thought I was doing.

Anyway, I got him stripped and practically threw him into a cold shower to try and lessen the pain of the burns. His arm and chest ended up bandaged up, but it wasn't as bad as it could have easily been. He tried getting his mum to give him the next day off school until I said "Mason, chicks dig scars", at which point he decided he might just be able to make it to school, but only if he could go with the bandages still on.

26th November 2012. Evidently, I passed a fitness test this day and celebrated by going on a pie-eating binge.

November 27, 2016 Took the children to the opening night of the traditional Christkindlemarket the local Germania Society puts on each season, and bought them maple sugar Santa-shaped candies on sticks, and got some beautiful braided candles and cinnamon brooms. There were German carolers and big decorated trees and it was a happy night. Saw lots of Christmas decorations coming home and it truly felt like Christmastime had begun. wouldn’t mind Groundhog Daying that particular night, if I had to choose one.

27th November 2022. In what would turn out to be the most talked about game session I have ever run, an NPC accompanying my D&D group turned on them. He'd been leading them through a swamp and straight into trap after trap. The party assumed this was down to his incompetence, but failed to notice he never got hit by any of the traps himself. When the party prepared to fight the big bad of this chapter, he suddenly turned on them and killed one of the party members in a single round (that wasn't supposed to happen, just lucky or unlucky dice depending on how you look at it). Jaws just dropped as this character who for months they'd adventured beside and come to trust started filling the party with arrows.

Three hours after the game finished, people were still talking about how surprised they were when I realised it was after midnight, and having work the next day had to leave the conversation. It still comes up occasionally. That almost all my NPCs (in this game) have betrayed the party at some point appears to go entirely unnoticed as they continually expect the next ones to treat them fairly.

27th November 1986. The wound over my left eye had finally healed up enough. The knife hadn't cut deep enough to leave a scar and talk of the fight had faded to nothing on the playground. The attacker had been arrested. I still felt proud that I fought off a bigger and older boy and saved my friends from being mugged on Halloween. It would be 3 or 4 years before I'd hear what his punishment had been. 12 months suspended sentence. Looking back, I do feel bad for his younger sister. She was in the same class as me at school and I can only wonder how she felt. She did tell me that his dad had beat the hell out of him when he heard what he had done. This was the only time in my life when my dad would treat me as anything more than an afterthought really. He seemed proud of me as if what I had done reflected well on him. Since within weeks my mum would leave him, taking us with her it would be more or less irrelevant and I did not care for his approval.

I would later encounter my would-be mugger at school. He walked up to me and threatened me, but I stood my ground and he backed off, but that was a couple of years in the future and he would disappear from the area shortly after.

November 28, 2006 Sent my friend a story I’d written about a nonagenarian preacher remembering back decades to when he’d slighted the grandfather who raised him, because he’d been sure the old man intended to be critical of the first sermon the then-young preacher had presented, only to learn after his grandfather’s death that the man had wanted to praise him for it. It was not like most stories I wrote and this friend was the first person I let read it. I also heard from an archaeologist I knew, and he had great new government job in the Rockies. I went places with my Aunt Sarah, my mom’s youngest sibling, only three years older than me, who was visiting the US after a few years away. She’d lived in Atlanta for a couple years during the Tiger, working for Coca-Cola in some exchange program, and wanted to move back. Her son, my cousin Joshua, was a baby at the time, adorably sweet, and it’s funny to think when he was thirteen he’d convert to Judaism, approximately blowing the minds of my mom and aunt’s conservative Irish Catholic side of the family.

November 28, 2022

Today, I tore my pants 😳😳😳

November 29, 2008 My dad surprised Landon and me with tickets to hear Rick Steves come talk, which would go on to be our first time out together since our daughter was born on the fourth of the month: twenty-five days and three night’s sleep earlier. I tried to read Joyce Carol Oates’ latest book but, continuing a trend in the 2000s, couldn’t get into it. In the mid-‘90s she had vied with Stephen King as my favorite writer, but times had changed. I filled our bird feeder before sunset, then watched spectacularly bright Venus and Jupiter appear to be atop one another in the sky at twilight. I figured somewhere in the world someone was sacrificing a hapless virgin over a celestial event so special. Since I wasn’t a hapless virgin, life was good.

29th November 2019: I asked Kristi how come she could hate roundabouts so much but love NASCAR, when essentially they are essentially the same thing.

29th November 2017: Kristi vetoed my idea of going to see Skid Row live on the basis that it was her due date and she didn't want to be giving birth at a rock concert. I however thought this was an awesome thing. Maybe not the Skid Row bit quite as much.

29th November 2016: My mother-in-law woke up from her double knee replacement surgery. Her shins had split lengthwise during the operation and she'd end up spending christmas in a recuperation clinic. I got to stand over her and insist that she did all her exercises and made sure they were all properly counted. I did not however feel brave enough to get involved in the argument between her and Kristi on how to decorate the tree. When I warned other family members about what was happening they all made the decision not to come around for dinner that night.

I did however make a bomb shelter under the stairs. Later on during out 2 month visit I'd fit shelving inside there and turn it into a pantry.

29th November 2010: The highest snowfall I've seen in my 20 odd years here fell. Work was cancelled due to it. I have only seen work cancelled three times due to extreme weather. Once was in the Falklands and twice on the Dambusters (the snowfall and back around Easter time it had been due to excessively high winds, which seemed odd as I'd previously had to work in a hurricane and this was merely a powerful storm and nowhere near as bad).

November 30, 2020 Kept an eye on morning snow flurries while watching The Simpsons do an episode set in town, which was fun since it showed places I personally knew. Talked to the instructor who had been teaching my children Krav Maga before the plague, and he said he was still not doing lessons because of Covid. Went out and had brunch in her car with my cousin Alison, though we didn’t really eat so much as chat---she’s lucky if she weighs a hundred pounds---then I emailed a chaplain from an Air Force base in Utah who had done my family a nice favor during Covid, and topped off the day by beating Demon’s Souls for the fourth time: still a rush after so many years. The month ended quietly, the house and outer world seeming almost preternaturally soundless.

30th November 2021

Waking up to snow got me all happy so I took this pic.

(https://i.imgur.com/WFUL6Agm.jpg)

30th November 2016: A discovered my favourite Choose Your Own Adventure type book author had died, a guy called Joe Dever. By sheer coincidence, I bought his first two books today and then when I looked at my memories, saw this.

December 1, 1989 There was a fire drill at my school that sent us all out into the cold for half an hour, just before my paternal grandparents picked me up at the end of the day. Grandma sat in the back seat with me and braided my hair before we went out to dinner at a strange restaurant “across the river” called the Wigwam, which was in a part of town where they used to live from the late ‘50s til the mid-‘60s. (I remember the interior was very, very cigarette smoky.) The aging neighborhood still had nice houses and pretty shops but was definitely going downhill. Everyone there was talking about the impending invasion of Panama, which my father had said was not about what the public was told it was, but he didn’t specify what he meant. I stayed all night with my grandparents, one of my childhood’s great joys, and lying on the floor with my elbows on the ground I read a book while my grandma watched Dallas, saying she also used to watch it when I was a baby and couldn’t believe it still came on. I went upstairs to sleep in the bedroom that is my youngest daughter’s today, and looked out the window with the light off, gazing into the dark woods, something I still love to do, because there’s something tranquil yet eerie about staring off into a nighttime forest that is also staring back at you.

December 2, 1997 My dad called to tell me there was a shooting at a school in Kentucky, and said he figured college shootings were going to be the next copycat thing, so be careful, but what exactly did that mean? I think it just meant “I love you.” I wrote a paper on Jason from Greek mythology, and entered into a standoff with my roommate, Jackie, over who was going to clean our kitchenette: all forty square feet of it. We ended up dividing the chore down the middle, then made butterscotch pudding (oh, how wholesome!) and watched a Barbara Walters special about “Interesting People of 1997,” whom I didn’t find interesting at all, leading Jackie, who was into fame and movies and the like, to call me a “celebrity snob.” Funny, back then I disdained celebrity culture, but it’s been a long time since I have even known who most famous folks nowadays are or why they’re famous, they come and go so fast and seem so interchangeable. (I bet Jackie still knows.) Before bed I talked to my boss and found out I was going to have to go to Boston in a few days for what amounted to a training assignment, news that I found both exciting and frightening, but which underscored what I already understood: I was destined never to have a normal life. To me a “normal life” is a sort of holy grail, a Shangri-La that likely doesn’t exist for anyone, but it’s something I’ve often thought about and envied.

December 3, 1994 Threw a frisbee for my doggie Charlotte Sometimes, and kicked away crisp leaves stuck in the back fence while waiting out in beautifully warm weather for my best friend Gina to come over so we could go see Interview With the Vampire, which I, a fan of the book, would soon think was a dud. We came back and played Scrabble with her almost thirteen-year-old brother, Mark, who spelled mostly pseudo-invented dirty words like “backbang”, then he walked Charlotte Sometimes with me out in the gloaming to a creek where we skipped rocks in the dimness while we talked about what crimes we thought we could get away with committing. (Him, stealing a police car; me murder of a complete stranger.) At home I talked to my mom about Christmas, then kissed her goodnight and went up to my room and sketched out a Ouija board I halfway contemplated making for someone as a present, since what says “Joy To The World” quite like a device for talking to the dead? Thought about what I was going to say in confession the next day, and since the usual priest was old and semi-cloistered, felt an amusing temptation to try to pass the plot of Stephen King’s short story Nona off as my life. Instead decided I’d go straight and just tell about how I was knowingly allowing my best friend’s brother’s crush on me to cultivate, though why this would be a sin, I’m not sure. Stayed up with Charlotte Sometimes to watch Green Day on SNL, which was hosted by Roseanne (whatever her last name was then) and painted my toenails orange while I did, though since it was winter no one was going to see them.

December 4, 2010 My mom came over and talked boy names with me and taught my daughter how to say the word “brother.” In secret I paid off a small loan held on the house of someone I knew in Texas, because he wasn’t in the best of health and the debt was crippling him. I got the lender to tell the person he was forgiving the loan, because I didn’t want him to know I did it and then make it become a big deal between us. (It was only around seven grand.) He soon told me, “I don’t know why but the fella who held the loan I made on my house suddenly told me he considers the debt wiped out. I’m so relieved!” Ironically, in three years the person whose loan I paid off ended up severing ties with me for what I thought were unfair reasons, cutting off a decade-old friendship cold without another word, but I don’t regret what I did for him, and was glad that back then I was able to do things like that, when now I don’t have the means to just hand out that kind of money without consequences.

4th December 2020: I had to point out to people that a Faraday cage might not be the answer to their problems with the government snooping on them. I resisted the urge to point out that a tin foil hat would act like an aerial though, making it easier for those mind-controlling signals to be broadcast to them though.

December 5, 1993 I’d been seeing what’d happen if I fasted to my limit, it had barely been a day and a half, but when my dad found out, he proceeded to literally pick me up, walk me to the refrigerator, set me down and say, “You’re going to eat now.” Then he stood behind me til I did: so much for that science experiment. That night the local PBS affiliate had a club of people who dressed up as Klingons answering the phones during a pledge-a-thon, and I kept calling up and going, “Hi, can I talk to Worf? Hey is Chancellor Gawron around? Tea, Earl Gray, hot. Make it so!”  Life was funnier before *69.

5th December 2013. After a hard-fought ebay bidding battle, I finally won something I'd been after for a long time. Alas, it turned out my bidding nemesis was my wife who was trying to buy the same item for me as a surprise.

I think you can safely say I was very surprised.

I was also sent home from work this day due to a gout attack. I had to pull my shoe off and when my co-workers saw just how big my toe had swollen up, it was generally accepted that there was no way I was getting that shoe back on. Since it was snowing and blowing gale-force winds I was quite happy to be stuck at home and not working outside.

5th December 2015. We had Sean and his girlfriend Holly around for some boardgames. We played Dead of Winter and if only we'd been able to survive one more turn we'd have finally beat the game.

5 December 2013, the day Nelson Mandela passed away.

I am glad that he is not alive to see how the ruling party which he was the figurehead of for many years has decimated our country with their corruption and greed 😦

December 6, 2006 I woke up at 2:22 AM, freezing and started to wonder if the furnace was out, so I got up and walked down the hall to see if my friend Gina, who was living with me for a few months since coming back from Merida, Mexico, was cold, but she was sleeping and I figured it wasn’t right to wake her up, so I headed downstairs on my own. People are always commenting on how this house is by a large, concealing woods, and how isolated it is despite being close to the city, and how it’s the most perfect layout imaginable for some latter-day Manson clan to come announce they’re “doing the devil’s business,” but I’ve always associated the house with happy times and have never been afraid. I went to the basement to look over the furnace, which was fine, and the heat kicked on even as I was down there, so back up I went, realizing only after I was again in bed that I’d left my door open, and conceivably someone could have made it cold to lure me out and then sneaked into my room and concealed himself, and I got this notion stuck in my head to where I couldn’t relax until I got up and looked in the closet and under the bed. Then I then started pondering the eighty-plus years of people sleeping in that room, and all that’d gone on in there, and I laid awake till I don’t know when, after four, certainly, with these sleep-depriving nocturnal thoughts cantering through my vibrating brain cells.

7th December 2013. My diary for today reads: "On the negative side of things today if your wife tells you, you don't need a piece of paper to make a list on because she has her head, the thing not to do is write your list out on her head.

On the plus side, if a woman is coming at you with a knife just hand her a loaf of bread and some butter. Her instincts kick in and you'll be perfectly safe. And have a sandwich as a bonus."

Later on the same day, Sean was round visiting us. After visiting us for six months, he finally noticed the sign on the mancave door that says "If small children (or Sean), are in this room please put all the swords out of reach." It was printed on black and white on a piece of A4 paper so his failure to notice it says a lot about Sean. He indicated that he found this offensive His next action was to pick up an LED torch, turn it on full beam and attempt to stare it out.

Which I feel demonstrates perfectly why I needed the sign.

December 7, 1995 Michael Jackson was in the news after apparently falling unconscious making a TV special, and that left people saying he was a drug addict. My boyfriend was off college for the semester, about two weeks before I would be on break in high school, so I took him a goofy end of term present, this rubber replica of a $10,000 bill that said “Stretch Your Money” on it. He said thanks, then awkwardly said he had something to tell me, and I thought uh-oh, and he said, “Bad Goofy on my shoulder wanted me to tell you later but I thought it was more gentlemanly to tell you now in case you wanted to cancel tonight and storm off once you heard.” His news was just that he was going to Florida for basically the rest of the Christmas season, so he could be with his mom and sister. Oh well. Hey, I didn’t storm off….

December 8, 1989 It snowed three inches overnight, which made my dad late in coming home from his trip Washington DC, because the roads were bad. I think I spent a third of my childhood worrying about him when he was away. My mom was trying hard to teach me to play piano that day, a perennial project of hers, but I resisted because I didn’t have any interest, and the DNA of her own musical talent skipped me entirely. Maybe my brothers would’ve been fine musicians like her, but I sure didn’t have it in me. I knew I was badly disappointing her, and I hated to see a sad look on her beautiful face, so I said sorry and asked if she still loved me and she said, “Of course I still love you, but I’d also still love you if you learned to play the piano.” Couldn’t argue there. I didn’t learn to play piano, didn’t become a nun, seems like I was always letting her down.

December 9, 2007 On one of the foggiest, mistiest nights I’d ever seen, including some “sea fogs” in New England, so foggy your eyes misfocused while looking at it, my maternal cousin Celia called me out-of-her-mind drunk, whining and ranting until she passed out on the phone after a rambling diatribe that was partly about raging against almost everyone she knew and partly seeking reassurances I didn’t feel like giving her that she was doing fine and no one was upset with her. In fact she wasn’t fine and almost everyone was justifiably upset with her. Although I was catching on that she was narcissistic, I didn’t yet grasp that she was a genuine psychopath, only got that she was an eighteen-year-old alcoholic who seemed to get herself into a lot of troubling situations that had her using and hurting (sometimes ruining) other people, and only caring whether people thought less of her, not showing any remorse for her actual misdeeds. (She lived to bask in praise and adoration, and if she lost someone’s regard she’d hate the person for ceasing to think well of her, and would sometimes go after the person either verbally or worse.) She’d never ask, “Did I hurt them?” Only: “Do they hate me now?” Everything was about her. A dangerous person, Celia.

December 10 2009 My mom watched my daughter while Landon and I went with my dad, his second wife, Barbara, and his stepson, Todd,  to see a stage production of A Christmas Carol, and also got tickets to see Titanic done on stage at an out of state college later in the season. It was a bitterly cold night, about fourteen-above with gusty winds scissoring into the valleys, but after the play we still walked around the deserted park up to a historic WPA-built amphitheater on a hilltop above the serpentine river. I was disgusted by the awarding of a Nobel Peace Prize that day, saying that compared to past recipients, this person hadn’t done anything to deserve it, but all everyone else seemed to want to talk about was the local college football coach deserting his team before the biggest bowl game in the program’s history, in order to take a job elsewhere, which did seem a little red. Sadly I think everyone had something to gripe about that last Christmas season of the decade. I came home and hugged my daughter, and only when she jerked at touching me realized I was doing it while still wearing a leather jacket as cold as the night.

OK, wuddeye got today? Ah, here we go.


December 11, 2021 Slept a little late since I was up keeping watch with the touch-and-go bad weather which threatened to reach our area, but flipped on the TV as soon as I woke up to see sights of horrible devastation in southwestern Kentucky. We escaped with just hard rain and a lot of tense hours, but the morning news was reporting the terrible storms overnight may have left 150 dead in Kentucky alone. An Amazon facility was hit in Illinois, as was a candle factory by the same mile-wide F-4 tornado which stayed on the ground for possibly 227 miles. In response my daughter Daisy and I went to the food pantry again, ahead of schedule, since it was having a special call for people to assemble supply boxes to send to communities in the storm’s path. When we got home I watched a documentary called Star of Bethlehem with my family, and prepared to depart early the next morning for a memorial service in Virginia for a former co-worker from the ‘00s who died because he waited nearly a year to seek treatment for his testicular cancer, which by then had spread. The longer I sat with my loved-ones that evening, the more I didn't want to be away from them yet again over something job-related, but I ultimately did go anyway, as it was surely going to be the last time the old team was ever all in the same place, together.

December 12, 2012 The date read 12-12-12. I went to a Hanukkah choral event at a temple with my friend Edie, and heard again how mellifluous the gargling consonants of Hebrew become when sung. Afterward, as with every Jewish event in history, there was a “nice spread” in the reception hall. I talked there with a man I’d previously met named Dan, one of the most knowledgeable religious scholars in the city, but also someone who seemed to be perpetually angry. I guess the fact his diabetes left his bones so brittle walking was dangerous for him may have contributed. Edie kept making these inside jokes about still having her birth nose, and implied many other women there did not. The bra I was wearing was so tormentingly uncomfortable all evening I actually took it off in the temple’s parking lot, inside my car, under my coat, glad for the dark evening. Caught the end of a Hallmark Hall of Fame Christmas show when I got back, and came home bearing bagels the size of silver dollars, having been informed that those dimensions meant they were authentic bagels and not at all a parsimonious attempt to save money. Strange culture sometimes, gathered Jewish people: not at all completely normal like my own kith and kin. (Ahem.)

December 13, 1998 I was back home after being away with work, and while in town I was staying with Brian, with whom I’d been in love across the 1990s, and on that day we only had about three weeks of time remaining together, ever. We got up that morning and he asked me to go to church with him, because since his return from a terminal illness in 1996 his once fast-living father had gotten deeply religious, and Brian always met him at Sunday Mass: something my daughter and I still do today. I said I didn’t have anything to wear and he said I was fine, just come with him, so I did.

Advent is a pretty liturgical season in the Catholic Church, vestments and altar cloths a lovely purple color, and the “Christmas is coming” themes were uplifting. Instead of looking toward the service, I found myself watching Joe, Brian’s father, seated at my left, and he seemed to find spiritual nourishment from being there, like it was repairing him. He closed his eyes for a long time, squeezing them shut to the point wrinkles formed in his otherwise smooth skin. Despite everything he’d gone through with his health, he didn’t look a lot older than his son, even though he was about the age then that I am now.

I saw he gripped a rosary in his hands so hard the jet beads were denting his flesh, and as I watched I got a strong feeling that every second of his existence since his unlikely recovery he had dwelled with an awareness he was in a state of “extra life” he didn’t expect to have and to which he probably felt he wasn’t entitled:  life granted by God, as he saw it. Even in my cynical heart there was something awe-inspiring in watching this surrender to gratitude that seemed to let Joe channel something beyond himself in a church filled with people who mainly seemed to be going through the responses to the service as if by rote. It was like he had found a connection to a higher power the rest of us weren’t perceiving.

After that Sunday I wouldn’t see Joe again for two years.

December 14, 1995 It was the homestretch to Hell Week at my school, the twice-yearly time of soul-shredding exams, and my dad said I wasn’t taking it seriously enough, so he came home early to study with me. While I resented it then, in retrospect it wasn’t really bad, since we’d also fix banana smoothies and talk, and full of facts as only 11th graders can be, I asked if he knew scientists were warning of a three-percent chance that AIDS was going to mutate to become airborne by 2015. He said three percent wasn’t anything to get gloomy about but it was a scary possibility and said we were overdue for a pandemic. He reminded me that when I was younger I used to say that when I got a doctorate in biology I might like to get into research on diseases like HIV.

When I was finally done studying, I got a call from Brian in Florida and he was going to go to a club with his sister, Clare, for a pre-weekend party, so I asked what the girls in Florida were like and he said where he was in the interior of the state the ones he’d encountered were dumb hicks who didn’t know how to dress. (Oh, mean!) I asked if they had scabs on their knees, which made him laugh and shocked him, because despite everything (and “everything” covered a lot) I think in some corner of his mind he liked to think of me as innocent.

He said when his sister, who majored in dance, was on the floor everybody watched her, she never got tired and moved like a pro. He said, “And of course she’s cute as button.”

I thought of pictures of her I’d seen, this girlish girl with her bobbed hair and a button nose and sky-blue eyes and yellow-blond hair and a slim, long-legged body, and while I thought it was nice that a brother would describe his little sister as “cute as a button” I also thought that was more apt for someone under ten.

I asked if he had to fight boys away and he said, “No, they all seem straight.”

I’d MEANT fight them away from his sister....

December 15, 2015 My husband paid off his crew, gave out bonuses, and closed everything work-related down til after new year’s, then took the kids Christmas shopping while I went off alone and spent my rainy-day fund on a warm stone massage with a sonic scrub, then put on a dark mask and sipped green tea with coconut milk while listening to recorded pan pipes. Because it was warm for December, I strolled a bit on a bike trail that meanders above the riverbank for almost a hundred miles along a converted railroad track upon which Lincoln’s funeral train once traveled, and saw a fox sniffing a mound of deer poo and was able to actually get within maybe thirty feet of the fox before it trotted back into the bushes. We all met for dinner at Applebee’s, because my husband’s mom, whom he and the children (“Daikeagity”) stopped and picked up on the way, liked to eat there. They gave out balloons and I kept inhaling helium to talk like a Martian til the room spun and I almost passed out in my salad, which amused the kids more than the Martian speech had. We then went into the Christmas-crowded mall and walked around til almost closing time. A Scientologist with a glistening forehead offered us a personality test; we said no. It was a nice day.

December 16, 2004 I was in Ireland, on leave from my work, tired of drama back in Austin, tired of drama back home, tired of two men I cared about constantly wanting to kill each other---frankly one of them wouldn’t have stood much of a chance against the other---plus just plain tired. RTE One did a show about Oscar Wilde, and while I was over at her house earlier in the day I’d told my grandmother I was going to watch it and she wrinkled her nose and said the only admirable thing about Oscar Wilde was he had the decency to become Catholic on his death bed, but she was sure he’d stay in Purgatory til Judgment Day for all his sins. My cousin Eonne asked me to help her make tie-dyes for Christmas presents, and my Aunt Sarah invited me to come to a poetry slam later in the week: an Irish poetry event being really quite something. I wasn’t taking calls from almost anyone back home but I did phone my dad and he asked if I’d changed my mind about my plan to stay over there for the months of my leave, and I said no, not this time. He said, “I don’t think you will. Ireland is only fun in small doses.” And he was right, I did come back in January, long before I had to, work-wise, but being overseas made for a nice pause after a hectic year.

16th December 2021. I got a phone call today telling me that I'd be cancelling my holiday plans and instead spending my time in some as yet unknown part of the country. The five days notice I was supposed to receive, was cut down to 24 hours and 10 minutes. 5 of those hours would need to be spent travelling. The section that was supposed to provide transport to get me to where I'd to report to the next day was spectacularly unhelpful (to the point where for the first time in my career I said "You know what, I've done what I can. I am going home, and if I can't get there in time tomorrow, it is someone else's problem." When I told my sergeant about the situation he was pretty p**sed off with MT and got me transport sorted out sharpish). I got home late, spent what little time I had between packing for a deployment of unknown length with Kristi and Ash and we opened our presents early in the assumption that I most likely would not get home until at the earliest, February.

I've had short-notice deployments before, and for much worse reasons. For reasons though, this one really bit hard. Harder than any other one had. I remember exactly how I felt when I saw my name on the list to go to Afghanistan (didn't bother me much to be honest, it was more an inconvenience than anything else. We worried more about friendly fire from the Yanks than rocket attacks from the Taliban, especially after Dave's brother had been shot up by them) I'd been debating how much longer I was going to stay in the air force for several years, but this was the thing that tipped the balance and decided for sure I was going to leave. I wanted to spend time with my family and was no longer prepared to do the whole "service before self" thing any more. For years I'd increasingly felt that the people I had sworn to defend and protect simply weren't worth the sacrifice and it was time to concentrate on those who were, and pay back the support they had given me.

That's wrong. Bitterly, stinkingly wrong. Think of the day you'll be able to give them the finger while watching them recede in life's rear view mirror.

December 17, 2005 Went Christmas shopping at lunchtime with my mom and my Aunt Christie and my year-old Chinese-born cousin Alba.

My friend Jessica wanted me to meet her to hear a John Lennon/George Harrison tribute band, but I’d been out with her the night before and twice in one weekend was over my limit. She was an inveterate party girl, taking every chance to shout “Woooo!” about almost anything, and she had never blended into a crowd in her life. Instead of going out, while she smoked a jay on her end of the phone we talked about whether it’s better to be attractive or interesting. Both are important, of course, and if someone has both qualities, well, she’s set, but I pointed out that history’s great mistresses, like Madame de Pompadour, Louis XV’s favorite, and Nell Gwynn, who turned Charles II into her boy toy, and later Edward VII’s longtime companion, Alice Keppel, were not the greatest of beauties, but rather women who interested those kings for their own qualities. If a king could have anything he desired but chose wit over looks, well, case made for the importance of being interesting.
 
Landon picked me up and we went to SOHO Japanese Bistro, and then saw King Kong, which I thought was far too sad. Fug sake, I almost cried! Afterward we drove around and looked at Christmas lights, and there were lots that year, as if people were saying nevermind the stumbling Bush economy, let’s go all-out. Back at his place near the river, with the city skyline to the north bright in the night, that view accounting for half the property’s value, Landon told me he thought it was sweet that I seemed to enjoy being sad sometimes.

I asked, “So you think my forays into sadness are….interesting?”

He must, since we’re still together, and when I’m in a mood I can still embrace sadness way too firmly, once for several life-consuming months in 2015. I think it’s in my Celtic DNA.

December 18, 1994 was a day I still smile to remember, because after church Dana took me downtown to see the city all decorated like a giant Christmas-themed amusement park. We gave carolers and beggars and street musicians money, and rode in a carriage pulled by a mare named Honey and a gelding called Lewis Clark, but when I wouldn’t pet their noses like Dana did, she said I should grow some balls, and I said, “Don’t talk about balls in front of poor Lewis Clark.”

We went into a big complex called Atrium One and had hot drinks and split a bag of roasted cashews at a table by a fountain while some Kenny G look-alike played smooth jazz, and Dana was being especially nice to me in the aftermath of my bad incident on October 24th, which showed she did love me despite the way she sometimes hazed me without mercy. She even bought me three books while we were downtown and told me: “Since I don’t know what you’d like to read, just pick them out and I’ll pay and wrap them up.” One was for my birthday and two for Christmas. (My cousin Dana has never slighted me for having a Christmas Eve birthday.)

We also got a box of peppermint brittle for $7.99 a pound, some candles and some dust that turned fireplace flames green, the last for our Aunt Christie, older sister to her mom and my dad, then walking down Fourth Street, which was like a mini version of Chicago’s Michigan Avenue, all Art Deco skyscrapers, we talked about guys, and even though she was twenty, that made me feel very flatteringly like her peer.

When we headed home she acted like every red light was her sworn enemy, but also told me she would teach me how to drive in a few weeks: not reassuring. She played her music loud enough to rattle the window glass, but because we were also talking, only did so during “killer songs.” She played Under the Pink by Tori Amos a lot of the way, and I was convinced there was some perverted hidden meaning in that title. (Still not sure there wasn’t.) I told her it was going to be my project to explore new music in 1995, so she said she’d make me a list of good bands.

We skipped the expressway and came home through the uptown, passing this neighborhood called Northside, home of The Crazy Lady Bookstore---gasp, owned by an actual lesbian!!!----plus artsy bars and clubs and lofts in converted 1800s houses, a district where she’d taken us two years before to get our palms read, and I told her: “You wasted your money that day, Dee. That lady must have been a fake or she’d have foreseen a humungous catastrophe coming into my life.”

She was like, “You’re only just now thinking she was a fraud? It was a game, you know that.”

But for a game Dana sure seemed to take it seriously that day in ‘92, pressing hard questions about some boy she was into and arguing with the palm-reader when she didn’t like what she was told.
 
That night I laid across my bed and called Brian at college and told him about my day like I always did, telling him everything I’d done downtown with Dana, and he said his day was a lot less fun, his stepmother, Jan, whom he (I think unfairly) dubbed “the gold digger” invited him to go over to the house for dinner with her and his dad and his sister Clare, so he went and from what he told me about the night, I thought Jan was trying to be nice to him, but he said I was missing her game, that she’d decided to divorce his dad and was running out the clock being super nice to them all so she could look better in court.

Possible, I guess, but I just listened and felt glad things like divorces weren’t a part of my own family’s life, or likely to ever be. Sadly I only had to wait a few months to grow wiser, and I think my parents actually beat his dad and stepmom to it.

December 19, 2017 Went to the Zoo for the Christmas decorations known as the Festival of Lights, consistently voted best “holiday” display in the US, but my husband was annoyed the foreman who worked for him, Ron, had given him a bottle of amoretto for Christmas when Ron gave the other guys on the crew bourbon, so all through the trip Landon kept asking me if Ron was making some joke at his expense.

I said, “Maybe he got you something pricier, since you’re his boss.”

“No, I think he was implying I couldn’t handle bourbon.”

“Just re-gift it and forget it,” I told him.

Later I couldn’t sleep, and my friend Rob, who was basically nocturnal, sent me a link to a video on ogreish.com which purported to show the founder of the Church of Satan, Anton LaVey, screaming on his death-bed after seeing Hell.

When I told Rob it probably wasn’t real but I still didn’t want to watch it, he called me a snowflake, and the taunt bugged me, because I’d seen too much violence, not too little, like him, so after years of keeping a part of my life locked away, I shared pictures of a sort I endured when they got sent around on my job on a military base like gruesome trophies, the most graphic being a close-up of the half-headless remains of Amar Majid Farhan, who handled cash pay-outs on bounties placed on US service members in Baghdad, and who’d lasted sixteen hours between being identified by intel and having his warrant stamped by a specialized team that stalked targets on the ground back before drone strikes were as common. The thing was, someone in the team had taken Mr. Farhan’s blood and brain matter and scrawled a taunt on the pavement in Arabic asking: “Next?”

Afterwards I felt dirty for showing him that, like I’d opened a door that could never again be shut, so my home life was tainted. When I told what I’d done to a psychologist my employers had me see, she said I was going to open up to someone eventually, everyone did, but why my nerd friend and why during Christmastime I’m not sure. I had someone much better to talk to about things and think it was my arrogance bursting out that night to show Rob I’d seen worse than the morbid videos he titillated himself with. Once upon a time I’d wanted to be a college professor, but the road of my life veered. I’d turn another direction if I had to do it over again.

December 19th 2021.

I had settled into my hotel room. Since I'd already done all the online courses I needed to do, I had 3 days to myself. I spent them wandering around the old part of town, including my favourite cemetery (because of its history. It is one I'd love to show ER and Indy around should they ever visit Scotland). I overheard the receptionist at the front desk complaining about all the military people staying at her hotel and how much of an imposition it was (never mind that we were its only paying customers and keeping her in a job). This was the first time I'd get angry with this hotel chain (the Mercure), but not the last. To this day, when I pass by one of their buildings I spit on the foyer.

I took a walk into a local games store which was just around the corner from the hotel. The guy behind the counter was telling me about how hard this week in work had been for him. I told him about the past couple of days for me. He looked shocked when I'd finished and told me that suddenly his week didn't seem quite so bad after all.

That night we all ordered steaks for dinner. The chef complained, told us that it wasn't economical for her to cook so many steaks for us and that while they'd cook them up for us on this occasion, we couldn't have them again. The menu would shrink a lot until we only had a choice of 3 or 4 dishes by the time we went home and wanted to charge us between £80 to £100 ($100 to $125) to clean a single bag of laundry and since we had no other options we'd have to pay (well, ok the tax payer paid, but it still p**sed me off).

December 20, 1996 The brain melt of 12th grade Hell Week exams wrapped on my last-ever day of school as a minor. I’d be eighteen when school started again (truthfully I had a strong secret urge never to go back), and for the first time in all our years together, my grad student boyfriend wouldn’t be going out with jailbait anymore.

I went to a party that night where these college students were drinking vodka through Twizzlers like it was the big thing of the moment, and met a girl there whose first name was Dockery, a name I’d never heard before and haven’t since. The usual thing was college guys thought I was cool to have around and college girls seemed to resent someone from high school trespassing in their territory, but everyone was Christmas-break gleeful that night, so everybody was nice.

For some reason after I petted a white cat that lived there where the party was, it followed me around the rest of the time we were there.

I wasn’t out late, home by eleven, I didn’t drink or anything, per a deal I’d had going with my father for a year and a half, that as long as I didn’t drink or do drugs or break any obvious laws (um, other obvious laws), and as long as I kept my grades high, I could basically do anything else I wanted. I went in to tell my dad I was home and goodnight and talked a second about how I thought I did in the Hell Week exams, and he asked if our deal was going to expire at the stroke of midnight when I turned eighteen, and I said nah, drinking and drugs didn’t appeal to me. He said he was glad I was home, and I said yeah, well, for every worry I’ve given you, you and your job have given me fifteen over the years, and he chuckled and told me it wasn’t a contest, so don’t make up for lost time.

Few things in life felt nicer than being off school for a long break, and life that night was very good.

December 21, 1996 On that frigid winter solstice I found out Carl Sagan died, which upset me since he was someone I’d looked up to and who’d been out there in popular culture all my life, advocating science and sticking it to Christian fundamentalists, long the focus of my teenage ire. I’d known he was sick, he’d been bald and thin last time I’d seen him, but he’d seemed optimistic, so I think I believed he would recover. I called Roger Morgan, the creepy/cool genius kid I went to school with and talked about Sagan with him but he was in a mood like he got sometimes and kept putting down everything I said. He told me, “If you’re that filled with grief, why don’t you put a black ribbon in your hair or something?” Later he called me back and while he was not the type to ever apologize, I could tell he was in a milder frame of mind and admitted Carl Sagan dying upset him too, since we sciencey types had lost an icon, and he wished me a happy early birthday ahead of Christmas Eve, but after a minute all he wanted to do was interrogate me about my boyfriend being back from Argentina and Israel after being gone during his father’s medical treatment for the last stretch of months, and so once again I cut the call short, knowing the Great and Megalomaniacal Roger Morgan wasn’t used to being dismissed, which made it even more fun to do.

December 21st 1990.

I fully participated in my first-ever pagan ceremony. I'd been attending since I was 14, but at that age, I was more stuck on the sidelines and would have to leave early. I felt confident enough about my body to strip off and dance around the fire with everyone else. I didn't have someone to jump the flames with, but I'd brought a six-pack of beer instead. I still remember just how freezing it was, even on what was a fairly mild night. It was a crescent moon that night if I recall rightly, but we had light from the fire and burning torches to see by. I felt a sense of, well not quite belonging or kinship, but rightness. Like I was in the right place at the right time. It was more than I'd ever felt at any other religious event, which normally left me bored. I managed to spend the whole day avoiding hearing Ice Ice Baby, a song that every damn time it started make me think of Queen, only to disappoint me when I realised it was a lesser imitator.

Did you know Vanilla Ice actually tried to say he didn't rip off Queen with that riff? He said his was different. Hand to the Lord, not joking.

Yeah, I vaguely remember hearing something along those lines. Next, The Scissor Sisters will be claiming they didn't rip off Thomas the Tank Engine.

I'm not a fan of rituals in general but I think the times in my life I have most strongly felt some powerful unseen (positive) presence beyond myself, as if the veil was worn thin between this world and places beyond the human senses, have been at night, in wild places, forests, hilltops, sometimes around fires. I often go alone into the woods at night to seek this feeling and sometimes find it. There's a place I've mentioned we call the Overlook, and it is undoubtedly a site of some sort of discernable energy, where I am sure for millennia people have stood and looked out over the beautiful valley and river and loved it as much as I have, and every so often it is honestly like time merges there: past, present, future all coming through at once. It can feel a little scary along the lines of like watching a thunderstorm blast overhead, but mostly it is simply awe-inspiring.

Oddly, another place I felt an energy so powerful it almost made me feel like my cells were vibrating was at a Hindu temple, amid statues of various semi-anthropomorphic deities.

Sometimes I really do miss those festivals. Still life moves on and I find these things are never quite the same if you go back a second time.

December 22, 2021 My thirteen-year-old daughter Daisy went with her cousin Bethany Brooke, Dana’s youngest, who was sixteen, almost the same age difference between Dana and me, to Peace, Love, and Little Donuts, where they have dozens of weird types of donuts about half the size of regular ones, which they custom-make right in front of you Subway-style, so they’re hot when you get them. Some of the names of donuts were puns on hippie culture (Almond Brothers, Heat, Wind & Fire, Snick Jagger).

Had a talk with my spiritual advisor and told him I’d decided that God cannot be completely good if God can do evil, since doing evil is the antithesis of being only good. I was thinking the same people who screamed that abortion was the murder of a baby (not saying I disagree) worshipped a God who murdered countless babies by flood and by the Canaanite genocide and during the slaughter in Egypt among the first-born. Might does not make right, and just because it is within God’s power to take life doesn’t make it right. Right and wrong are not defined by the power behind the act but by the act itself. Killing a child was murder. Murder was wrong. One who does wrong is not absolutely good.

I told him I didn’t think I had the right sort of mind to make a good Christian, because I thought thoughts like those and said I was sorry if I disappointed him, but he said he’d only be disappointed in me if I held back sharing my thoughts about God, because he always wanted to be there for me.

This man has long been a much nicer and more patient friend than I deserve.

Not confident our power is going to stay on in this wind, so since it's only half an hour til tomorrow....


December 23, 1994 It was my final day as a fifteen-year-old, and as we were wrapping last-minute Christmas presents at her apartment, my cousin Allie and I started talking about the worst things that had ever happened to us, emergency blood transfusions and stomach pumpings and her getting raped by her brother’s friend when she was ten and her drugged-out brother Adam sat across the room and let it happen. Allie had had more than one drug overdose in her life, but one was so bad paramedics said she had almost zero blood pressure and they didn’t see how she was brought back.

She asked me if I’d had a near-death experience in October, and I said no, I just saw the lights in the room get bright as my pupils dilated, and felt very cold and it was all distantly loud. (But then again I didn’t “die”, just came close.) Allie said she hadn’t had one either, but….

Then she said, “Except.”

I said, “Except what?”

She said, “Don’t laugh, promise?” I said I wouldn’t laugh, and she told me: “I knew I was dying, and something inside me was still alive enough to feel sad that I was, and I felt like I was going to have to stay inside that feeling of being sad without it ever ending. Forever.”

I looked at her sincere little face and though she was three years older she looked very young and frightened, and I could tell she was being absolutely honest and that this was her secret horror. If my cousin had spoken of Hellfire and demons it would not have disturbed me nearly as much as her hinting that death involves living forever in whatever we created of our lives. I thought hard about her saying that and concluded if I had perished on October 24th the negative side of my own life might have been summed up as selfishness.

December 24, 1999 It was my twenty-first birthday and my grandpa, my dad and I went to Perkins for breakfast and had a nice time on the last occasion we were ever together like that, since Grandpa got sick early in 2000, and was clearing his throat a lot that day I noticed. Still, we didn’t know that then and Grandpa gave me a booklet that showed how things were in 1978, houses, cars, the cost of stuff, news headlines, what was popular. (I still have that.) My mom called me to say happy birthday and her accent was gratingly full-on Irish again after almost five years back there and she didn’t sound like “herself.” Later that night my grandpa asked me to slip out with him and he bought me a beer at a bar, first time I’d ever done that, and we drove back to my party, and considering it was Christmas Eve it was flattering so many people came. My friends from back in New England called and I opened presents they’d sent me while they were on the phone, and it was a happy day. There was even a scream-worthy funny moment when Gina’s brother Mark, who was by then a senior at our old school, spilled a cherry Coke all over these hundred-fifty dollar Nikes he had on, that he’d just gotten for Christmas, and said some choice four-letter words about that mishap. I kissed him for coming down to wish me happy birthday, and he said he’d teach me how to play golf if I was home that spring. I didn’t want to learn but I said OK anyway. I kept hoping someone I was thinking about all day would call me, he knew what day it was, he knew I was in town, we’d talked during the year since my working far away ended us, but he didn’t call me that day. I suppose you can’t have everything, even on a landmark birthday, but still I had hoped so hard and it made me mad at him. Maybe he really was done with me, but I’ll never know.

December 25, 2021 Christmas was mercilessly early in arriving. Stumbled out of bed to Daikeagity urging me to come on, come on, so proceeded downstairs to meet a gray and low-skyed day with gusty winds and temperatures in the sixties, the warmest Christmas day in local history, so warm the Yule log burning amid dancing blue flames made the room hot enough to open a window, and later in the day we had a pouring cloud burst with actual thunder. Thunder at Christmas! My dad had spent the night at our house, so he got up with us, and my husband’s parents came over after breakfast, so “almost” everyone was together. (Thanks, Mom!) Mostly the children got fewer things than in the past but bigger than usual, like a clarinet, and a new mountain bike. I got some nice history books and a domestic coupon book for helpful little things around the house. It was an at-home, go-nowhere day, and we were together, which is the most important part and something that has not always been so, as 2019 taking me to Turkey proved, and which the future will make otherwise only too soon. But that day was ours to be together, and there was joy.

25th December 2021.

For the first time in her life, my mum didn't have christmas in her own house, having came up to spend it at ours after a year of negotiating and persuading her. Of course, after she agreed to come I went and got sent away on Op Rescript. Fortunately I did get home for christmas and boxing day. Normally we don't go for the big, traditional christmas dinner, but part of the agreement was that we would have one. Unfortunately this meant I hardly got to see Kristi all day, since she doesn' feel the kitchen is big enough to have someone else in while she is cooking. Inside I quietly seethed that I wasn't getting to spend more of my very limited time off with her. It was however the first holiday season we'd had where we all weren't ill. Since we'd opened all our presents in a quick frenzy before I left (not knowing that I'd be able to get back home), the day itself was something of a anti-climax. I was glad though that I got to be with them, if only for a little while.

25th December 2019.

About midnight Kristi was in severe enough pain that she'd to go to hospital. I phoned a taxi (yes I knew it would be considerably more expensive than normal, but some things are more important than money). It turned out she was having gall baldder problems. She spent the rest of the day loopy on strong painkillers.

25th December 2018.

Ash's first christmas. We went down to my mums house for it since it felt important to me that he had as much of his family around for his first one as possible and with my mum's age and health I was not confident she'd get another chance. Although we all felt fine on the day itself, before and after it we all felt quite ill, which we were fairly convinced was the flu, only the second time I've had it. We enjoyed the day itself though.

25th December 2016.

After a heatwave that went through November and most of December (which had forced us to buy an entirely new wardrobe each, having brought only cold weather clothes on holiday with us), we awoke to discover 18 inches of snow had fallen overnight. I cleared Lori's path and salted it since she was being allowed out of rehab for her christmas dinner. I had been totally surprised (not to mention slightly shocked and to a degree even disgusted) when I saw KFC advertising catering for your christmas dinner and declared that to be the most redneck thing I had ever heard in my entire life and was very glad that it wasn't something Kristi or any of her family did. I don't quite share my mothers view on christmas dinners, but I do have some limits.

I know I shouldn't judge, but sometimes it is hard not to.

25th December 2001.

Home for my first christmas leave. The train had been delayed by 8 hours and I'd spent the whole 14+ hour journey standing on a too-crowded train with no free seats and then had to get a taxi home since by the time the train got into Glasgow everything had shut down. I was just glad to be home. Everyone was asking me about what the still in the news events of September that year would mean for me. The initially expressed optimism (which I hadn't agreed with) that bin Ladin would be dead by christmas clearly wasn't going to happen. I wondered if he shaved his beard off and dyed his hair, if he'd be able to walk unrecognised down the street without being recognised. We'd been told our training was going to be interrupted and we'd be deploying to Iraq to do guard duty and deploy barbed wire, so I was making the best of the available free time I had.

25th December 19--.

I still wasn't sure about how I felt about having sex for the first time the previous week. Sure the BJ had been great, but the rest was something of a disappointment. Perhaps if I had done it with someone I had felt something for, rather than just for the sake of just having it? The decade did not have many years left in it and people started talking about the end of the millennium before the next decade that would bring it had even started. It was still a long way off though and phrases like the millennium bug had not yet entered the common lexicon. I had my usual disagreement with my mum over eating brussel sprouts, a food I find endlessly disgusting. I pointed out all those times she told me that if I ate all my greens I'd grow up tall were a total lie. As a compromise,  I ate one. I tended to cut them in half and then swallow them without chewing to avoid the taste. Despite this, I had on several occasions choked on them. My later comment that I didn't understand why she'd spend all day cooking a huge meal for us, only to spoil it by trying to force us to eat something that only her and Elizabeth liked would mean that at least on the sprout front I'd never have to eat one again. I'd continue to eat the huge meals. My two most hated food stuffs to this day remain brussel sprouts and fish cakes.

25th December 1985.

Our first christmas since my dad had quit his job and my last one before my mum would finally leave him. Things had not been good in the months leading up to this. Our present pile was significantly reduced from previous years, but I still declared it to be the best one ever, even if I did not feel it inside. Dad had moved from merely being a hostile presence in our lives to a deeply malevolent one. Today was a welcome break from finding mum in tears and doing my best as an 11 year old to support her. I remember what my presents from the previous year were, and I remember the ones from the following year, but this particular year I draw an almost complete blank on, other than I finally got a fishing rod. I'd only get to use it once (and I caught a rather large rainbow trout while camped out on the shore of a nearby loch one weekend). My dad used my fishing rod a lot more than I would ever get to (big surprise there).

December 26, 1995 While it snowed I watched La Double Vie Du Veronique, which was almost custom-designed to reach deeply into me, then went to the mall with my friend’s brother, Mark, and at the Nature Company we sword fought with tinkling rain sticks til the manager psychically reminded us with a glare that they were a hundred dollars apiece. I bought Mark’s fourteenth birthday present, and figured he might as well pick it out, but I held it back until the next week. At home I listened to my loquacious mother on the phone and instead of making me happy it left me annoyed. Roger Morgan, my intimidating admirer, called me from Connecticut and maybe it was just the mood I was in but I talked to him a long time, and he got bold and said he wanted to know everything about me, so I said, “Roger, nobody wants to know everything about someone else.” He said, “No, I really do.” Flattering but I passed on the offer. About twenty minutes later Brian called from Florida, so I got rid of Roger Morgan and said to Brian, “You’d better come home soon, I think someone imagines he’s got a snowball’s chance in a microwave as your rival.” Brian didn’t like that very much but what did he expect, leaving me through Christmas and my birthday? But he said he loved me and I said I loved him, so that was all good.

December 27, 2005 As I was driving south to wait for Landon at his house, I was passed by a phalanx of sirens, police cars, ambulances, a fire truck, and after I drove by, I let myself into Landon’s house and turned on the TV only to see a crew covering a live incident a few blocks away, where a man had murdered his entire family. It sickened me, so I turned it off, got in my car and drove back to my own house instead of being there. I don’t think I ever told him I’d been there. I got on email when I was home and Tyler, who was six then, had sent me a picture he drew for me that brightened my spirits. Mon fils qui n’est pas mon fils.

December 28, 1998 On a cloudy afternoon my grandpa and I saw The Thin Red Line, which was artsy and deep, though felt like it ran a long time with multiple false endings. I was down that day because parts of my life I thought would never end were collapsing, but being with my grandpa took my mind off things. Grandpa said I was walking with my hands stuck in my jacket pockets and my eyes downcast, and told me if I had to leave to go back to work on the east coast I should push sadness back and think of the good parts of the experience, whether I wanted to be there or not. He said, “When you’re facing something difficult, look forward instead of back, because sometimes how we react is all the control we have about what life throws at us.”

I mean, yeah, but…. I felt like a riptide was dragging me out to a stormy ocean, and I didn’t want to be swept along. There are times that divide an entire life into before and after, and that week was one. Everything that’s happened since, from the way my life has played out in the 21st century, to whom I married, to the fact I have the children I do, relates back to that week. The calendar may have said it was still the ‘90s, but for me life as I’d lived it in the twentieth century was ending, and 1999 was to be a no man’s land between then and now.

December 29, 1988 This was the first entry I ever wrote in a diary that’s since grown by nearly 8,000 pages:

Thursday December 29, 1988 Went to the mall petted Lab. puppy and held genea pig. Did algebra in workbook. Mom's curling iron might be broken. Saw Wonderworks show Magic Box by CS Lewis. Had to get things out from under my bed. Mom said. Get to sleep in living room tonight with tree lights on.

December 30, 2011 I had a nice talk with Barbara, my dad’s second wife, whom I actually really liked. She was telling me that growing up she’d go some summers to her mom’s cousin’s farm in the Bitterroot Valley of Montana, where they raised Palominos. I asked if Palominos were skittish like thoroughbreds and she said no they were as sweet as kittens. Later a Charlie Brown New Year’s special I’d never seen before was on, and while our baby son slept we were watching that with our three-year-old, but afterwards I turned on a recorded Big Bang Theory just as Sheldon let THE most massive fart, and my daughter suddenly burst out laughing like I had never heard her laugh before, she just rolled. My husband watched her with this disbelieving amused expression and said he very proud of her for comprehending fart humor at such a tender age.

31st December 2017.

I don't recall the details of why this happened, but Kristi challenged me to write the bible of The Hoff.

It started something like this... "Oh yeh in the beginning there was the name, and the name was Michael Knight and where Michael Knight went there was good, for he was a lone crusader against injustice. And he looked on his work and he saw the first series of Knight Rider was good.

And yea there was those who doubted the Hoff when he brought amongst us the Knight Rider. And he did bring unto the unbelievers Bay Watch. And there was much rejoicing for in Bay Watch there was much slow motion and much bounciness.

Woe to ye who worships at the false 80's TV alter for those who held Airwolf, Animan, Street Wolf or Bring 'Em Back Alive were doomed to eternal damnation, for their hearts were empty and held not the Hoff first!"

Following this, she swore an oath never to issue me another challenge.

December 31, 2020 On the last day of the plague year, my family and I went to a mall-sized grocery store, and because I’d picked up a taste for it in Turkey, I got some ayran, salty, drinkable yogurt which Turkic herders and warriors used to almost live on. We stopped by Rapid Fire Pizza and while there saw a winter storm warning on the TV screen, so we headed home under dark clouds and cold dead-calm air, and I made it seem like we were fleeing from an approaching beast in snowstorm form, making Trinnie, my youngest, look behind us and squeal with delight.

I sent out a story I wrote in 1996, and heard a nice reply about it from the once and future published author to whom it was sent. I also sent out emails to people home and abroad wishing them well in 2021, and thanking them for the contributions they’d made to my life in 2020.

The children did not make it to midnight, but I did, keeping an eye on the ticker at the bottom of the screen telling of ice coming to encase us all, and talking to my mom as 2020 the Dismal and Dreadful passed off to be quarantined in the fabled Archipelago of Last Years. (The fate of all years, as revealed in the 1970s metaphysical documentary Rudolph’s Shiny New Year.)

After Mom got off the phone with me to start her morning over there, I ended up talking to my godson’s mother til the wee hours as we traipsed down memory lane through some of our many misadventures, like the time she was pregnant in 2007 and we took a sonogram picture of six unborn kittens, and convinced her husband they were having sextuplets. I’d worried she might’ve been mad with me because I was briefly back to giving her dad s**t, as I’m afraid I do from time to time, just too much baggage there sometimes, but I guess she didn’t know or was used to it because she was her normal chipper Éclair self.

I was awake until almost dawn, and watched the dark sky go phantom gray with morning, thinking good thoughts and having hopes for 2021, which did turn out to be a decent year in the Ellieverse.

January 1, 1997 It wasn’t just hindsight, that day in my diary I actually wrote that I had an apprehensive feeling about the coming year, and I wasn’t wrong, 1997 would go on to be tough.

That morning Joe, Brian and Clare’s father, wouldn’t stop profusely thanking me for apparently saving his life after a bad prescription drug interaction on the thirtieth of December left him unconscious on his floor, where I found him. He said he’d never be out of my debt but I told him all I did was called 911 and followed the dispatcher’s instructions, as anybody would have. (It was annoying to try to dislike someone who was gushing thanks and praise at me.)

I talked Brian into leaving Joe alone for the first time in two days, and going over to hang out that night with my friend Mandy, and driving over I warned him her place often smelled like marijuana and dog poop, and Brian went, “Fitting for those times you want a dual whiff of the dark side.”

Maybe it was all the tension of the past few days but him saying that made me laugh.

What an unpredictable year it would be.

January 2, 2022 Decided to see how long I could go without cussing in 2022, and the answer was one day plus fourteen hours and twenty-five minutes. It rained constantly all morning, like March, and the skies were dense with a heavy silver coloring. When the rain suddenly stopped, we went outside, and since I had a new phone, I let my son repeatedly shoot my old one with a .20 gauge. If there’s an afterlife for cellular technology, it’s going to take a serious miracle to see that thing pieced back together come Judgment Day. Showed off hitting targets with my tennis serves, and wasn’t nearly as good at it as I used to be….hence the sudden end of my “no cussing” experiment. Played a couple duels of Magic the Gathering with my daughter, then got out my Dishonored Tarot cards to show her, inspiring her to remind me that all forms of divination were a mortal sin. I reminded her in return that damnation was a bargain deal, since God can only damn you once, and she high-fived me. I do love passing on useful life hacks to my offspring.

The cards then went on to tell her she would make good grades, not fight with her siblings, do her chores, drive safely when she got a car, be polite to her mother, and avoid boys til at least college.

(It was worth a try.)

January 3, 2005 Still in Ireland as I had been since the month before, I called home and told my friend Mark happy twenty-third birthday, and he razzed me about having been detained overnight by police in Dublin on New Year’s over something stooopid.

It was also my maternal cousin Donna’s nineteenth birthday and she was into body sculpting/bodybuilding, and basically looked like a Bowflex model. At her flat north of the Liffey, she was telling me about this guy we both knew named Orlando, with whom I’d been hanging out over there, and she said, “Be careful of that one, El, he basically used to be a rent boy and still may have some private clients.”

I was like, “Whhhhat?!” This dude did not ding my gaydar at all.

I went to a club with Donna and her muscle-laden boyfriend that night for her birthday and aside from locals the place had Germans, Poles, English, a Nigerian woman, only one American that I knew of, me, but it was like the UN in there. Orlando came in and sat down by me as I was tipsily telling everyone that if I ran a club I’d have lockers for women to put their purses in, and while what Donna had told me about Orlando galloped across my brain, the first thing Orlando said to me was:

“Did you know James Joyce used to fook an aristocratic Englishwoman in a flat just down the lane?”

Uh, no, I hadn’t.

He said, “Yeah, the crazy fooking lady claimed the son she had a year later was ‘spiritually’ Joyce’s child, though biologically her husband’s, and every year on the child’s birthday, James Joyce sent the kid over a present.”

Orlando had a head full of all kinds of weird information, a trait I liked in a person.

3rd January 2006.

Got back today, although I didn't get home until after dark. I had only been away four days, but Bev seemed sullen and resentful. I couldn't tell if this was because I'd been away because I'd only phoned her once during that time or for some other reason (much later I would find out the reason. Her time of the month was late). When I was unpacking she saw that I'd picked up some protection, something she wasn't happy about(?), but I figured we'd been having unprotected sex a lot, and although I hadn't asked her she did not seem to be on the pill. Me getting these would later on (about 6 weeks or so) be the source of an argument. Much to my pleasant surprise, she had actually did some housework while I was away instead of just sitting playing warcraft until she fell asleep at her computer. I had already decided not to give her my new mobile phone number as I wasn't sure how things were going to go and I'd seen how she'd treated her other ex's, just starting fights with them for no other reason than to be the centre of attention. The phone would live at work and I didn't let any of my friends know I had it in case any of them let slip. This would turn out to be a good decision. The kids seemed happy to see me back and told me what they'd bought with the money I'd given them for christmas.

It was becoming increasingly clear that breaking my rule of not getting involved with someone I was trying to help had been a huge mistake. I had started to consider if splitting up with Bev would be the right option, although in that case I'd still have her living with me.

3rd January 1997.

Decided not to go back to the course today and called in sick. It seemed incredibly stupid to go back for one day before the weekend. Eric wasn't happy about me taking the extra day, but he couldn't really do anything. Besides I was on track to be the first student to actually complete the course which would look good on him. Or at least not as bad as having a course running for however many years without anyone completing it was. I had a crate of beer that I steadily worked my way through while Stewart and Elizabeth watched kids shows. Played a bit of Civ 2 and wrote up more stuff for the Werewolf: The Apocalypse game I was running. This seemed like a better use of my time than the alternative.

I wonder if anyone else completed the course after I left?

January 4, 2005 That night in Dublin we went to hear a hot cinnamon-haired fiddler named Naomi Niles play at the Ogre’s Pit, and I had more to drink than my body strictly approved of, since I didn’t drink often. The aforementioned Orlando, who seemed immune to the effects of alcohol and who could knock the stuff back and be pinpoint-sober, said he’d hold my hair for me if I yakked, and I said I wasn’t going to yak, and didn’t, but by night’s end I wasn’t feeling as great as I had at the start. Most people get a 1:1 feel good/feel bad ratio with alcohol, but I have always seemed to tip toward a 1:3 “feel bad” mix when I’ve tippled.

While I was sitting there in the Ogre’s Pit feeling questionable, Orlando said, “Doing this is like magic when you’re feeling wasted.” Then he lifted my shirt up in the back and began to kiss down my spine.

I had two men professing love for me back home and there I was letting a possible Irish whore kiss down my back. My life definitely resided in strange territory.

I also remember Orlando’s weird story for that night---he told me one each time we hung out together---was about his Irish mother moving to Canada as a teenager on her own, to take up living with an old man who agreed to support her there, and how he, Orlando, grew up in maritime Canada til they finally returned to Ireland in his late boyhood. He said after the old man dumped his mother they were so poor they lived in one room and his mother would work on a farm beside migrants laboring during potato harvests. He said, “That was how we lived. That and my mother’s discreet prostitution.”

He’d just told me this sad tale of his origins, but all I could think of was how if my cousin Donna was right about Orlando’s past it meant he’d been a second-generation sex worker.

January 5, 2000 Woke up at my cousin Dana’s house after hardly any sleep to a call from my employers ordering me in for “at least” seven straight on-site days of no outside contact working in a windowless building on a project in Virginia I reallllly did not want to be part of, and I had ninety minutes to get to the flight, which was sixty miles away. Angry and half-asleep I stepped on Dana’s “2000” glasses with the two inside zeros being eyeholes, and Godzilla’d them underfoot, then fled into the icy pre-dawn grayness before she woke up and found out, so I didn’t get to tell anyone there goodbye, even baby Tyler. The news as I drove up was about a big train wreck in Norway that invited speculation that it was caused by a late-occurring Y2K software malfunction. It was also a flight with lots of turbulence, and all the wobbly way I wondered if Y2K had caused the train wreck, might it also affect airplanes? There were times I despised my employers for all they put me through.

January 6, 2009 Got into a yelling match with my literary agent in which I told him, “Rothman, you really are an anal-retentive Jew.” I was able to say this with more or less a clean conscience because he had just referred to himself that way----“I’m an anal-retentive Jew"----so I was just agreeing. We had been fighting because he told me I had to finish a manuscript and I reminded him I had an eight-week-old baby, to which he said, “Then it’s the perfect time to write, since you have nothing else to do with your time off.” Childless fella, obviously. Looking back I should have thanked the sun, moon, and stars I had practically sleepwalked into having an agent, when now I know how hard it can be to get representation at all. I didn’t recognize sheer beginner’s luck when I had it. (Of course considering how things turned out…)

There were as of that morning two weeks left in the Bush Presidency, and as much as I felt he’d betrayed us, I was also dreading the coming Obama administration, which I thought was going to be so disastrous that 2008 had been the first time in my life I did not vote for a Democrat. (Not just at the Presidential level, at any level.) Ultimately though I disagreed with much that Obama did in his eight years in office, he was the best President of the century when it came to his dealings with federal agencies, because unlike Bush, with his stubborn tunnel vision, or Trump, with his incompetent meddling (Trump used to tell people with forty years’ experience in the field, “Listen while I teach you something.”) he was respectfully laisse-faire.

January 7, 2006 I took six-year-old Tyler and his almost four-year-old little brother CD to see PBS’ Dragon Tales done live on stage, downtown. I was still buzzing from the decision I’d made that morning that I was not going to renew the lease on the apartment I’d lived in since coming back from Ireland the year before, and was going to move into the house my grandfather left me, and which was finally mine to occupy after a long court battle. Once that decision was made I knew it was the right one and felt at peace, so I invited my friend Gina, who was back after a year in Merida, Mexico, to dwell in the house with me, which she eventually did through the year til she got engaged and moved on. The boys and I got ice creams coming back, since nothing cries out for ice cream like a cold January night. Driving home I had something cool happen when my headlights reflected off what I assume was low-lying mist of some kind, creating for just a moment a facsimile of a ghost floating above the deserted, dark road, in the instant before I drove straight through it.

9th January 2014.

I was working out of 15 sqn while our own building was being renovated. I received several boxes of paperwork from Afghanistan, which by itself was not unusual. However, when I opened the first box I found a combat smock shoved in on top of all the paperwork. Removing it I discovered it had a flight sergeants rank tab on top. When I opened up the next box, everyone else turned around to stare when I declared "There is a pair of shreddies (underpants) in this one!"

The other boxes contained other items of clothing and I chuckled at the thought of some poor flight sergeant running around naked, trying to find his clothes. I worked out how long it would have taken the paperwork to arrive back in the UK, found out what flight sergeants had been out there around that time and by the end of the day, had worked out who the clothes belonged to. I then sent him a note saying "We have your clothes. If you ever want to see them again then bring a box of non-sequentially numbered doughnuts to the 15 sqn docs office."

I knew the flight sergeant fairly well having done some courses alongside him. He was a really nice guy. It came as a total shock to me a couple of years later when I found out he had very suddenly died from cancer. He'd beaten it previously, but apparently, it had returned much more aggressively. For the life of me, I cannot remember what his name was although I remember what he looked like,

Regardless of that, this still rates in my top three oddest days in work.

January 8, 1995 The ice storm that’d crippled our city for a day was just slush and puddles, so my Aunt Christie came over, upset, and had a depressing talk with my dad about my cousin Allie being in a stupor from abusing drugs again after, well, not quite getting clean, but at least laying off them for a while. Already upset by that news, I would go on to tear-up that night after seeing a story on TV about a Girl Scout leader who succumbed to cancer after trying to finish her year with her troop, and she had all these crafts planned and had collected tennis balls to make fetch toys to donate to an animal shelter. I found it a heartbreaking story. Such a bleak day, that one.

January 9, 1996 In the aftermath of what some said was the deepest one-day snowfall in area history---it was up to my middle thighs---we were off school, and so I spent the night with my friend Gina, and the next day, for probably the last time, we did something we used to do for a goof when we were maybe ten to thirteen, we slid in together under her bed so we were sandwiched between the floor and the box springs in a space that felt very shadowy and private, and we talked furtively about secret things. After that I donned my one-piece snowsuit, though I’d mostly outgrown it, and stayed outside for the afternoon. It wasn’t all that cold and the snow was perfect for sledding, sending us downhill at I bet thirty miles an hour. Someone even made a bonfire that melted a huge pond in the drifts. Just as it was probably the last time I slid under Gina’s bed with her, I think that was the last time I “played in the snow” in quite the same way I always had all my life. Something happens at some point and going out in the cold like that that loses a good deal of its appeal, but that day it was still as fun as it ever was, and when I finally came in red-faced and half-frozen, Gina and I curled up on the sofa with her little brother and watched what Gina thought was a hellishly disturbing move called Heavenly Creatures, by a director I’d never heard of til then, Peter Jackson. It was the sort of day I don’t think I would ever have again, like a final visit with my fading childhood, and I wouldn’t mind going back to that day, if such things were possible.

My history? I can't even remember what I did on what day last week!

I'm in the same boat, bud. Usually I have little idea what season major events in my life occurred, much less what day.

9th January 2020.

I managed to get a copy of a book I'd been after since I was 14. It is called 'The Lost & The Damned', the companion book to 'Slaves To Darkness'. Copies of it have been available online, but for sums I wasn't willing to pay. They have a pride of place on my shelf.

9th January 2010.

I was preparing to leave to travel down to Halton on a promotion course. As much as I wanted this first promotion, the courses for it I felt less enthusiastic about. It would be an enjoyable course, although I came close to punching out one of my fellow students. He'd failed this course a couple of times already, and on the last day of it, he walked up to me and told me that I didn't deserve to pass it. No idea why, I'd sailed through the course with good marks and been positive about it throughout so I put it down to jealousy. Really the only thing that you could fail the course for was having a bad attitude.

To be honest if it wasn't for referencing my diary I wouldn't be able to pull this off so precisely.

HA! Got one! On Friday the 13th..no...ah fvck.  :bluesad:
I had one-but it was on Nov.13 in 1992. I suppose that won't work.

(https://i.imgur.com/47WmJ97.gif) (https://lunapic.com)

January 10, 1994 I was absent from school, an uncommon event for me, since I had a bad flu that felt like my stomach was contracting as I laid in bed and pulled my knees to my chest because it hurt so much. As I did I thought about pain and why if there’s a benevolent God pain existed at all. It was a hard, fast flu and I felt better by evening and even did the homework Gina brought me, which included reading parts of The Diary of Anne Frank, or as some heavy metal-loving boy in my class insisted on calling it, Anne Frank: Diary of A Madman. I didn’t get the Ozzy reference then but still thought it was funny. The same boy got griped at by the teacher for saying, “I think Anne Frank’s book is so boring I wish the Nazis had found her sooner.” Last I heard he was working in Manila and married to a gorgeous local. Crap and cream rise, I’ll tell you….

January 11, 2005 Still spending my leave among family in Ireland, I drove out into the Burrens with Orlando, with whom I was still hanging out. The Burrens is a spooky, beautiful, vast and bleak area in the west of Ireland, largely deserted since the famine, though once heavily populated and dotted with the foundations of many abandoned cottages. It really is a spectacularly striking landscape noted throughout the centuries as a site of unexplained disappearances, which continue to this day. Long steeped in supernatural lore, ghost stories, myths and legends, even my mom’s brother, my Uncle Pat, by no means a teller of frivolous tales, cautioned me against going out there alone. When I was little he used to leave me enchanted by telling me how odd things had often happened to him out there among those unearthly-looking hills, saying he once saw ball lightning skipping along a ridge.

Stories claim the Burrens lies at a doorway between our world and Tir na nOg, the realm of the fairy-folk who used to live openly in Eire before the coming of the Celts, and whether it does or not, one thing I can attest to is that when you are out there on those stony hills, often you will feel…something. It’s hard to explain what I mean by that, but the odds are good you’d feel it too, particularly at night. It can ring inside you like the sense of excitement that comes with taking a dare, and it’s also like you “hear” something, but not with your ears.

It’s a mysterious place, let me just sum it up that way.

So anyway, I was walking there on that none-too-warm day with Orlando, who had an old soul, and he got to talking about how some people were more elemental than others, and he said I was made of air, earth and fire, no water in me, which sounded funny but I got what he meant. He claimed it was good to be a mixture of multiple elements because if someone was just made of one then like as not the person became too extreme. Someone who was all earth became brittle like shale. Fire consumed itself til every bit of fuel was gone, then it went to bitter ashes. Air would just drift, and water flowed in tears and broken-heartedness. He said the key was all about balance.
 
That kind of talk made perfect sense out where it was windy and the air smelled like the ocean and tasted slightly salty, like it never did where I lived far inland in America. There is no place else on earth exactly like the bleak, haunted stretch of seacoast that is the Burrens, where I'd had all morning and into that afternoon to wander among memory-ghosts and feel them tugging at me.

January 12, 2016 My father’s stepson reached out to me for help, desperate and doomed, facing expulsion from the university he’d dreamed of attending since elementary school. The situation was that some girl, recognizing him as a serious brianiac, got him good and smitten and persuaded him to do her schoolwork, then when he found out she was not only less than in love with him but was boasting of the ease with which she’d tricked him into the arrangement, what did the bruised-souled young fellow do? Why send everyone he could think of the “special pictures” she’d texted him….and did so on university computers. Well, I couldn’t save him, after pulling that stunt practically on the eve of #metoo he never had a chance, but the school was persuaded to take a little mercy on the broken-hearted fool even as it showed him the door, and in the end he didn’t get arrested and was able to step into a remarkably good job without finishing his degree, but it was an example of what often results when a male thinks with the smaller of his two heads.

January 13, 1998, Because such things were still possible back in less guarded days, I went unannounced to my former high school for a visit half a year after graduation, and talk about a head trip, I was already totally a foreigner there. Weird vibes, weird reactions, even from the librarian, Mrs. Hazel, who’d always been so pleasant with me, and from the juniors I’d known (by then seniors); it was like they were seeing a ghost. Jeff, my academic advisor who, despite working for administration, had been a double agent and did many nice things for me in my time at the school, all but gasped when he saw me. Yes, Jeff, my charming semi-closeted homosexual scholastic mentor, who worked for an Archdiocese that pretended not to know about his orientation, was polite but “busy” and the feeling I got from him and everyone else was: “….YoU dO nOt BeLoNg HeRe aMoNg uS aNyMoRe….” So I left, I’ve never been back, and I’ve also never sent their money-grubbing alumni association a godforsaken penny.

January 14, 2008 Because we were overseas for several weeks at least in part so my future husband could acquire items for the houses he restored, we ditched sightseeing in London for the day and went to a warehouse off Hackney Road, where we saw overpriced things that turned Landon’s head, like a Georgian marble vanity, but in the end he had to say he couldn’t make profits off them, the rule was don’t install in a house anything you couldn’t triple in price, and their offerings were just too high end.

The man and his wife who owned the unit were not gracious at all from that point on and griped about having to come out and open up. (This place was divided among vendors’ spaces and unknown to us this had been a day when it was not otherwise open for business.)

Landon at first tried to be obsequious, the way Americans are, sometimes to our detriment, and the couple stayed blunt, the way English are, sometimes to their credit, and I later found out Landon was thinking maybe we should offer to take them for a drink as thanks for coming out, which I would not have wanted to do since they were uncool to us and I had a feeling they would have let their stuff dry-rot before lowering it by a pound, so in the end he thanked them one more time and we walked away to them still huffing indignantly about how rude we were.

Ate that night at a café (pronounced “kaff”) off Wapping Gardens’ main drag, Midsomer Murders playing on the tele in this homey, calming little place run by a red-haired woman and her apparently Middle Eastern husband, both exceedingly cordial, and in general we met locals who unlike the vendors that afternoon were funny, kind people, and we had the best evening there of our trip to that point.

We got out so late we had to wait an extra hour on our ride, since we didn’t lease a car in London, and around 11:00 the city changed masks and got slightly spooky, the people out on the roads then were the sort you might expect to meet in urban places anywhere, several asking us for money, others striding along in threes and fours being loud, glaring over toward us, and I didn’t have any weapon on me, so I was glad when the ride finally came, the driver a rather solemn fellow who barely spoke English but who could tell us he’d been born in Iran.

We were both tired and knew we had to rise early to get down to Kent for more business appointments the next day, when we’d tackle the always-interesting challenge of driving on the left side of the road.

January 15, 2017 Having gone to bed at only around one-fifteen, I would have happily slept on, but my daughter Daisy woke me up before dawn and we went to the six o’ clock mass, where my godson (whose name I can barely say) was an altar attendant. He did well and we were all proud of him wearing a white robe and looking like a little ghost in the pre-sunrise darkness of the parish church. Afterward his grandpa took us all to breakfast at a place called First Watch, where he showed us a bunch of old foreign money he’d picked up in his travels, and while it was spread out on the table the server came by and said the currency reminded her of paper food stamps from her childhood. I looked up paper food stamps and she was right, back in the day they looked similar. Joe left the server a twenty-buck tip, the best she could likely hope for working there, yet I thought how the amount was not going to change her life and that, sadly, serving probably just kept most people who did it poor. As we were leaving talk shifted to whether the Patriots would be going to the Super Bowl again, a record if they did, and I said the best Super Bowl Sunday of my life was in 2011, because when Daisy was two it began our tradition of watching the Puppy Bowl together, and everyone agreed the Puppy Bowl was indeed the better deal.

16th Jan 2018.

I bought a book for Ash that I had loved from my childhood (even though he wasn't yet born). It isn't the oldest book I can remember reading (that goes to a book called What Daddies Do), but I do feel some degree of nostalgia towards it regardless. I've only read the story to him once (Ash has an awful lot of books to go through, and right now he is only interested in ones with trains in them).

16th Jan 2007.

I called my boss at home at 03:15 in the morning and told him that I was unable to get into work as their was a Polar Bear sitting on top of my car. He somewhat sleepily mumbled a reply about he'd see me the next day. A minute later I got a call back saying "Hey wait a sec, you don't have a car!"

January 16, 1989 When Mom drove me into school, 97X, the alternative FM station she liked to listen to (the same one playing in Tom Cruise’s car in Rainman) put on Lovecats by The Cure, a song I liked in an early manifestation of my eventual year-long mid-adolescent love affair with the group’s music. At school some boy named Greg Stoeffer threw up in gym after he got hit HARD in the stomach with a dodgeball. The janitor came and mopped his hurl away but it stank up the whole gym so much we had to quit playing, which suited me since I’d gotten smacked in the face by the ball when it ricocheted off the bleachers and caught me a good one. I was going to keep playing but I admit it hurt. I was cool with most sports and in general liked gym enough to minor in it in college, but after that incident dodgeball always left me leery.

January 17, 1991 Ground operations in the Persian Gulf War began, dubbed Operation Desert Storm, which sounded strange since for months I’d heard it called Operation Desert Shield. (Or as boys at my school insisted on naming it, Operation Panty Shield.) A girl in one of my classes, Shelly, said Nostradamus predicted this conflict would lead to the end of the world: that was the zeitgeist of things at the war’s start, paranoia and rumor. I also heard back that day from a recruiter at a tennis academy, who used to work for Nick Bollettieri, and she offered me admission to the program for which she repped, saying my try-out in front of three teachers had been good enough to get in. “You’re talented but you’re rough, and we can mold you.” After talking to my parents I declined, though, and have never regretted not taking her up on the opportunity, but I remember she was snooty about my refusal and said, “Then you’re never going to go anywhere in tennis.” Funny enough I beat one of her program’s students in straight sets in the quarterfinals of a junior tournament a couple years later, and that same recruiter sat in the stands and expressionlessly watched me do it. It felt good.

My older brother was there for Desert Storm, as was one of my friend's (Dave) brothers. Dave's brother was unfortunately killed when an A-10 shot up his vehicle, mistaking it for an Iraqi vehicle.

18th Jan 2022.

After a few weeks in Fort William, which is a nice place, but very, very wet I was back in Inverness and the hated Mercure hotel. This time my hotel room overlooked the river Ness though. It was also much quieter than my previous room on the other side of the hotel.
(https://i.imgur.com/xhZ8ygH.jpg?1)

18th Jan 2021.

We had a long walk through the town, enjoying the peace and quiet that the pandemic had imposed on the country. Ash got to play in pretty much every park in the village, especially the one at Station Park.

18th Jan 2013.

Finally got around to seeing the new Dredd movie. It was sold out in most of the shops. I enjoyed it and thought it was much better than the Stallone effort. Sadly it would not get a sequel having the misfortune to come out just after The Raid. Talk of a TV series based on the film went on for a few years afterwards, but has so far came to nought. :(

January 18, 1999 First a long overnight flight, then a 250-mile pre-dawn ride with Jackie, my roommate, who was worried she was too sleepy to drive and so kept the window down the whole distance up I-95, blaring jarring music in the cold air, and I was finally back in college after being away for a long time. It felt like much had changed since I left, yet everything in my bedroom was also just where I left it, as if it’d only been hours and not several months. When we got back an electrical storm hit, and the news said it was only the tenth time a January thunderstorm had been recorded the state since 1820. Since I’d already missed part of the semester, I had to walk straight into class within hours on no sleep, and the egotistical professor had a chip on his shoulder about me “skipping” the beginning two weeks of his course, even though I had the dean’s permission to enter late, and I made up all the work. No matter what I did all term he only gave me a B, the sole B I ever got in biology in college, and I think it was from spite. I remember the first night back I went tiredly to bed, knowing I had a check-in in Boston before the week was out, another long trip down and back, and was struck by the oddity of the life I lived, going from this detail-oriented, high-pressure short-term assignment I’d worked in late 1998 in the United Kingdom---“remember, you’re a predator”---to going home to Ohio filled with relief, only to get dumped there by someone I still absolutely loved, to landing back in school again where some pouting professor could get away with treating me like he had a right to hammer on me at his discretion to soothe his own hubris. I was essentially being spun around from an adult life full of responsibilities, to a kid’s life under a teacher’s thumb, just like that. My existence has rarely been normal.

January 19, 1996 I was a good kid who’d become disillusioned with high school. I still kept up a respectable GPA and would eventually graduate in the upper five-percent of my class----too low according to the program heads---but the day before, Thursday the 18th, I’d skipped going to my least favorite course and had gone down to talk to Jeff, my advisor in the gifted program, which was my school’s claim to fame the way championship football teams were elsewhere, and told him I was 50-50 on walking out of school altogether, which definitely got his attention. His eyes got big and he told me to relax a minute, then he went and got us soft drinks and told me to just keep “playing the game” and get through. I asked him why I should do that, and he stumbled at that question like it was self-obvious, but the truth was I don’t think he’d ever had to answer it since it was assumed everyone in the program had their hearts set on getting into the best universities and excelling there: a goal toward which I was increasingly apathetic.

I liked Jeff but I knew the truth was his job was to keep those of us in the program well-groomed and on-track like we were prized horses. (Or cattle. Or sheep.) He’d asked me to write down what I hated about the school, and I said there was no point to it. Then he asked why after so many years was I feeling this way now so strongly, and I said I guess I’d had enough of the bulls**t.
 
The word hung in the air, I don’t think I entirely meant to say it, but I realized I was going to get away with using it in a school that had zero tolerance for cussing and so much else, and that made me wonder (to my eventual detriment) how far I could push things.

That morning, Friday the 19th, when I came in after all that going on the day before, Jeff called me back to his office and seemed concerned but I didn’t know whether it was genuinely for me or because one of the school’s standouts bailing in the middle of junior year would’ve been bad for its reputation and Jeff’s job. I believe it was both, because we’d known each other for several years at that point and he honestly did care about me, I think.
 
In any case I said no, I didn’t want to talk about the day before, thank you, and yes, I was going to class, so rejoice, Jeff, rejoice. (I talked to the poor man terribly sometimes and he never ratted me out for it.)

I went upstairs to class and ironically this senior boy in a special academic program with me had just gotten his letter of acceptance from Brown, which around there was like what winning a state athletic championship would be for most schools, the Ivy League was a huge deal, the only thing that mattered, really. So we all told that boy congratulations and the principal came in and some Archdiocesan reps showed up to take his picture, which all fed into me thinking the school and especially the gifted program were warped, and once again I wanted to walk away, drive away, leave, never come back to that twisted pressure-cooker that had all-but abused me for years.
 
I made it to the end of the day and drove over to Brian’s house and grabbed him like I was a beast with a thousand arms and I had all this angry energy that came out in a way I am surprised didn’t leave one of us injured but which did make me feel better.

I took a shower there afterward and did something you’re never supposed to do and put my hair into a tail while wet, so it was ridiculous looking the rest of the day. But anyway, after all that I told Brian about my complete burnout with school and not wanting to finish my year there, and he said, “Stick it out, it’s not much longer and next year you’ll be done and you won’t have to spend the rest of your life listening to people saying you quit because you couldn’t take it.”

Couldn’t take it. Right.

He’d gone to a Jesuit academy that had a reputation for being almost like a military school in its rigorous discipline, that’s how I met him when he was a senior and I was a seventh grader already in love with him, and he’d excelled there, so I knew he was telling me this from a place of some degree of understanding, and yes, quitting school would not have made sense.

But my God I hated every minute I had left, and stopped trying to hide it from anyone.

January 20, 1996 The day that marked exactly one year til the end of President Clinton’s first term in office, and one-hundred years since George Burns was born, was also the afternoon we celebrated my Aunt Christie’s forty-sixth birthday a few days late. My boyfriend, who had bonded so well with her that she would actually be more in touch him at the time of his death than I got to be, came with me when a lot of the family met at my grandpa’s house for the event, and in a true miracle my aunt’s selfish son, Adam, showed up with a present for her, shocking me that he even remembered. Adam spent much of the evening glaring at my boyfriend and being his normal s**tty cokehead self, and he told me I had no business bringing someone who wasn’t family, and I said his mom had issued the invitation, which to my amusement made Adam even madder, since while he neglected his mom, he couldn’t stand the idea of her being close with some other male of about his age. While all this was happening the worst flooding in seventeen years had closed low-lying streets, and we had to take “the high road” back. In a year there’d be even worse flooding, the highest river level since 1937, the third highest flood in area history, but not knowing that was coming, we were amazed at how easily the sprawling, earth-colored rivers dispelled any illusions of human control, their rushing roar audible a mile away.

January 21, 2008 Landon and I were still on our trip, we’d left the UK and entered France, and that day we toured Utah Beach, which interested me but barely moved his needle at all. The guide we’d hired showed us Brecourt Manor from a distance, then some other Band of Brothers sites, including where the infamous German 88’s had been located. One of the more interesting unplanned stops was when we pulled over to see a ruined German fortification that was simply sitting there, unmarked and unadorned, with steel rods sticking dangerously above pitted concrete walls, all slightly submerged in the swallowing earth, with weeds taking root in the cracked concrete itself.  There were also bombardment craters to be seen here and there, never filled in, either because of their meaning or simply because of carelessness, I don’t know which, and walls to houses throughout the Channel-side towns of Normandy were punctuated by bullet markings; I ran my fingers across them and thought about the life or death struggle that had occurred there. We’d missed the edge of a terrible storm that had wrought destruction farther east in Poland and it was all over the news. Back home such a storm would have earned brief mention, sure, but I don’t think Europe was used to devastating weather like we were, and it got coverage usually reserved for something like terrorism.

January 22, 2008 We heard that Heath Ledger died; a shock since he was young and on top of the world. It was another long day spent visiting military sites, and Landon was more than overloaded on them but was being cool about it, though he kept telling me I was the only girl he knew who was interested in such things.

On that day we went south and the tour guide who took us along the Somme battlefields was curt and venal and didn’t seem to like Americans. We saw the massive mine crater at Lochnagar, saw where the German and British front lines were, saw No Man’s Land, found heaps of plowed up combat-junk, and visited the war cemeteries, terrible solemn places, and if you knew what went on amid that same now-tranquil ground in the summer of 1916, there was probably nothing that could’ve prepared you for the overload that arose with thinking of the literally tens of thousands of men who perished in the flat, quiet fields we could safely walk across in our time.

I took some bullet casings, British ones, that were lying on the surface, and a part of some rusty barbed wire, but it also almost felt like a violation to do that, even if there was no restriction against it. (There were even gumball machines that rolled out samples of ninety-year-old shrapnel for a Euro.)

The landlady of the place where we stayed that night was elderly and had lived all her life near the battlefields, and had a grandfather who had fought in the trenches til recurring fevers got him discharged from the French army in 1915. She had incredible stories passed down to her, like her account of the British soldiers who stayed nearby, friendly fellows who were customers at her grandparents’ laundry, and who came and told her grandparents they’d see them soon, then went off in late June 1916 and literally to a man died that summer.

She said when the war ended the multitudes of rats that had lived in the trenches migrated into town and were everywhere for the next year, crawling across people in their beds and eating anything they could get hold of, even crawling up people’s legs at dinner tables trying to get to the food, starving in the absence of corpses in No Man’s Land. She said for decades 1919 was remembered as l'annee des gros chats: the year of fat cats.

She also said there was a German plane that was shot down and fell onto the town, and the German pilot who was dead at the controls had his face caved in by the crash, and his hands were so still tightly gripping the throttle it was hard to pry them off. She had many stories told to her growing up nearby, and it wasn’t like getting these accounts from a history book, it all took place right there, amid people she personally knew, in her own neighborhood just west of the trenches.

That is a fascinating memory!  I really envy you that experience.

22nd January 2019.

Ash got his first tooth.

Thanks, indy, but when it comes to going interesting places and finding cool things, you set the standard.  :thumbup:

January 23, 2017 My college roommate, Jackie, who had been married and divorced once, engaged three times, and never had a biological child, was in the process of adopting a little girl named Sophia, who, as a picture showed me but Jackie never mentioned, was bi-racial, and very cute.  Sophia had gotten to come stay with her for a week for the first time, a sort of trial, I think, and I was happy for them both. But in grim news Jackie told me our friend from back in the day, Amy, who had been diagnosed with breast cancer months before, had been moved to a hospice, where as it turned out, she would within days enter a coma and die. Life’s like that, beginnings and endings, often hand in hand.

23rd January 2016.

I was lying awake in bed, in the early hours of the morning when Kristi suddenly out of nowhere asked me to dance a jig. Being an obliging sort I got out of bed and started dancing and humming a merry tune. Evidently, Kristi had only been semi-awake and my speaking to her woke her up fully. She asked me what the hell I was doing.

Women huh? Just can't get them to be happy.

January 24, 2004 Came back from working out of town, and the city was in a frantic whirl over a major winter storm coming in mere hours with all the wild energy of a colt let loose in its first meadow. Ice and eight inches of snow were forecast, then more ice on top, a perfect recipe for shutting things down, so per tradition I went to the store to grab snowed-in goodies, then drove to Landon’s house to wait it out with him. Ultimately the storm did roll over us every bit as powerfully as they predicted if not moreso, and we didn’t go anywhere except to walk out onto the Purple People Bridge that spanned the river, and listen to the snow sizzle as it fell into the water---the world was that shut down and quiet---and as night descended we watched the lights on tall buildings in the city blur to Impressionistic smears in the swirling whiteout that made us feel encased inside an overarching snow globe.

January 25, 2020 I was home after unexpectedly being away for two months working, mostly in Turkey, and my family had a makeup Christmas and birthday for me. There is no feeling like coming back after being away, especially if you were worried you might never see your loved ones again. It was a special day, and the best Christmas of my entire life, makeup or not.

January 26, 1996 A week after my 11th grade complaint-fest with my advisor, Jeff, I had another particularly rough day at school, the only school I ever heard of where the better you did, the harder they made it on you. The mood induced by this may have factored into the course of things that evening, when my fella and I went to hear music up by the university, where the garage bands all seemed to think they could best demonstrate their talents by shattering the ear drums of audience members with their loudness.

Brian had two beers in as many hours, and I didn’t have any at all, technically being four years away from legal drinking age, so neither of us was drunk, but on the sidewalk this beat cop called us over and asked us questions and shone a flashlight in our faces and I thought he was going to make us walk straight lines, but after a little more pointless harassment, he let us proceed. Walking off though I said loudly enough for him to hear, “What a dickhead.” Brian cringed but I got away with it, though cops up by the university were notorious bullies.

I think an integral part of being a teenager is sometimes you give people you care about a tough time for no reason, because after the cop encounter I made a big show of wanting to drive us back, knowing Brian didn’t like anyone else driving his car, so I grabbed his keys and slid behind the wheel and stayed there, teasing him at first, then as sometimes happens, it got more serious and I grew determined I would for once drive his precious car, and when he finally said I was on a “Girl Power Power Trip,” I was tempted to not ride with him at all, my mood going from happy to total jerk in the course of about two minutes, though I finally did climb over to the passenger seat and give up.
 
Halfway back I told him I was sorry, and he said not to worry about it, it was funny, and of course him thinking I had been “funny” made me mad all over again, though thankfully I had enough sense to keep that to myself.

Navigating the mercurial moods of a teenage girl is never a pastime for wimps.

January 27, 2012 I went out to see The Grey with Sharon, a girl I used to tutor, who went on to become my friend. I was six months pregnant with my youngest and I think that played a role in the movie making me so motion sick I had to get up and walk outside in the cold air. Sharon came with me and I said I was sorry for causing her to miss the film, but she said it was all right. We walked down to a Target nearby and she asked what I thought about Joe Biden’s latest gaff, him imitating the accent of an Indian call center worker, and I said Biden was an ass but I actually didn’t see why it was so bad, and said it’d blow over. (Remember the incident? Me either.) At home my college friend Amy (she who would later die of breast cancer, yes) had emailed me swearing she would come down and shave my head if I did not watch her college’s hockey team play a nationally-televised game the next night. I never cared one way or the other for the sport, but fearing the loss of my ever-problematical hair, I promised her I would.

January 28, 2012 I went to a commitment ceremony for two women, one of whom was Edie’s first cousin, and who, despite being an atheist, wanted the tone of the event to be as Jewish as her partner would agree to. I had a chance there to talk to Dan, the erudite religious scholar I always enjoyed conversing with, and met a man from Cos Cob, Connecticut, a place I hadn’t been completely sure actually existed, like Intercourse, Pennsylvania. He said Cod Cob was once such a WASP enclave there were clauses in home-buying contracts stipulating no sales to Jews, making me wonder what the WASPs were afraid of, that the Tribe would come to town and monopolize the field of accounting? I made it back in time to see most of Amy’s hockey game, so I spared myself the retributive baldness she had threatened the night before, and emailed her a thank you for reminding me it was on. Friendships are built on good diplomacy, after all, and no one should ever accidentally annoy someone else, or cut off her hair.

January 29, 2019 A sub-zero polar vortex was hammering our area, and working downtown at the library for the blind, Tyler had to walk blocks each day through the canyon-like streets, where howling gusts knifed between tall buildings. If you’ve never experienced it, trust me, there are few more bone-numbing experiences than windy winters in a city. Knowing he was enduring this, some pervy rich old creep who had the hots for him offered to take Tyler on a trip to Miami, but I’m glad to say he told him no thanks. Sometimes I think cute gay men endure more open sexual harassment than even attractive women, but nobody much comes to their defense.

January 30, 2019 I learned that author Amy Krouse Rosenthal had died at age fifty-one. Her Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life influenced my own writing, and I was sad to hear she was gone, bright spirit that she was. (She put her phone number in her books, and if you texted her “hi” she’d text you “hi!” right back. Her motto in life was “ATM” which stood for “Always Trust Magic.”) I did smile, however, to read that before she died Amy, in truest Amy fashion, put a profile for her husband on her blog, inviting women to consider dating him when she was gone, because he was a great guy. Her passing made me remember David Bowie’s explanation for why so many wonderful people are taken before their time: “Isn’t it always the most beautiful flowers that get plucked first?” Later that night I got up out of bed to send my friend Tara money to bail her husband Rob out of jail, after he punched a guy who’d driven a snowplow into their car. There’s rarely been a dull moment knowing Rob and Tara, or an inexpensive one. (I figure I really must owe them past-life karma or something.) If Rob and Tara have a motto it’s probably “AAE”: Always Ask Evelyn.

January 31, 1991 I took a card to my neighbor, Mrs. Glenn, just out of the hospital after some vein-related procedures on her legs, all related to obesity and her “sugar” as she called it. She was resting in a special chair that elevated her feet, and she had bandages on her calves, and her arm was bruised, all of which made a deep impression on me, but she seemed in good spirits and said she didn’t hurt any and thanked me for coming over. I went home and asked my father what if Mrs. Glenn ended up in a wheelchair, or lost her legs? He said, “I suppose with her conditions those things are possibilities.”  It was so awful to think of that I wanted to go hide my head under a pillow or take off running like a horse does when it breaks its leg. And I wanted to know why there was suffering in the world. Instead I spent the rest of the day lost in morbid meditations on how much horror there was in human life. That’s something I still frequently think about, and it still makes no sense to me.

Martin Luther once asked the Catholic Church a good question, demanding to know why if the Church had the power to grant indulgences and get people into Heaven, it didn’t charitably distribute these for free, instead of selling them. Likewise I couldn’t help but wonder, young as I was, why if God had the power to create a post-death paradise, wherein everyone was happy and no one was ever in pain, God didn’t grant this for everyone in the Earthly here and now. When I asked a priest that, he said, “Faith isn’t founded on understanding.” I don’t know what else he could have said, but the answer didn’t eliminate a question that still lives in me.

31st Jan 2020.

We picked up tickets to go see Tragedy in Glasgow. As usual we spent the day drinking in Glasgow with friends and going round the rock clubs, then had a great night.
The next week lockdown would hit and it would be a while before I'd get to see any more bands live, but it was not a bad one.

31st Jan 2017.

This was my first conversation of the day.

Sleepy conversation this morning as I went back in the bed room and saw Kristi's eyes were open...
"Morning sweetheart."
"Its all wet here."
"What!?!"
"Its raining, and everything has gotten all wet."
"Honey, it is not raining. Everything is fine, go back to sleep."
"Its raining. You should sing in the rain."
*sigh* "I'm singing in the rain, just singing in the rain..."

February 1, 1992 I considered myself to be in good shape but when I encountered someone in absolute top peak condition, it showed me what the difference was. At age thirteen I played a tennis match against a twenty-two-year-old who was in such good shape from being a runner that if she’d put more time into tennis alone she’d have been awesome, but she didn’t concentrate on just tennis, she coached soccer for Urban Appalachian girls, and ran track for her college, spreading her athleticism into many pursuits. I won 6-4, 4-6, 6-4, but I think I was playing harder to beat her than she was to beat me, since she was one of those annoyingly courteous players who never disputed a line call and who seemed really happy for your victory when she shook your hand after the match. “Nice! Going!!” I left the court hoping I’d get to play her again sometime, even if I lost, because in a particularly hard match you have to use everything inside you, and she brought out my tip-top game in ways I don’t think anyone to that point had. Alas, I never saw her again.

February 2, 2018 I was up late sitting by the living room fireplace with Tyler, who was living with us then, listening to him tell me the last bastion of closeted homosexual men he encountered were those active in churches, where they wanted to be and felt church was an important part of their lives, but wouldn’t have been able to have been involved there if their sexual orientations were known. He said he felt sorry for most of them, even some of the true hypocrites among them, because they were forced to choose between living a lie, or being open about their sexuality and thereby giving up other parts of their lives. He was involved for a while with a man a few years older than him who worked as a “youth life coach” at a large Methodist church, and this man would tell Tyler how painful it was to always be afraid of being outed, and yet to want to keep doing his work within the congregation. What finally made Tyler stop having anything to do with him was when he found out the man also had a fiancée in the church, and she knew nothing about her intended’s attraction to men. Tyler said he drew the line at helping deceive and potentially hurt someone else, which made me proud of him at a time he was giving me a lot to worry about.

The only thing I can say about what I did on ANY date is I was born on Aug. 20th, 1962.
Christ, I can't even figure out what date it is, now that I'm retired!  :buggedout:

February 3, 1994 The evening before, my dad had gone to Rupp Arena with my cousins’ father, my Uncle Lark, to see my dad’s favorite college basketball team, Kentucky, play Uncle Lark’s alma mater, Alabama, and they had a certain bet riding on the game. Well, Kentucky, which came in with a thirty-two game home winning streak, beat Alabama, which entered Rupp Arena having won its last five games, so the next night Uncle Lark came over to our house and shined my dad’s shoes. It was hilarious how he did it, down on one knee, and he spat on them and buffed them and just went the whole nine yards. He explained that an Alabama man who wouldn’t pay off on a lost wager was not an Alabama man with pride. (And like my mom, Uncle Lark could totally change accents on a dime, leaving you wondering which was real, the mild drawl or….you know, “regular” talk.)  For some reason I never grasped and still don’t, Uncle Lark called me “Ellie Two-Shoes” and I really should ask him why sometime. After he left I watched The Simpsons, and on the phone told some boy from my school I’d go see Ace Ventura with him, but didn’t particularly want to, to be honest. It’s said boys are only after one thing, but even more they want to convince their friends they’ve gotten the thing, so I knew you had to watch out for that.

February 4, 2019 Though I’d have done it for nothing, I got paid two-hundred dollars by my godson’s grandfather to sit in at a meeting with Taiwanese business people. I didn’t have to do or say anything, it was just that the Taiwanese apparently had a custom that each side had to have the same number of people present, and if one side had a female, the other should too. Not to match them person for person was seen as bad manners, so I filled in, and he insisted on paying me for it.

Afterward I went to a tea room with my godson’s grandfather---who was also my one-time fiancé’s father, my close friend’s father, my companion in grief, and the other half of one of the more complicated long-term interactions of my life---and rehashed the apparently successful meeting, him telling me what exactly had just happened, because I hadn’t followed all of it. He also told me some of his corporate war stories from the ‘80s when he was spending hundreds a week on cocaine for himself and to share with others, and said, “When I began working I was always the youngest guy in the room, presented as a sort of a wunderkind, now I’m back in this when I didn’t plan to be, and somehow I’m the elder statesman, paid for my connections and knowledge.”

It was a fine afternoon until my daughter called me in tears telling me our dog, Chocolate, had ripped apart a little cat we’d adopted. That dropped my internal mood considerably, and we ended up having a funeral for the cat that evening to further darken what had begun as such a nice day.

Changed gears there, didn’t I?

February 5, 2005 Went with Landon to the century-plus-old Mardi Gras in my birthplace, Covington, Kentucky, which like New Orleans is a Catholic river city with many blocks of 19th century houses, some with wrought-iron balconies resting above quaint public gardens, crisscrossed with cobblestone streets, a town with history and a town with ghosts. (Look up the Gray Lady of Carneal House sometime.) Unlike New Orleans, though, Covington’s Mardi Gras has always been held on the last Saturday before Lent rather than on Fat Tuesday itself, and while New Orleans’ event draws about a million revelers, Covington’s was more like 10,000.

I’d gone to Mardi Gras in New Orleans in 1998, had a miserable time, and truthfully enjoyed Covington’s much more, since not only did we all have to sleep on top of a car in New Orleans, but I came home with a tiny bruise under my eye after a Caribbean drag queen spinning heavy ceramic beads through the air like a propeller caught me solidly in the face, and didn’t say sorry or anything.
We stayed out walking around Covington’s Main Strasse riverfront district long past when the parades were gone along with the bulk of the crowds, roaming the echoing cobblestones amid sights of flashed breasts, tossed plastic beads, and staggering drunks, til the police pulled up at a snail’s pace in a paddy wagon, clearing us out around two in the morning, so we ambled back to Landon’s house one city to the east, crossing a bridge over a north-flowing river.

We’d both stayed completely sober the entire five hours we milled through the boisterous event, which I was later told was a crime against the hallowed spirit of Mardi Gras, for which we were deeply ashamed of ourselves.

February 6, 1996 School administration was pushing back at the renaissance of my “less than positive attitude” toward the place I’d also evinced the year before, in tenth grade. As a result, I, who was featured as one of the outstanding students in their recruitment pamphlets, lost the pass that’d let me spend lunchtime in the library or in my car, and even though I refused to eat there, I was having to sit in the cafeteria with the rest of the student body as some sort of passive-aggro humiliation routine, yanking my hard-won privileges.

That day I wound up at a table with two ninth-grade boys everybody was constantly telling me were weird in an uncool “watch these two” way. While I looked on aghast but slightly fascinated, they sat beside each other and fed one another their lunches by hand. They didn’t seem to be showing off, they appeared unselfconscious about what they were doing, and a sophomore girl named Terri, who played me tennis sometimes, leaned close and whispered, “For sure a couple homos.”

But I didn’t get that impression off the pair, I got “seriously disturbed.”

I tried saying hello to them, but they looked at me and giggled and went back to what they’d been doing. Well, I like a challenge, and suddenly I thought of a way to pass the time; I’d ask them questions to see if I could break through their absorption with one another. I asked about The Sandman, and the weather, and how they met, and Michael Jordan’s gambling habits, and nothing seemed to work. I might as well not have been there at all. So finally with around three minutes left, I brought out the heaviest gun I could think of, a subject I figured no male in history, whatever his predictions, had ever failed to respond to with interest:

“So you ever seen tits?”

Hand to Heaven, they didn’t even bat an eye, one just kept nibbling tater tots from the other’s fingers.

I was stumped.

6th Feb 2014.

Felt tired today after not sleeping following last nights nightshift so went to go for a lie-down. The door went with the man to fix the en suite window. Then another man came to fix the oven door. Then Kristi went out so I thought I'd try again. Just as I lay down, the PS 2 we'd ordered so I could play my old games arrived, then just after that, my copy of Slaves to Darkness pitched up (only 25 years after it would have been really useful, but hey I have a copy now and I was happy to have it). Then another repair man arrived to fit carbon monoxide detectors. After that, I gave up on sleep. It has been a long time since I last worked night shift.

6th of Feb 2015

I had received the keys for my new house and started packing. Apparently, I owned divided up into 4 different classes. T-Shirts, Books, DVD's and Uniform. Everything else appears to fit into a small shoe box and can be ignored. Of these, t-shirts took up the most room, but books made up the heaviest boxes. As the house was only 20 minutes from my barracks, I started moving stuff by hand. My plantar fasciitis which had put a severe cramp (pun not intended), in my running made this torture. I could manage maybe 4 trips a day before I'd to stop because of the pain. For someone who used to run up to 6 hours a day, this was a big shock and I hated it. The next week would be torture as each day I made the 20-minute walk each way, several times. Doctors had kept on telling me to rest up to let my feet heal up, but the more I rested the worse they got until I could only walk for 7 minutes before the pain started. Yeah, that first week was hell, but after that, I was fine and I have never struggled as much again. I don't run any more, but I do get at least one hour of walking done each day at the fastest pace I can manage.

February 7, 1995 While the second half of 1995 ranks among the best and most treasured times in my life, the first half of the year was a crucible. I was dealing with an unprecedented overload of bad events in my theretofore sheltered life, and the week before had had a meltdown focused on the guy I was in love with, telling him I was giving him a chance to get away and go on with his life, because I was going to be too much trouble. I stayed away from him for about a week, but when we finally did talk that night on the seventh, he said didn’t want to run, so some little voice in my head said, well, I gave him his chance, it’s on him then. But mainly I was limp with relief he was still with me.

After we’d talked a while he was telling me about his dad’s second marriage imploding, as it had been for a while in slow motion, not a lightning strike like my parents’ ending, and that according to his sister Clare’s report from the front lines, his dad had said to his wife Jan that night, “Won’t it be faster if the next one you hook is over seventy, so you’re closer to getting all his money?”

I asked him why if Jan was so bad his dad ever married her, and he said, “I think the men in our family fall in love too hard.”

I said, “You mean yourself too, Brian?”

“Yes, Evelyn,” he said, “I can’t choose to quit caring once I feel something deep for someone.”

Ouch.

Then he said, “But I want you in my life, so please don’t pull away from me like that again.”

So we were all right and he wasn’t holding my train wreck moment against me. From each of our houses we watched it snow, one of those pretty, slow-falling, mellow sorts of snowfalls that turn the night sky slightly pinkish, and in the midst of all the bad stuff happening around me, some of it my own doing, everything felt happy for the first time in a while.

February 8, 2020 Even as chatter was growing louder about a pandemic, my friends Tara and Rob came over to play Risk, and I was freaked out over Rob telling me like it was some hilarious joke that the doctor who was treating him for a possible blood clot in his leg had made him aim for 10,000 steps daily, but his pedometer only showed 1,136 steps for an entire week. That night I told him and Tara I was going to have to re-evaluate all the “underwriting” of their life I had been doing, but I said this even as I was signing a check for Rob’s co-pay on his blood clot treatment. They weren’t con artists so much as good-naturedly lazy, but somehow I felt guilty about saying I couldn’t keep helping them, even as my left brain wondered why. I wasn’t rich, they weren’t family, yet every time they asked me for money, I tried to come through. My friend in Spain who claims to be a trance medium has told me I owe Rob and Tara a past life debt, and I suppose that fluffy pronouncement explains our situation as well as anything. 

Hmmm... at this day last year I was doing the same sh!t I do every day, I guess.

February 9, 2021 Eleven inches of snow fell from dusk to dawn back home, the deepest one-day snowfall since 2008, but I was not there to see it, I was far away teaching a class on reading micro-expressions as means of gauging truth versus lies. As part of the exercise that capped off the day’s lecture, I made a hundred statements---

“Except for her beauty, I don’t think my mother contributes much to life.”

“One of my ancestors hollowed out a log and put gunpowder in it, then sealed it and sneaked it into the wood pile of a mean English landlord.”

“Frank Sinatra once talked to me.”

----and challenged the students to tell me whether each one was true. The base odds were obviously fifty-fifty, so they needed to do better than that if they’d learned anything, and to give them a break I went heavy on some of the tells I’d advised them to look for. Still the collective success rate of the class ending up being under fifty percent, and I felt like a lousy instructor, destined to be fired in the last months before retirement.

The accommodations where I was staying were pretty good, they even had those strange but comfortable purple waffle mattresses I’d seen online, and I laid on mine and called home and found out from my friend Clare that her paternal grandfather had died just short of age one-hundred. (Her father, who was in his mid-sixties but looked a generation younger, liked to attribute his own Dorian Gray-like lack of aging to his father’s genes.) This was a grandfather Clare had never known, as he and his wife began shunning her father early in his adulthood, and they’d never met her or acknowledged her or her late brother.
  
She said: “I find it hard to care that I’ve lost my grandfather, since I never met him, but I have always wished I’d had grandparents in my life.”

Poor girl.

9th February 2013.

Got on a plane with my two brothers and one of my sisters-in-law to travel to Utah. Stewart's luggage containing his medication would end up at the wrong location. Despite it not having snowed for 6 weeks, there was still plenty of snow on the ground, and as soon as we landed we went off to the theatre to see Arsenic & Old Lace. I really enjoyed the show, but I struggled to stay awake after the long flight. I am now friends with one of the actors who was in the show and I think I still have the program somewhere. It started snowing heavily the evening we arrived and continued to do so until the wedding. I guess that means we got a white wedding?

10th Feb 2011.

After watching Knight & Day, and cross-referencing it to Battlefield Earth, I decided that whatever the benefits of scientology were, being able to pick good movie roles wasn't one of them.

February 10, 2018 I found out that that my youngest daughter, five year old Trinity, climbed up on the counter at her grandma’s house and ate the entire contents of a big bag of dried figs, after being told by her grandma that she’d had enough figs and that too many would give her a stomach ache. When I heard I thought, oh, well, you’ll live and learn, child. And boy did she learn. In fact she was up til the wee hours….learning. Finally, looking and sounding the worse for wear she gazed pathetically up at me as she stumbled abashedly toward her room and announced, “I don’t like figs anymore.”

February 11, 1995 I passed my driver’s test on this day, or as I told my grandpa, “I aced that test so hard it ran screaming to its mama.” Not very humble, but creative. Went around and showed people my license and my new car, a Ford Taurus---oh-so-‘90s, I know---and went over and got Brian, and we played Pink Floyd’s The Division Bell while I drove us places, a feeling of unprecedented freedom flowing through me. I wanted us to go to this hilltop overlook on the west side of town, where a few minutes’ hike into the woods yielded a view of three states above a scenic bend in the river, a special place, but he rightly said it was too wet and cold of a day to be atop a small mountain. Neither of us had a lot of money to go do stuff, but I didn’t care, I was riding an immense high and life felt good. It was great to be driving, great to have a car, and great to be out with him. It was a day full of all sorts of amazingly cool things and new things that just went on and on, the sort of day you almost have to come down off of like a drug, the kind you know even as it’s happening around you that you’ll never forget and that someday you’ll wonder how you ever went back to normal life.

Those rare, precious days are SO amazing when they come!
And they pass so quickly . . .

If I had a boarding house I'd run it like a combination of those old ladies in the play, and the Faceless Men. I wouldn't kill anybody, just wear fake skinned faces and serve legit bitter almond tea. I think people would love that .

Sigh, I know, right? I totally should've had sex with him that day for a perfect trifecta: the license, the car,  first-time sex, all in the same glorious day? If ever I get my hands on a time machine that girl's getting b***h slapped. And then I'll take her place.

February 12, 2019 Worked at my father’s office that day and before going in I walked alone through the old cemetery up the road where I liked to go. The hoarfrost broke under my steps and the orange glare of the rising sun made the landscape look like a creamsicle covered in sparkling diamonds. Came home that afternoon and my daughter had made Tyler a surprise cake to mark his getting a good evaluation on the job at the Library for the Blind, and though her generosity seemed to embarrass him, he still thanked her a bunch. Then a half hour later he had a sweet-faced boy in his room in our basement, and I wondered if I should ask the boy to stay for dinner and try Daisy’s cake, but in the end I just said bye to him as he left and then told myself they were probably down there together sending money to orphans, or studying the Bible. I went out that night with Landon and saw a funny play about voyeuristic ghosts, and the theater district was festooned with posters advertising the coming of Hamilton the next week. I had insomnia that night, and considering I’d gotten up at 4:30, it made for a long stretch of being awake in the Ellieverse.

February 13, 1992 Drove in to school with my mom and heard on the radio that California was having some of the worst flooding in its history after getting a foot of rain. (Let’s repeat that: a foot of rain.) I was called into the office after homeroom and was given a certificate of recognition signed by Archbishop Pilarczyk, for my part in representing the school’s honors program at a 7th grade academic event in Columbus, then went in late to a class called Advanced Composition, probably my favorite that semester, and as we’d been told to spontaneously write a haiku, I composed this:

Tree frogs’ chorus ends
In wintertime’s cold embrace,
Songs just for summer.

February 14, 2006 Our great, now late, tradition of going to Chicago for Valentine’s Day began that year when Landon and I stayed at the Hyatt and ate brunch there and later had a rum and coke at its block-long bar, took a cold carriage ride, shopped and got bought cool stuff, then looked at some multi-million dollar sailboats moored off the lake, and in general had a wonderful time. We’d return to Chicago for Valentine’s Day over the course of a number of years, but somewhere along the line we had children and the annual trip dried up. I don’t miss it, I’d rather be with Daikeagity, but it’s fun to look back on. And who knows, maybe someday we’ll put on Kevlar and go back to Chicago.

February 15, 2016 Asked my husband if I could “try” to shave his face with a straight razor, and he was game, so I watched a video about the undertaking, applied steaming hot towels and a pre-shave oil that smelled intoxicatingly of lime, lathered him up and had at it. I kept whispering, “Don’t move….sit very still….” and considering I had a lethal weapon poised above his jugular, he diligently complied. In the end I didn’t cut him even once, so bully for a tennis player’s steady hand.

While I shaved him we talked about rumors that Antonin Scalia had been murdered, which I thought unlikely, and I said holding his life in my hands was the sort of fun we should do more often. In that vein he asked if I’d given any more thought to his suggestion that he and I should try ayahuasca together, since we knew a source, and I said, “Now there’s an idea.”

How much deep thought I was actually giving the matter and how much I was going along with it (or for that matter how much he was) was debatable, because I didn’t think it would be good for me. I asked if he was really wanting to do that, and he said if I did it he‘d be in, so in laying it on me I think he was taking an out, but it was a fun mutual dare we had going for about five minutes while I shaved his chin as smooth as a baby’s stomach. (People say smooth as a “baby’s bottom” but what kind of person goes around rubbing babies’ bottoms?)

Later in the night it was so foggy from melting snow they had to issue a multi-county alert, so he and I went walking in our woods amid a supernatural-looking landscape with naked tree branches reaching up into cloaking mist. Who needed ayahuasca when you had a trippy night like that?

February 16, 2008 We were in New York City, back in the US for the first time in weeks after a trip to France, Britain, and Ireland, and though I didn’t know it yet, I’d come home pregnant. We went atop the Empire State Building, though it was a sunny, cold sort of day that stung the eyes. For lunch we got potato pancakes with spicy brown mustard at a kosher deli where the cashier and cook yelled at each other, and for dinner we kept a six-week-old reservation at Tao’s, where the food was excellent, and one of the customers at a nearby table looked exactly like some chisel-featured mobster from a Scorsese movie. (Turned out he was a stock broker, not a leg-breaker.) We got out in time to just make it into the Ambassador Theater to see Chicago with the blond-haired guy from The Dukes of Hazzard, John Schneider, playing Billy Flynn. Back in our hotel room (such a non-posh place the bathrooms were communal and down the hall) I laid in bed and tried to entice Landon into one of my late night philosophical rambles, asking him whether something was beautiful because it pleased the senses, or did it please the senses because it was beautiful? He said, “I don’t know but I think you’re going to tell me.” Then he fell asleep before I trudged too far into the question, so I sat by the window, watching the city do its thing through the bright, vivid night, struck by the fact New Yorkers probably never got to see the stars. I was ready to go home.

February 17, 2000 I’d begun the morning talking to a senior supervisor who’d been born in Pakistan, and listening to her sum up my contributions in an Oxbridge accent: “You are only good for what you are good at.” I knew the people I worked for were always ready to tell you what you did wrong, not what you’d done right. Besides, I had more personal things to darken my mind.

After that ego-spanking phone call I submitted a paper in class arguing against Malthusian theory being applicable in the breakup of the Soviet Union, then helped my artist friend stretch canvases in her basement. After my grandfather’s terminal small-cell lung cancer diagnosis that month, I was staying in my apartment more than had been my routine, and helping my friend was the first social thing I’d done in days. I was half a continent away from my grandpa and wanted to be nearby, but my father and aunt said he wasn’t seeing anyone.

“It’s his vanity,” Aunt Christie explained, and in a way I got that, since my grandfather had long traded on his good looks, and his had been the era depicted in Mad Men, when people drank and smoked and males didn’t show much emotion, but I still wished I could be with him. (He did let me come see him once that spring, and I was the last family member to visit him, something later held against me in court when my cousins’ father was suing me, the suggestion being I poisoned Grandpa’s mind against my cousins, to whom he left virtually nothing.)
 
I was alone that evening in the apartment I shared with my roommate, Jackie, and from September to April it was so cold there my fingers would sometimes go numb, but as I sat by a window and watched the tail lights on cars going down the hill (I called it the “firewyrm”) I talked to a boy named Greg, who asked if I wanted him to come over and talk about my grandpa, and the thing was, he had always been such a genuinely kind sort that I knew he meant it, he wasn’t trying to score with a vulnerable girl, but I still said no thanks, this was something I was going to have to find a way through on my own.

And did I? Here’s the obscene truth. By the time my grandpa died in August, it was almost an anticlimax, because in shunning me it felt like he’d already left, and the months of dreading the day had steeled me against it. A long illness can have that terrible effect, whether you want it to or not.

17th February 2003.

I finished my Phase 2 training at the Defence College and with two other guys who were posted to Kinloss, drove up in a van to Lossiemouth. I hadn't felt quite ready to leave Cosford late the previous year, but I had taken care of some business in Birmingham and was now ready to go. Since my older brother was stationed at the same camp, I had expected him to meet me up here, or spend some time with him and his family, show me around and so forth, but he went off to visit his in-laws instead. Somewhat disappointing, but not totally unexpected. Luckily a friend from an earlier course was there to show me around over the weekend, although there was a howling wind blowing and I couldn't hear much of what he was saying to me.

February 18, 1999 My home state was preparing to execute the first person in half a century, a mentally-deficient “volunteer” who had waived appeals, an action which had gotten him beaten almost to death by a fellow inmate who felt he was speeding up the executions of others. The preparations for the man’s death had created a morbid media circus, so I had avoided the news for several days.

I did call my grandpa that night and he said he didn’t understand why capital punishment tormented me when it was a good thing to get certain people permanently out of society. I smarted off and said, “You’d probably shoot people on death row just for fun, wouldn’t you?”

He said, “Some of them, like kid killers.” My grandpa was a gentleman but he had a streak of violence in him that manifested in hunting for pleasure, and in incidents of sudden road rage I’d seen. He’d also been needlessly hard on my dad growing up, leaving them mostly estranged.

Ohio’s courts delighted in eye for an eye justice, its death row was overflowing, and after killing the “volunteer” it has since put almost sixty others to death, and, yes, it still bothers me, because the government should not own the lives of human beings, otherwise what are we but slaves to be disposed of at its will? What’s wrong with letting murderers waste away of ennui in a sunless cell, punished day by hopeless day by the constant misery of deprivation and unquenched desire, tormented to the bitter end of natural life even in their tortured dreams of freedom each time they close their eyes at night?

February 19, 1995 Out with Dana, who was blowing a wad of money her deep-pocketed dad, my Uncle Lark, sent her in lieu of a college care package. We mostly drifted through a mall, where she bought Elder God Tarot cards, rice rolling papers, thongs from Victoria’s Secret, and a book for me called The Intelligence of Dogs. She kept an unlit cigarette dangling from her mouth to mess with people who’d gripe that it was a non-smoking facility, and she’d pounce and ask: “Jesus, do you see smoke coming from it?” I cringed but she thought instigating confrontations like those were funny.

I also talked to her about why I kept messing up the best thing I had going in my life, being in love with someone who loved me, but no matter how I phrased the topic she’d shrug and say, “You’ll figure it out.”

“Do you simply not care?” I demanded, stricken that my guru was brushing me off like that.

“No,” she said, “I really think you’ll figure it out.”

Hmmph.

She took me home around seven and I watched Patriot Games with my dad, who found the absurdity of Hollywood spy movies amusing. He asked what I was going to do and I said, “In the long term figure out my life, but in the short term I’m going to bed early.”

He said, “Just don’t let going to bed be your long-term goal.”

(Still pondering that…)

Considering that being in love had inspired me to undertake emotionally hostile behavior incomprehensible to myself and others, I laid in the dark and thought maybe being single for life was not a bad move. As I was a virgin, I wondered if I became a nun, would I get to wear one of those cool wimples?

20th February 2003.

My first proper day of work in the RAF. I went along to SHQ to pick up my arrivals paperwork and was fortunate enough to bump into an NCO who was also arriving at the station and working in the same place as me, so he gave me a lift around and helped me pick up all the stuff I needed from the various areas. When I arrived at my workplace with all my paperwork already, it made me look really switched on and made a good first impression. I was working with two cpls (Kev and James), and two other guys my rank (Adam and someone whose name escapes me, although I can think of his current rank and where he works, just not his name) as well as 2 civvies, Graham and a guy whose name has been lost to time. I do remember that he came up with a radar for F1 cars that could detect puddles on the road ahead and sold it to Ferrari on the condition they gave him a job.

Anyway, my job was to strip and rebuild wiring harnesses for the aircraft engines. Surprisingly, it was one of the more technical jobs I'd get, with the different types of cables, making sure the wiring was correctly terminated and so forth. I'd mostly enjoy it and stay in post for 2 1/2 years although for the last 6 months I found that I'd go home, put on one of the Grand Theft Auto games and just spend half an hour going on a rampage, shooting things up in order to chill out enough to be able to handle him the next day.

February 20, 1991 NPR’s All Things Considered was filled with gloating reports that the USAF had bombed thousands of retreating Iraqi soldiers, and I wasn’t sure how I felt about that, so while driving to my dad’s basketball game, I asked if those were the Iraqis who’d eaten the zoo animals in Kuwait, and when he said maybe, I decided perhaps they had it coming.

I watched Dad’s team win by double digits against a squad made up of Teamsters, and he said, “Let’s get out of here, El, before they call in their mob connections on us.”

We ended up at UDF, part convenience store, part ice cream shop, “forgot” it was Lent and had malts and killed a can of Planter’s cheese balls. It always felt special being out with my dad in those days when he and I were both still young, and while I tossed cheese balls into his open mouth, I told him I’d finished reading the last Black Stallion book, and he was suitably impressed til I told him there wouldn’t be any more because the author was dead, and he said, “Dear God, why do you always concentrate on details like that?”

He and my mother had had their thirteenth wedding anniversary that week, and I asked if he ever wished he’d married someone else, and he said no, not even for one second, because if you marry the right person, the rest of your life falls happily into place. I think certain people in your life are your obsession, and my mother has for sure played that role for my longsuffering father.

February 21, 1998 I was woken up around 8:30 on a Saturday morning to my roommate, Jackie, knocking on my door to tell me a boy from our university named Greg had shown up with donuts and coffee, and was in the living room asking for me.

I toyed with the idea I was still asleep and dreaming, then rolled over in bed and was like, “He what?”

I got up and put on sweats and a tee, my ungovernable hair looking like the Wreck of the Hesperus, I’m sure, brushed my teeth with water from a Poland Springs bottle, and opened my bedroom door to see this cheerfully nice boy from school sitting in our tiny kitchen with steaming beverages, and donuts from a famous local place called Old Town.

Greg greeted me brightly and without explanation, and then after he and I chatted a moment, I listened while he and Jackie did what people in the northeast seemed to do obsessively, talk about hockey. Because I’d been born on the Mason-Dixon Line I had nothing to contribute, just listened, gathering that on the ice one thing was imperative: always defeat Canadian teams.

After Greg left an hour later, Jackie said to me, “That boy is trying to back door his way into your life.” 

I sputtered and said, “But I’m still with someone back home.” (Actually, though, I thought the morning had been rather pleasant.)

She told her friends Lisa and Amy about what’d just happened, making them hurry over, and I remember after they interrogated me and I said really there was nothing to tell, we watched Beverly Hills Ninja, which was gross, loud, and IQ-lowering, but bittersweet considering poor sweaty Chris Farley had died a few weeks before. I watched more movies in the years I lived with Jackie than the rest of my life put together, and I bet we were in Blockbuster three or four times a week. (Now it’s a pet groomers.)

February 22, 2019 Went to see Hamilton onstage with my almost sister in law, Clare, who has always hated the way her name is spelled, by the way, and who was, to say the least, more excited about going than I was, although since then I’ve grown fond enough of the production to forgive its blatant cultural appropriation. Her dad, who’d gotten us the hard to come by tickets, had told us both in an email that morning about how upset he was that a Jesuit associated with the high school where he and his son had both gone had been charged with the sexual abuse of students, and I couldn’t help but think the only way an abuser would stay under the radar for the forty-nine years of his alleged misdeeds was if the school had facilitated him. “I’ll never believe that,” he said. “That just can’t be true.” He was genuinely devastated.

February 23, 1997 On the Sunday morning that was my maternal cousin Eonne’s seventeenth birthday, Brian and I rode ten miles on my favorite bike trail. It was in the fifties and the nearby river was so high it was just a few feet from the pavement itself, slapping away at the hillside and bringing displaced water snakes up to curl sluggishly in our path. We’d had several big floods in the 1990s but this was the third worst in local history, with only 1913 and 1937 being more severe, and the waters would get much deeper before they’d recede, putting thousands of area families into shelters. We walked down to the flood’s edge and tossed in pennies for future archaeologists to find, and watched a tortoiseshell cat comically try to stalk a blue heron about three times its size. Back at Brian’s house, where I was staying but wasn’t quite living there yet like I would be before twelfth grade ended, I heard news that made it seem like a lot was simultaneously happening in the world. For starters the Mir space station was on fire in the atmosphere, one further blow to “superpauper” Russia’s international prestige, while Hale-Bopp comet was finally visible from parts of Earth. Overshadowing that was the morning’s announcement that scientists in Scotland had cloned a sheep whom they called Dolly, and I just knew the next day in ethics class we’d get lectured about the immorality of cloning (which we did). And then that night NBC undertook the bold move of broadcasting Schindler’s List uncensored. Floods, space wrecks, cloned sheep, holocaust movies, some days seemed to have too much going on.

February 24, 2008 Drove over to see my cousin Celia, the severity of whose behavior was such that something had to be done. Sure, when she wanted something, or when she was happy, few people could match her for sheer effervescent charm---a common trait of intelligent sociopaths---but for the past few weeks she had been all dark side, all the time. Her father overseas was blaming me, since he had by hook or crook kept Celia under some measure of control when she was still in Ireland, but I’d recently helped her come to the United States when she turned eighteen, and as my reward watched as the bottom rapidly fell out from under her.

I got her fairly early and drove around while she woke herself up with Red Bull-spiked espresso, and she was brittle and negative, but I knew whether she liked it or not I was going to have to talk to her about the state of her life, because it was like a plane crashing into a train into a school, into a hospital.

We stopped above the downtown where the view was beautiful, a valley laid out for miles in a city built on seven hills, like Rome, and before I could cross into the subject, Celia dropped a bomb on me. My hard-living cousin was pregnant. It was like my throat went dry, my heart did something strange, and I thought….oh my God.
 
She told me she’d been trying to drink so hard she miscarried, and said her recent extremes had not been as unintentional as everyone thought. She said, “Pills, booze, nothing has worked, so you’re going to have to give me abortion money.”

Since I had paid for her to come to America, paid for her to begin college, and paid for her apartment, she figured she was safe to demand money, but I said no to that request, and she blew up in an instant rage and asked did I not get that she had ruined the baby inside her on purpose and it would now be brain damaged?
 
Ever felt your heart break? It’s more than an expression, you can actually feel something you once cherished disconnect inside you, and it hurts.

I tried to think but she was in my face screaming, and the thoughts I got were memories of her as the baby I loved being with when I visited Ireland every summer, and the little girl I used to be close to, and even of her as an adolescent complaining to me on MSN Messenger that her family didn’t understand a creative person like her and life would be better if I could help her come to the US. I’d bought her story and been taken advantage of, I knew that by then, and her family had always been right when they’d warned me about her.

When she paused in her rant I told her again I wasn’t going to help her end her pregnancy, which made her give me a look of contempt. She said to drive her back to her flat then or she’d walk, so I did, and on the way she said I shouldn’t get attached to the idea of her being anyone’s mother, because her baby didn’t have a chance in Hell of being born. I’d known women who had abortions, but I don’t think I’d ever seen one harbor so much hate for the offspring inside her. (Incidentally, she would have her baby, a little girl named Lizzie, who is beautiful and fine and has grown up mercifully free of her mother in her life, and except for inheriting her beauty, seems nothing like her.)

As I dropped her off at the flat she shared with other students---though she’d quit attending class herself---she leaned back inside my car and said, “Stay away from me or I swear to God I’ll break your nose.” Then she slammed her fist against the roof of my car for emphasis, and I lingered considering her words. She was a berserker in the oldest Celtic traditions, and in her rages I’d seen her go after men, but I wasn’t going to have the luxury of walking away from her, so there’d be more to come, I knew.

I watched her walk off, all smiles again when she encountered one of her roommates on the sidewalk and despite the last hour, I couldn’t help but think Celia was one of the prettiest young women I’d ever seen, yet the way she could turn her anger on and off like a water faucet removed my last doubts that she was deeply disturbed, and the problems she represented had just grown worse.

You did your best with her, ER, but some people are too broken to fix.

February 25, 2022 Driving home from a meeting at my former work site sixty miles away, I stopped and got Elden Ring, which had launched to massive hype. I had resolved not to get it for a while since I was in the middle of a (kinda boring) play-through of Red Dead Redemption 2, but oh well. I inched into the game for a couple hours, finding it impressively like an open-world Dark Souls, but had to stop and head downtown with my husband and our youngest daughter, Trinity, to see a Chinese dance extravaganza called Shen Yun. A couple years before I’d attended a performance and ran afoul of management in the lobby for pointing out that some of the female dancers had suspiciously diminutive feet, but nothing like that happened this night. We came back before it was very late and I was pleased to see my oldest, Daisy, was holding down the fort with her sixteen-year-old cousin Bethany Brooke. They’d had pizza and watched ghost videos on a YouTube channel called Slapped Ham, and since it was a Friday night, Bethany stayed over, and she and Daisy were up chatting in giggly whispers til the wee hours. We planned a trip to wander around a moribund megamall the next morning, a vaguely creepy experience amid hundreds of thousands of square feet of silent space and abandoned merchandise, and it too was a good day.

February 26, 1994 My parents went out and I got to stay home alone dancing around my room in my socks blaring bands I thought were cool, like The Cure and Joy Division, screaming along to Radio Live Transmission:

“….listen to the silence! let it ring out! eyes, dark gray lenses, frightened of the sun… we would have a fine time living in the night… hiding from these days, we remained all alone…”

No, I wasn’t in any universe a Goth, I doubt I knew that term back then, but I remember feeling high on those sounds and thinking that was surely a little bit what sex was like, not knowing yet that being high on music could sometimes actually be better.

But what I remember most about that night was it was the first time I ever drank alcohol. I went downstairs and got this bottle of red wine that’d been in the kitchen for weeks, my parents had it for a party and it had just sat there without ever drawing my interest til then---the devilish influence of rock and roll, yep---so I poured myself a substantial glass, gulped it down, and wham, got a head rush that staggered me. I wasn’t sure I liked the feeling but I buzzed along for a bit, laughing and jumping around to more music, though to my credit I didn’t take another taste of alcohol for over a year and rarely after that, it just wasn’t my thing, still isn’t, but by my standards it was a wild night.

Well, the next day my dad asked me, “Were you here alone last night?”

I said, “Yes, why?”

He goes, “Did you by any chance have some wine?”

I said, “Yes, I did, one glass, but…it was a big glass.”

He said, “I won’t ask why you did, I was fifteen once and did a lot more than I think you do, and more than just wine, but I will ask you to please not do it again, OK?”

I said I wouldn’t, I had just been wound up. He laughed and said he knew how that could be.

I walked away wondering what he meant by he’d done “a lot more” at my age….? (Unfortunately he’d eventually tell me, and I’ve never quite recovered from hearing it.)

27th February 2016.

I had a dream where various holy books were being rewritten by PR companies hired by their respective deities. The only bit I can remember was them talking about the whole garden of Eden bit and saying "Hmm, getting kicked out for being tempted by an apple. No one in their right mind is ever going to believe that people would risk getting booted out of paradise for that. Let's go with a bacon sandwich instead."

27th February 2013.

After a bit of a fight with D.I.O. I finally managed to get allocated a quarter in Lossiemouth. They wouldn't give me the keys until April, but I received notification that I wouldn't have to make the journey to and from Inverness on a daily basis to get to work. Ten years later, we are preparing to leave the house. Managing to remain in the one location for a decade is a pretty rare achievement by itself in the military.

February 27, 2001 I had a long talk with a co-worker in Austin, whose life and mine were becoming intertwined in ways that would ultimately show how emotional entanglements can be as complicated as sexual ones, and he was furious because the Taliban had blown up the Buddhas of Bamiyan. Though he was ethnically Jewish, his epistemology did not stretch to a belief in much of anything, but he did have a respect for Buddhism and liked to tell me, “The finger pointing at the moon is not the moon.” He said this meant that people should pay more heed to the message, not the messenger, something he claimed western religions did not get, but which made me wonder why those statues of Buddha had been built then.

That night he said he thought Islam was “an irreversible force for evil in the world.” He and I used to candidly say many things to each other we couldn’t have said in other contexts, especially considering all the sensitivity training our employers made us take and pretend to heed, but there was a certain professional peril in him voicing that view, and I told him so.

When September 11th happened later in the year, he’d see it as a validation of his epiphany about Islam, though he would also go on to spend time in Dubai, and have Arab friends, proving it was easier to hate a billion people than a few, a mindset sadly apparent across human history.

February 28, 2017 The worst storm of 2017 came early that year.

I went out with my friend that evening to try dermablading, then came home and turned on the TV, which was filled with warnings about storms zeroing in on us, illustrated with red arrows of projected damage paths, two of which went right over top of our area, the manifestation of the Midwest at its worst, and it was coming from an unusual west-east line that stretched into Missouri, instead of the more usual south-north orientation of storms, meaning instead of a narrow front passing in a short time, the deadly weather was going to last almost constantly for hours.

We had our children sleep downstairs, and later that night, right as the tornado warning siren down the road went off ---meaning there was an actual tornado somewhere nearby---I got a call from my cousin Celia, telling me she was using her one phone call from jail to reach out to me for bail money, as she’d been arrested for domestic violence. As she spoke it sounded like a bomb exploded outside, the house went pitch black, the windows violently rattled, and I dashed downstairs myself, thinking this is it. I shouted: “Celia, I can’t talk right now.” And I hung up, even knowing that was her only call out.

That first storm cell soon passed, though radar showed others on their way.

At about ten after one in the morning, after hours of lighting and hail and high winds which showed no sign of ending, my phone rang again and it was Keith, a man with whom Celia was living, and with whom she’d had a little boy named Derrick the year before. Keith, who was a decent sort, begged me to help him get Celia out of jail, saying it had all been a misunderstanding, someone had called the police on them for arguing. I asked what Celia had been like lately, and he said in this sad way, “She’s really trying.”

Not sure which way he meant that word, I listened to Keith plead Celia’s case, and heard thunder crashing outside his house fifteen miles to the west, coming our way in minutes. I could also hear baby Derrick crying, and I thought of that poor child living with a crazy mother, which was the thing that made up my mind for me, and I told Keith I wished him and Derrick the best but I was not going to bail Celia out. I listened to him though til the last wave of the storm hit us with marble-sized hail and wind that roared like a raging waterfall, then told him good luck.

When the sun rose it was on a dead-calm morning. We walked out and saw the damage on our property was mostly confined to downed tree limbs, scattered debris, and the glass on my grandma’s little greenhouse shed had been shattered, nothing too horrible, but the news showed many thousands of families had been affected throughout the battered region, so I drove to my mother in law’s church to volunteer to assemble care packages for those in need.

I found out that evening from Celia’s sister that Keith going into the police station with Derrick in his arms, pleading, had gotten the domestic violence charges against Celia dismissed, but that she had painted me as the villain of the entire situation, because I’d refused to help. I was long past caring about my psycho cousin’s blaming anyone but herself, and felt no guilt.

March 1, 2020 I talked with my college roommate, Jackie, about the uncertainties of the plague manifesting like a shadow across the quivering globe, and she said she expected to soon be off work the rest of the school year. I’d been thinking things might be shut down for a month, perhaps, but she turned out to be right, of course. Then she and I walked back two decades down memory lane. In a signpost of our present ages we drifted into a conversation not just about Covid, but cancer, and the tone to the way we talked about it was less abstract than it would have been in the past: we were well out of life’s safe harbor known as youth, and had lost a mutual friend. After we hung up, I canceled the leave of absence request from my work which I had recently submitted, figuring if the world was shutting down it’d be wasted, and found when things calmed down I’d have a short assignment doing instruction in Seattle, which didn’t sound bad, but every time I left my family I hated it. I was in the homestretch to twenty-five year retirement, so I complied with the will of a boss infinitely bigger than me, but I was burned-out on the job to the point of irritation, and if I had not been able to end my career at the finish line, I don’t know I would have stayed on much longer, retirement benefits or not. Besides, the spreading coronavirus had compelled everyone to think in the short-term anyway. Strange times.

1st March 2010.

I was walking home to the block from work at lunchtime when a man in his 50s stopped me. I'd been thinking about how recently, every taxi I'd gotten in the drivers had decided to tell me all their woes and considering if I should charge them for the privilege of me listening to their problems. The man proceeded to ask me for advice on how to deal with his overdraft problems. I have no idea who he was or why he thought I could counsel him on his problems. I listened for a couple of minutes, but ultimately I was feeling hungry and only had a limited time to grab my lunch, so when my attempts to end the conversation politely came to nought having given him all the advice I could and directed him to a debt advisory charity, I simply walked off and left him there. I hope he got his issues sorted, but man what a fuss over being overdrawn by £20.

1st March 2008.

I got what would turn out to be my last message from Bev. Gave it a damn good ignoring, other than my eye happened to catch the last line. I think she was trying to call me an idiot for turning down her attempts to get back in my life but she had missed out the second 'i'. This did make me chuckle given the context. The place where I worked only had two people in it, and evidently, I was angry at the mere thought of her trying to contact me, because my boss refused to be left alone in the room with me in case I decided to hit someone, and he was the only target. I got the med centre to sign me off for a day, but that was more to make my boss feel better than anything.

March 2, 2007 I had a block of time-off, so I got up at 6:00 to walk with Landon above the river on the pedestrian-only Purple People Bridge, so we could watch the fog rise from the water below, and see the sleeping city shake off the night. It was something Landon and I did almost every morning when we were at his house due south of downtown. (And which once almost got us struck by lightning out on the metal bridge.)

When Landon went on to his work, I met up with Dana, and we talked about Anna Nicole Smith, whose death had capped off a fight over money that none of the combatants would live to spend, and there seemed a commentary by the divine in that.

We segued into politics and I thought Hillary Clinton, whom I expected I would support, was mendaciously presenting herself as more moderate than she was. We also speculated about whether she’d be the first President to have performed fellacio, but agreed probably not: thinking of you, James Buchanan! As for Barack Obama, I said he shouldn’t run, that he was too inexperienced and his honeymoon would fade, which is Exhibit A. for why you should never bet the farm on my political predictions.

There were no Republicans in our family, and on that day I told her I could not comprehend why anyone would ever want to vote for one, which was ironic considering how twisted the political road would become for me in another year.

March 3, 2010 While paranoia may have been the common cold where I worked, it paid to recall Kurt Cobain’s wisdom and remember that just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they’re not after you. So it was that two and a half weeks before our wedding, I had to sit Landon down and candidly explain to him that I’d just been told I may not have had much of a future ahead of me as a living breathing person, because----forgive my dramatic phrasing---someone who’d taken my testimony against him as the most rancid of betrayals, wanted the coldest of revenge. As it had been explained to me, the ramifications of taking the steps necessary to make it harder for this inmate’s wish to be fulfilled were going to permanently change my life, and if Landon married me, his life as well as our sixteen month old’s. We rejected many of the security recommendations as being just too drastic, we still got married, and if you notice, either by luck or something higher, I’m still here a baker’s dozen years later, but on that March day I truly believed it when I said my time in this world was soon to end.

3rd March 2013.

In preparation for moving out of the barracks in into a house I went out and bought more stuff for the kitchen. I picked up cutlery, kitchen knives, a grater, chopping board, tin openers, bottle opener, a George Foreman grill, a blender, a toaster (which looks suspiciously like some sort of high-tech weapon, I may have to investigate it further), sandwich toaster, kettle, placemats and assorted implements that are either for use in the kitchen or possibly something to do with the Inquisition.

Within weeks of arriving Kristi would have burned out the grill, the sandwich toaster and the kettle. We still have the toaster though.

I also spent more time packing DVDs. At this point I was still below the 5000 mark that would be passed later on this year. I had packed away everything very carefully to fit in my room in the block, but getting it ready to move elsewhere created a minefield where moving around the room required great care.

March 4, 1992 It was Ash Wednesday, and being in Catholic school we got the day off. To please my mom I agreed to give up my beloved Walkman for the next forty days, and left ashes on my forehead til bed. It was over eighty and sticky hot, breaking a high-temperature record for that date, and that night my dad’s friend came over and brought his daughter Verity, whom circumstances kept pushing into my life. In retrospect I think Verity was probably a homosexual, because she was always trying to get me to undress around her, but even beyond that she was a combination of annoying and sad. Her mom had left her with her dad when they split up while Verity was little, and Verity liked to talk about her mom, who worked in the entertainment industry in Los Angeles. Verity had gone to Fiji with her mother since the last time I’d seen her, and she told me her mom might be getting a part on an Aaron Spelling TV show. Mostly when someone tells you something like that you think, yeah, sure, but her dad backed up her story, and it was her claim to fame, having an absent mom who did glam things. Verity also told me her mom said Los Angeles was preparing to have eight-digit phone numbers by 1995, so by decade’s end I should expect them where we lived in the “Flyover Country” which Verity said she couldn’t wait to trade in for California as soon as she turned eighteen. The girl was tiring if not tiresome, and while I didn’t dislike her, I was always glad when she left. Kind of like Lent itself.

March 5, 1991 My father was saddened to hear his favorite movie theater, downtown’s Race Street Repertory, was closing. It was owned by a local rock DJ, Larry Thomas, and brought in movies that wouldn’t be shown anywhere else in the city: obscure films, art films, controversial films, classic films, foreign films. Dad had taken me to the Rep a few times, once to see an international animation festival, and the seats were plush red velvet, supposedly salvaged from an old Detroit movie palace, and reclined slightly, and the hundred-seat space inside was more like someone’s parlor than a cookie-cutter multiplex. They also served eclectic fare at the concession stand, like candy from Japan, popcorn made from blue kernels, and fancy water from Iceland, and it was usually overseen by the DJ’s wife, who had the great name of Thumper. In thirty years nothing has come into the city to fill the void left by a cool little movie house like that, and with streaming it’s hard probably hard to grasp what a big deal having a place like the Rep used to be.

March 6, 2021 Sometimes I deviled the psychologists my employer made us see each month, and that day I told the one assigned to me that I’d recently rented the one bedroom apartment that used to belong to my late boyfriend in the mid-1990s. (Which was true, by the way.)
 
The little game of twenty questions began then, when she asked if I was living there, and I said no, and she asked me why I’d done that then, and I said because I wanted it, and she asked what for, and I said it was a place of mostly good memories he and I made together there, the time we may have accidentally invoked the goddess Kali notwithstanding, so why not, it was available.

“You’re trying to recapture the past?” she asked.

“More like enshrine it,” I replied.

“And what does ‘enshrine’ mean?”

“To elevate it above the ordinary in reverential fashion.”

She then asked in a typical psychologist manner how being in the apartment made me feel, and I said at first it made me feel nostalgic and good, if a little pressed by the weight of time, like how I was now sixteen years older than he ever got to be, but that lately I’d felt something malevolent there.
 
“The goddess Kali again?”

I said no, just an odd feeling of menace or danger that was making me question the wisdom of going there alone. (I was still being honest.)

We were drifting toward choppy waters, so I told her I’d had a dream in which I burned the entire apartment building down. I thought she’d leap into that but she segued into another topic, and I felt disappointed, because I could have merrily ridden that hint of pyromania through the rest of the hour.

7th March 2011.

I was picked to be part of the renta-crowd to meet the archbishop of Canterbury when he visited the base. Since he is the head of the church of England, I couldn't help but think that they should have picked someone who was a) a member of his church and b) English. Seemed to be a nice enough guy, but he didn't mean anything to me and the whole thing had no more impact on me than meeting the guy who empties the bins (although he is more useful to me). We had a short chat and then I headed back to work, still unconverted to his faith.

There is a cinema like that in Cape Town which has been around since the 1940s: one of only two cinemas left here which can screen film prints. It has a bit of a strange name: the Labia Theatre.

www.labia.co.za (http://www.labia.co.za)

March 7, 1995 Considering that in the near future a late twenty-something tutor of mine, who was working for his Masters with a goal of teaching, would commit against me what I later learned was called sexual battery---basically groping---it disgusts me to read things I wrote about him in my diary, like this from the seventh of March in ‘95, when I was off school for several days after my grandma had a stroke, and he came over to see me in this terrible time:

Phil came by tonight and Dad said I could go up the road with him. He basically did my homework for me at the table, except for French, since he took Spanish, and I said I wasn’t going to be ready to go back Thursday, and Phil said that’s all the time off they were going to give me and I had to make tomorrow about preparing myself to go back. He said I had to be strong and show the good influence Grandma has always had on me in life and said I have one-quarter of my DNA from her, so she’s always going to live on in me. He gave me a hug and called me his favorite girl. He was really great to me.

Kinda makes me want to hurl to read that today. And of course he was also my teacher for a few weeks at the end of twelfth grade.

March 8, 1997 Brian and I volunteered to do cleanup in the aftermath of the highest flood waters in the area in sixty years. We went to the hard-hit Village of Newtown, which was founded as a land grant to Revolutionary War veterans, and they handed us latex gloves, since it wasn’t wise to touch anything the waters had inundated. Newtown was a mess with trees in the streets, garbage everywhere, damaged homes, and SO MUCH MUD. Worn out by the time we went back to Brian’s house, we cleaned up, ordered pizza, and watched a movie called Tommy Boy, which was an insult to brain cells but kind of pleasantly fit the mood of the strenuous, noisome day. Before bed I called and told my mom I was all right, since she’d been worried about me working by only-partially receded flood waters, and it felt nice to be fretted over.

March 9, 2014 Went to a Princess Diana exhibit filled with her dresses and shoes and tiara, jewelry, letters, photos, and, eerily, the sound of her voice welcoming us. All of it was displayed with loving lavishness, and it was odd how Diana still captivated so many people. I even saw one man sitting on a bench crying, while another man comforted him. And it was odd, too, how to Daisy, whom we took along, Diana, who felt recent to me, was just some lady gone eleven years before her life began.

Came home and changed for my Aunt Sarah’s bridal shower---her second marriage, this one to a Jewish man, no less---and it was a thing of loveliness. My aunt, who is my mom’s youngest sister and nearly my age (I used to have to sleep not just in her room but in her bed with her when I went to Ireland as a kid), has always reminded me of Naomi Watts. Celia was there but we left each other alone, and coming back I thought how that being the case I could have let Daisy come after all, as she’d begged to do, but given how volatile ever-dicey Celia could be, I hadn’t wanted to take the chance.

9th March 2018.

The doctors decided to induce labour and have Ash arrive 3 weeks early. Kristi's body was not cooperative however and after a few hours of nothing happening, they said "Baby is doing fine just now. We can operate to remove him now, or we can wait until he starts to get upset and then operate then. Your choice."

Kristi decided now was the better option. I got dressed in scrubs and accompanied Kristi down to the operating room. They erected a screen so we wouldn't see them operating on her, but to be honest seeing her body randomly being jerked around in small movements reminded me of seeing a dog eating a corpse. I remember watching her blood run along the steel operating table and drip down onto the doctor's white shoes. I held Kristi's hand while I sat before her and chatted away. She wasn't upset or worried (not that I could see anyway). Neither of us were panicking or upset, just excited. Anyway, surprisingly quickly the doctor held a baby over the screen for a few seconds and then took him away to do whatever they needed to do. I sat still holding Kristi. She thought it was because I didn't want to see her cut open, but I just wanted to be there with her and make sure she knew just because we now had someone else, that she wasn't any less important in my life and hadn't been replaced. After a few minutes, they were cleaning up and I was handed Ash. This irked me slightly as I felt the mother should get that privilege first, but I was too happy to have a living person in my arms to really be upset about it. I stood outside the operating room, holding Ash and watching as he struggled to open his eyes for the first time, and I said the thing I say to all newborn babies the first time I hold them. When his head lay in the crook of my arm, his legs just reached down to my hand and no more. When his eyes finally opened, they were the most wonderful sparkling blue colour.

Putting Kristi back together would take a lot longer than cutting her open did. I don't know how long I just stood there holding Ash, letting him grab my finger in his tiny hand, but I could have stood there for a lot longer without comment or complaint. With Lilly-Beth I had been able to feel her moving around when I'd been holding Kristi, but I hadn't really felt that with Ash. What she'd been feeling for the best part of a year was now solid and real to me too. I wonder if women understand how different it is for a man going through that. They have this thing inside them that they can feel moving around, that messes around with their emotions, makes them ill and produces floods of hormones, while men just kind of have to sit and wait for the baby to turn up. It doesn't feel real for us (based on my own experience and that of other men I've chatted to) until then.

Happy birthday Ash.!  :cheers:

Happy birthday, Ash, indeed!!!!
That was the greatest post you've ever made.

March 10, 1994 That morning I was asked by the Dean of the Honors Program if I’d spend a day mentoring a “gifted” girl who was considering enrolling in our school, and show her around. I said I’d be happy to, and was flattered to be thought of for the role.

In truth, under the surface I was also disturbed by a dream in which I cut off all my hair and walked into our living room holding handfuls of it to show my mom what I’d done, and she said that if I ate my hair it’d migrate back up to my head and be fine again.

I later told Dana about this, and because she had an area of concentration in psychology at her university, she said it sounded like the female version of a Freudian male castration dream, and I said, “Let me get this straight, men have dreams about cutting off their….?”

She said, “Apparently.”

It was that same day I first heard that Disney was going to release what was described as an animated version of Hamlet, with lions playing the parts, and I recoiled at how awful that sounded. It was the first reference to The Lion King, one of my favorite movies, I recall ever hearing.

(https://media.tenor.com/bnK8AbXH7k8AAAAC/fascinating-mr-spock.gif)

March 11, 1995 What sixteen-year-old me described as “the worst thing” happened, when that evening I went to the hospital with my dad to visit my grandma, who remained comatose after a stroke, and my grandpa was there with her, as he’d been around the clock, and there was this wave of tension in the room, and when my grandpa left and walked toward an elevator, several things happened at once. My dad rose and walked not so much after my grandpa as at him, and my Aunt Christie leapt up and hurried toward the hall and pulled my dad back toward the room, but even as she did my Dad leaned out toward his father and said something I almost could not believe I heard:

“…all those years and now you feel bad about yourself, well f**k you…”

I sat frozen in shock.

The elevator doors stood open on my grandpa looking out volatilely at my dad. He hadn’t lost much to his sixty-five years, and was taller and more muscularly-built than my dad, capable I knew of hiking miles through the woods without rest, clearly he could have thrown a hard punch.

In the car my dad told me he wanted me to know he shouldn’t have behaved that way, but beyond that he didn’t explain anything. He was professionally trusted with a lot of responsibilities, he thought carefully in most situations and was someone who admired the ancient Stoics and what they stood for, and I couldn’t imagine what had brought on his reaction. What I did know was that while my grandpa was wonderful to me, he and my father had a relationship that was strained, but it had never erupted before that I knew of.

Eventually Dana told me everything, like how our grandfather had made an institution of adultery for the entire course of his marriage to our grandmother, cheating on her not only casually in his younger days but later by “keeping women,” a term I had never heard of.  Dana said, “Grandma was old-school Catholic and didn’t believe in divorce.”  She claimed that a lifetime of anger had boiled over in my dad, and that our aunt had stopped what could have been a major fight.
 
In my shock I wondered if there was no limit to the disillusionments life was going to throw at me that year.

March 12, 1995 The weather was absolutely beautiful, but in light of what Dana had told me about our grandfather after the hospital incident the day before, I was too upset to enjoy it. In fact if someone had asked me to name one thing that was going well, I’m not sure I could have. My grandpa was an adulterer, I’d hurt my boyfriend, I’d quit playing tennis on the cusp of making it, my mom had gone away, and my grandma was dying. Even Morrissey might’ve considered all that too depressing to write a song about.

So right on the border of afternoon and evening, just before the alchemy of each would add an indigo glow to the sky, I blindly took off walking, not sure where I was going, but my aimless trek took me into the older part of our city, by some secluded railroad tracks, and standing on a little hillock above the tracks was a crazy boy everyone was leery of, Scott Pepper.

I looked at him, he looked at me, and what could I say but, “What’s going on, Pepper?”

He called out: “Millie!”

Close enough, I thought.

He boasted cheerfully, “I’m going to f**k-up some Toyotas on a train.”

I could have said, hey, I’m outa here, or don’t do that, but instead I listened as he explained that a train carrying new Toyotas was coming along soon from Kentucky like it did every week, and he had a pile of bricks, so did I want to see him shatter some windshields?

In the end I watched while this arch-hood everyone said would wind up dead or in prison threw bricks down at Toyotas sitting in the open on special train cars, and he got lucky a few times, busting through window glass with a noise like gunshots.

After the train passed he turned to me, obviously riding a wave of adrenaline, and asked wasn’t that awesome, but though I couldn’t believe I was saying it, I told him I could have aimed better than he had.

He flashed a crazy-boy grin and said, “Well you should have then, there were plenty of bricks. Come back next week!”

Then the moment out there in the wild went just a little spooky. The sky was abruptly darker than it was light and Pepper said we had better get away from the tracks in case police had been alerted. As we walked he put his arm around me, and the sweaty skin of his forearm touched my neck, and that contact seemed to do something to break the spell of disconnection I’d been feeling, and in a moment of hyper-reality, I realized no one knew where I was, I had just watched a felony being committed, and I was alone with a certifiable loon who was hyper in the wake of his vandalism.

Don’t get me wrong, Pepper hadn’t been doing anything threatening toward me, in fact he told me I was cooler than he’d thought I was, to which I’d answered, “Yes, I’m just full of surprises.”  (Thing was, I heard myself say “full of cirrhosis” a Freudian slip betraying the fact I knew the disease his father was said to have.)

He must not have caught that though, just kept walking with me til we were beyond the woods and back to where sidewalks were, at which point I complimented his powers of destruction, said goodnight….and ran the heck home.

12th March 2017.

Went out for a walk with Kristi. It was chilly but not too bad. I surprised her by grabbing her hand and licking it. She looked at me non-plussed and I told her I'd just marked her as mine.

12th March 2018.

Ash got to come home. Once we got in, Kristi asked me to go out and pick up a breast pump, which instantly made me incredibly angry. I did not want to leave Ash's side. The wave of rage took me totally by surprise, but I kept control over it. Picked up the pump which cost I think somewhere around £60 or £70 and got used once before Kristi declared she didn't like it and it never got used again.

13th March 2018.

After having him home overnight, Ash had lost too much weight due to jaundice and had to go back in. He spent the night under a UV light and gave every impression of loving it, lying there like some male model posing. We took it in turns to watch him and make sure the goggles protecting his eyes didn't come off. At about 4 am a nurse came in and told me that I wasn't supposed to be there. I told her I'd been told to come in and be prepared to spend the night. There was a bit of an argument before she stormed off saying she was going to find out if I had special permission to stay. No one previously had said anything about me not being able to stay and she never came back.

13th March 1996.

We all sat around listening to the news in disbelief. This wasn't something that happened here. Some of the older guys were in tears as stories filtered through the news. Even at these dark moments, there were stories of heroism. The surgeon who had been operating on children, looking to save their lives even though his own child had been killed, or the teacher who had been shot several times, dragging herself and some children into a cupboard, where she covered them with her own body to protect them. News reporters tracked down the killer's mother, surprising her at her front door. Even though her son had murdered a class, I still felt for her and that the reporters had crossed a line in their eagerness for a "scoop". My dislike for journalists turned into disgust seeing them and how they reacted. I wondered if they were similarly intruding onto the grief of the parents who had lost their children. Dunblane had always been a quiet, unremarkable town. I'd passed through it a few times on the way to other places. It was just one of those towns that were just there for people to have come from. In under 4 minutes 15 children and a teacher had been killed before the gunman turned one of his weapons on himself.

The laws would change shortly afterwards, restricting gun ownership even further after this and to date, we've never had another mass shooting. Dunblane would later achieve fame for another reason, both Andy and Jamie Murray would achieve fame for their tennis playing. Both had been at the school that day, although neither of them were injured in the attack. Gun clubs and owners protested about the new restrictions but the majority were not in the mood to sacrifice their children just so a few people could play with their toys.

March 13, 2020 The plague was coming, and no one seemed ready for it. In our family’s orbit, Tyler’s girlfriend, Kylie----yes, we were also shocked to hear he had a girlfriend---who was pregnant with their son Giovanni, was having Braxton-Hicks contractions at a very bad time to be pregnant at all. Eleven-year-old Daisy, who would soon be separated from us by having to stay put with Tyler and Kylie and Giovanni til the end of shelter in place orders, said when she put her hand on Kylie’s belly, she could feel her muscles pulling tight under her skin. I told Daisy it would be all right, and said I was glad Kylie’s first baby was going to be a boy, since boys seemed notoriously easier to deliver, to which Daisy replied: “You’re never going to let me live that down, are you?” That was my girl!

March 14, 2021 I visited with Aunt Sarah, my mom’s youngest sister, who, though she only lives across town, I am with far too rarely, and she told me sometimes as a child in Ireland she would see the most beautiful wildflowers growing along a path, but when she’d point them out to her friends, none of them saw the flowers, and always thought she was having them on. She said these events faded as she got older, and stopped entirely when she was a teenager, and I told Sarah maybe she was seeing into the fey realm of Tir na nOg, an ability said to be both a gift and a peril. It’s good sometimes to talk to credible people who have had otherworldly things happen to them, since it reminds me that amid all the bogus sensational claims out there, wondrously odd things do happen, and reality consists of more than the visible spectrum alone.

OMG the same thing happened to me when I was little!  Except it wasn’t in Ireland, it was in Chicago.  I used to see big tall bright flowers on the far end of my backyard.  They were so pretty, almost cartoon-like.  Every time I’d see them I would want to go get my mom to show her, but by the time she’d come, they would be gone.  I was so tempted to go closer to them, but something made me feel very cautious.

Isn't that something?  :smile: I think things like that are so amazingly wonderful. I envy you and Sarah.

March 15, 1995 After school that day, the notorious Ides of March, I lost yet another chess match against my father. I’d never beaten him in chess, not once, not ever, never really come close, though I could hold my own against most casual players. It wasn’t that he was highly competitive to the point he set out to destroy his kid in a game, it was just that he was so unusually intelligent and had such a strategist’s mind that he could think far ahead of me as he set about honoring my request that he never “let me win.” Plus, you know, that day, well, whatever, I was in no danger of ending his streak. He was a standout basketball player in his time, good enough to have gone on to play in college had he not taken other paths, but when we’d shoot hoops together in games like Horse, or Around the World, I would win a lot of the time, but I was barely a challenge in chess. My mom didn’t like gambling, so I didn’t learn to play poker til after she left that same winter, and I started playing it a lot, eventually also against my dad, and he was good at it too, but poker’s more random nature evened us up at least to where I could take him maybe a third of the time---he read people with an almost preternatural deftness—and later in the evening as I thought back to that particular afternoon and how jolting it was to come home then of all days to him waiting with a chess board, I wondered how it would have gone if instead of asking me to play chess, he’d have requested poker. It may been interesting, since I was already trying to bluff him.

March 16:
1994: Gina and I watched The Breakfast Club, that to my mind delivered the questionable message that conforming to social standards was more important than being yourself.
1996: Went ziplining in Gatlinburg during spring break with Charlotte Sometimes and my dad.
1997: While Brian was waiting for me to finish braiding my hair before we went to see Private Parts, (he won the coin toss), I was hit by the belated realization that Beetlejuice had probably been lying about that whole “attended Julliard” thing.
2005: Went to my global cooking class, and while covering northern Italian cuisine I paired up with a girl who told me her friend had blown himself up while making meth the night before.
2008 On Palm Sunday Mom and I saw a Passion Play, and I was wrapped in a warm bubble of joy because Landon and I had just found out we were going to have a baby, someone we wouldn’t meet for months but already loved.
2012: Saw a stage production of Come Back to the 5 & Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean and was disappointed to learn it was not about sausage.
2015: My cousin Adam was forced to leave Brazil as an “undesirable foreign person” after his Brazilian-born wife Hilma divorced him for a long list of reasons.
2020: Amid draconian Covid regulations, Tyler’s son Giovanni was born, though I wouldn’t get to meet him for weeks.

March 17, 1993 It was Saint Patrick’s Day, and it snowed a slushy inch, filling emergency rooms around the city with drunks who’d slipped and fallen on various breakable body parts. I wore a shamrock pin so no wisenheimer could pinch me, and came home to write to my favorite college student up in Michigan, telling him he was right in recommending I read Black Water, Joyce Carol Oates’ re-imagination of Chappaquiddick, told from the victim’s perspective. (Such a bad way to die!)

He’d also motivated me to read Peter Straub’s If You Could See Me Now, and John Fowles The Collector, both of which did mind-freaks on me. In one novel a murdered girl (my age!) returned to have her revenge, in the other some psycho-nerd kidnaps a girl who is the object of his twisted devotion. Right down my alley!

Fortunately Brian’s picks were almost always good, and I got into authors I might otherwise never have heard of, but it was like he had his own private book club, membership one, and anything he said was worth reading I’d go out and get.

“Evelyn, I think you’d like Flannery O’Connor.”

“I’m on it, Bri!”

Ah, to be a teenage bibliophile in love….

March 18, 1996 We had a Nigerian priest preside at my school’s morning Mass, and in his homily he told us about the ethnic cleansing of Christians in the rural east of his country, where Islamists wanted to create a fundamentalist state. He said he lived each day there in fear but would be going home that summer determined he would not let violence frighten him away. He spoke of how fortunate we were to live in a country where people could worship as they chose without being killed for their expressions of conscience. This made an impression on me, and that night I asked several people to explain why relative tolerance has mostly been a feature of life in the United States. Answers varied, but somehow I wondered if simple prosperity might’ve bred a contentment which translated into Americans lacking those motivations that drove impoverished Nigerians with little to cling to except a religious identity, to kill others who were different from them. I still don’t know the answer, but I’ve often wondered about that Nigerian priest, and if he remained all right when he went back to his homeland.

March 19, 2001 My dog Charlotte Sometimes died. She was a true friend, a selfless soul, and I miss her very much. It seems like dogs spend their lives loving us and trying their best to make us happy, and I have always felt bad I wasn’t with her when she died, and always imagined she waited for me for as long as she could, missing me, and wondering why I wasn't there. Working for the people I did has cost me time with more than one loved one. It has cost me irreplaceable things.

March 20:
1989: Spent the night with my friend Tracy, and bought a new nightgown for the occasion. Her bedroom was an overdose of pink walls, carpet, furniture, sheets, that I secretly called “Pepto Dismal.”
1992: I learned the Greek root word for agnostic meant “ignorant” and thought I’d finally know something Brian, who was then a senior sent by his school to work in the office of my school, didn’t, so as I was leaving that afternoon I asked if he knew what agnostic literally meant, and he went, “Sure, ‘ignorant’.” Grrr.
1993: Though you can’t spot me in the final version, I (along with about a hundred others) was an extra in a high school hallway scene of a Seth Green movie called Airborne, which had been filmed locally at Western Hills High School.
1996 To get an early start as a junior, my school made the group I was in take practice SATs all day: multiple tests in a row. My brain leaked.
2010 After years of cohabitation following semi-cohabitation, I got married on the vernal equinox carrying a bouquet of dandelions. I was secretly sad that the man I married was surely going to be a widower soon, and my daughter would never remember me.
2018: My six year old son’s school called us after he bloodied the nose of the boy who’d punched his little sister. The school suspended my son, but I told him I was proud of him because in the face of anything you defend your family til either victory or death, no middle ground.

March 21, 2008 It was Good Friday, and I participated in a local tradition dating back to 1861, wherein the faithful gather below a 19th century church built atop the tallest of the seven hills that surround our downtown, and climb the stairs to pray, or in my stubborn case, merely walk up them, albeit with participating family members. My mom was there, as was my Aunt Christie, veteran of decades of past climbs, and my four year old cousin Alba, who’d been adopted from China. It was a cold morning and the sun was emerging beautifully above the horizon, and from the hilltop miles of surrounding area lay visible, including the river, which was flooding yet again, swelling above its banks into two states. I was two years away from my personal Great Awakening, so I didn’t join in praying but I did feel a connection with tradition there, the times I’d climbed those steps with my late grandma especially, and as far as rituals went, it was a beautiful one. It was also the case that Landon and I were still keeping my pregnancy secret for a little longer, and I remained euphoric. That night he and I saw The Spiderwick Chronicles with his cousin Vince and his wife Lindsey, who were bickering, but to Landon and me our baby was bringing nothing but joy.

21st March 2014.

I discovered that Kristi had never heard of Kate Bush so I spent a few hours playing her greatest hits for her. I didn't play her weirdest stuff. As a rough guide to her, I described Kate as being the Bjork of the 80s. This caused quite a few Bush fans to get all rilled up, but I stuck by my description regardless.

21st March 2018.

Ash fell asleep in my arms while I listened to some Ozzy. I considered this to be a good sign. I dressed Ash up in an outfit someone had knitted for him, which was a tuxedo. I also watched a fringe politician (Nigel "Rubber Goon Face" Farage) try to score political points by throwing dead fish into a river. Maybe if he'd thrown them in while they were alive they might have done some good, or maybe even donated them to hungry people to feed them. Still, maybe other fish ate at the dead ones and their lives were not taken in vain.

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March 22, 1992 I was staying the weekend with my grandparents, it was barely after midnight and I hadn’t been in bed long when my grandpa knocked softly at the door and said if I wasn’t asleep he and grandma wanted me to come see something. So I put on my robe and crossed the hall to my grandparents’ room and Grandma pointed outside, where on the lawn was a herd of about eight beautiful whitetail does and their spotted fawns, grazing in the moonlight. Deer were not as numerous then as today and to my young eyes there was something magical in that unexpected sight. We stood in the darkness and watched them til they drifted into the shadows of the forest, and I vowed to myself to always remember that occasion.

22nd March 2011.

I got home after another short-notice deployment. I'd walked into work and been told to grab my to-go bag, and be gone. 47 hours of non-stop travelling, no sleep for the 63 hours, 1 cheeseburger, 1 pasty and 1 can of coke made up my entire food intake for the entire time and 1 fist fight. I was cranky and on edge by the time I got home. Hell, I was that way by the time I got to where we were going and found the person I was delivering the goods to was an arsehole. After dealing with him I went back to the cabin and made him unload the lorry on his own. Maybe the driver helped, but I certainly wasn't going to help out the ungrateful prick. I was amazed there wasn't a charge waiting for me by the time I got back. Maybe his own management knew what the guy was like and decided not to back him up, or maybe my management figured that someone would have had to really push me to get me to act that way. I desperately needed a shower, but I collapsed into my bed first and got cleaned up after I woke back up. I didn't mind the trip though. I meant I had played my (small) part in the downfall of Gaddafi and that we'd finally have a measure of revenge for Locharbie. I didn't care whether or not the guy they'd had in prison was a patsy or bore some degree of guilt, he was the one at the top that I held responsible.

March 23, 1995 My dad was overseas talking to my mother about their dying marriage, and while I remained mad at her for leaving, I also desperately hoped she’d come home and everything would be all right again: denying to myself that things had not been all right for a long time. While Dad was away I was staying with my Aunt Christie in her Italianate Victorian home that sat in a neighborhood made up of 1800s houses with century-old oaks lining the quiet streets, and that chilly afternoon she and I walked to the local library, where her book club was discussing The English Patient. Coming back afterward my aunt said she was sure my mom missed me and loved me, and I said, “I love her too, that’s why I didn’t leave her.” She then told me her own daughter, my cousin Allie, was “stolen away” from her in court by her wealthy first husband, who then alienated Allie and her older brother Adam from her, and Aunt Christie said she wouldn’t wish the negative feelings her own daughter sometimes had for her on anyone else, and hoped I’d never turn on my mother as her daughter had turned on her. All in all the week or so I spent with my aunt was one of the happier events of the spring, but that day she had me feeling slapped by guilt.

23rd March 2015.

We had just spent the weekend in Edinburgh. It was a fun weekend, although I quickly learned my suspicions about googlemaps were entirely correct when it gave us the wrong directions. We had a hotel in Leith that was not the advertised 10-minute walk from the train station. Even walking at my top speed I couldn't have made it in that time. We had some good walks though and really enjoyed seeing Spamalot on stage, and Big Hero 6 in the cinema (I have a very vivid memory of some kid bursting out into tears when the brother died).

What the hey, it's after midnight, so it's tomorrow.


March 24, 2020 Are ghosts real? I know when someone is “as much asleep as awake” the part of the brain that handles dreaming is still active, and despite my enthusiasm to leap at the one and only possible ghost sighting in our old house, I always get snagged on the fact my husband had been in just such a half-asleep state when he saw what he saw on our stairs. Or maybe I should say when he saw who he saw on our stairs.
 
It was during the pandemic lockdown, and Landon got out of bed in the night to go down and see why our dog Skipper was whining at the foot of the staircase---apparently for no discernible reason---and as he was coming back, “as asleep as awake,” for about a split second he saw my late grandpa standing on the steps looking straight at him.

My grandpa had passed away thirteen months before I met Landon, but he knew what he looked like well enough to recognize him: six-four, strong-featured, handsome, sturdy of build, with a piercing gaze.

Landon said he felt a chill from head to toe, but didn’t wake me up to tell me, though when he described it the next morning he told me something that made my heartbeat speed up, because he said my grandpa had been standing with a foot on one stair and one on the stair beneath it, and I remembered when Grandpa would stop and talk on those same stairs in the more than thirty-five years he lived in that house, that was exactly how he always seemed to pose.
 
I would spend hours that night and on a number of subsequent nights sitting on the landing hoping to see something, but to my disappointment didn’t and I still haven’t. Yes, the half-asleep mind is a fantasy-maker, but…what if?

Not my history, but...

24th March 1984.

The breakfast club met for detention.

March 25:
1998 Thwacked my ankle on a bedpost getting up, and when Jackie asked about the resulting red mark, I told her in my sleep aliens had put a tiny metal cylinder under my skin. She said, “Ankles are not where aliens put things, El.”
2006: Saw George Carlin on stage. He seemed….not himself.
2008: Went to an exhibit of John Singer Sargent and Winslow Homer watercolor paintings.
2010: We were in Rio on our honeymoon. It rained. Lots.
2017: Went to the wedding of my husband’s foreman’s foster son, and got the impression Landon and I were the only people there with a blood-alcohol content below .20.
2018: At breakfast in a restaurant, Clare’s mother, Bethany, fired off her strangest-ever passive-aggressive jab at me: “A woman ought to be married in her early twenties, not in her thirties, so her husband gets her breasts in their prime.” Even strangers one table over stared at her.
2020: Learned that Gerald, my next-door neighbor growing up, had died of coronavirus.

March 26, 2021 South of us there’d been dangerous storms, and while we were unaffected, the gusts gave us a windy night that moaned through the treetops, making banshee sounds in our woods. I couldn’t sleep, so I went downstairs to sit in the dark, and after a while my twelve-year-old came down too, so she and I listened to the wind for a while, then put on an old radio serial called Night Beat, about a Chicago crime reporter, and until we finally dozed off on the couch after the wind at last went meek, Daisy and I shared a fun little adventure amid noir tales of another era.

March 27, 1995 I messed up kinda bad. While my dad was away in Ireland with my mom, I was still staying with my wonderful Aunt Christie, who told me she trusted me and wasn’t going to “ride shotgun” on me while I was there. And what did I do in return? Stayed out for an entire weekend. Afterward I was exceedingly, guiltily, sorry, and after listening to her pour out her soul about how I abused her trust, I told her I’d never do it again, that I was sorry and I loved her with all my heart, then contritely tiptoed around her house the rest of the day. She and I had been planning to watch the Academy Awards and see how many categories Forrest Gump won, but I went to bed early worrying I had ruined our relationship. Thank goodness she forgave me for being so stupidly rude like that, when there really was no excuse whatsoever, and only one motivation.

28th March 2009.

I was preparing to leave the RAF at my 9-year point (shortly after this they offered me a promotion to convince me to stay), and as part of this, I'd decided just to sign up for every diversion I could. Today I went white water rafting.

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I took a slight dislike to our river guide that day, although that was a very minor thing on what was otherwise a very enjoyable day. I'd encounter him again years later as it turned out he was a member of Kristi's church, although this was only so he could try and get close to the female missionaries. He creeped me out and while I'd tell Kristi that he could come round to the house I also put the condition on it that she had to have someone else in the house as well. While I had no proof of this, he struck me as the kind of guy who didn't understand the meaning of the word no. He moved out of the area around 4 years ago which was only a minor relief as he'd been willing to travel a couple of hundred miles and back to go see the missionaries when they moved location. However, this was all in the future. Managed not to fall out of the boat or be capsized.

March 28:
1993: Did an all-girl school retreat called What Are You Doing For God’s Sake, where they fed us only bread and cheese and nuts (rainbow sherbet on the last afternoon) but except for making us get up before dawn three days in a row, it wasn’t bad. It was run by very old nuns and some married women who probably should have been nuns, and they tried to convince us how fulfilling it’d be if we became nuns as well. I was aware I was too ruled by wonton desires to thrive in celibate life, but enjoyed the retreat more than I admitted.
1996: Got yelled at because my practice SAT scores stopped showing improvement. My advisor, Jeff, told me he was sorry the dean treated me like that, and I told him I didn’t care about the in-my-face yelling as much as he might’ve expected.
1999 My roommate, Jackie, expressed a desire to become Catholic, a process that involved six months of instructional classes, and asked if I would be her sponsor. Though professing to be an odd choice, I agreed.
2001: My friend Mitch, the “channel medium” gave me a copy of Seth Speaks; I found it banal.
2002: Dana’s third child, Charles, was born. He’s grown up to be a good-natured big-boned lad, who hasn’t seemed to have found his path in life just yet.
2005: The man in Austin told me something I have often thought about, that I was like a river that went around a rock, while his ex-wife was like a rock stuck in a river. She was a stressed-out person.
2022: Went to a Hindu temple and unexpectedly found it one of the more powerful moments of my life, like the air held vibrating energy I’ve felt a only a few times, always theretofore at certain sites out in nature, like the burrens in Ireland, or some nights on the overlook in the woods beyond our house.

March 29, 2005 Drove downtown to Saks Fifth Avenue on a sunny, pleasant day to look for U2’s new line of clothing, Edun (“Nude” backward), and heard on the radio that we’d just broken the record for twenty-four hour rainfall total, that Johnny Cochran had died, and Jerry Falwell was in critical condition. (How my younger self would have been gauchely cheered by that.) I wasn’t impressed with Edun, so I walked a few blocks to Ticket Master and set Landon and me up to see Conor Oberst in Cleveland on May 16th, then went to my Global Cooking class and made Cuban cuisine. I told someone there how when I was in college my cousin Magda invited me to go to still-illegal Cuba with her by using an Irish passport, and the idea of visiting a Communist country did appeal to me. What I left out was how going there would’ve been a bad idea because of my employment, and I didn’t think risking termination and possibly prison in two nations made it the best idea ever floated my way.

March 30, 2022 The man in Austin, whose already-dying marriage I may have unintentionally brought to an expedited end a number of years ago, unexpectedly called me and said: “I’m in town, would you like to have lunch?”

We were going to sit outside a café but the wind was too strong, so we talked in his car. Since the early 2000s when we’d been close---and while some people didn’t believe it, especially his wife, our relationship was platonic---he’d changed in many ways, and though we were only a few months apart in age, he had risen so high within our employers that it could be said he was someone with power, which made our once more or less equal standing very uneven in 2022.
 
He said he missed what we’d had for five years, the confidences, all of it, and most of all missed me. He told me he was happy with his second wife and his children, but he also didn’t have anyone who represented what I had been to him twenty years earlier; if nothing else, someone who simply understood the madness of the job. He asked how I’d feel about being in each other’s lives again.

It was like being handed a beautiful venomous serpent you know you should flinch away from, but you find yourself reaching for it anyway.

In the year since I agreed to what he asked I’ve only heard from him twice, and those have been “how are you” check-ins. I’m good with that, it’s probably safer, but I do wonder why he changed his mind.

One year ago today I went to see Judas Priest (for the 5th time) and Queensryche (for the 4th) together at the Prudential Center in Newark, NJ. Fantastic show!

March 31, 1994 Because we were off school til after Holy Weekend---in your face, publics---I was allowed to stay up late, so I invested that freedom in talking long-distance for three hours with my favorite college student up in Michigan. I began by asking him, “Hey, Brian, know how to join the Sylvia Plath Baking Club?”

“How, FLN?”

“Head first!”

He told me he was going to ditch school in Michigan (generally a good idea if you’re from Ohio) and go locally in the fall, something that made me happy to hear, since the heart wants what it wants, even if the brain tells the heart it has little chance of getting its possibly unwise desires.

He was getting sleepy toward the end of our call and said, “Evelyn, do you know what’s the strangest thing in my life right now?” I thought he was going to say it was his interaction with me, but he said, “The fact I am living off Raman noodles and have seven dollars in my wallet to last the next four days, but there’s thousands of dollars sitting in my bank account that I won’t touch because my dad put it there, and I want to earn my own way.”

He was so determined to support himself that when he came home that summer he gave his dad back all his money.

April 1, 1994 It was Good Friday, and also April Fool’s Day, and as my mom and grandma and aunt and I walked up the tall hillside with its long flights of steps leading to the Immaculata Church atop Mount Adams, that old local tradition, I kept thinking back to the day before, when  my quip about Jesus pulling off the first April Fool’s Day prank didn’t go over well with my mom, and how I tried to redeem myself in her lovely green eyes by going to confession.
 
Inside the ornate 1800s confessional I told the priest I almost never confessed anymore, and he asked why and I said I just didn’t. Then he asked how old I was, and I said fifteen, and he asked if I believed he had the power to forgive sins, to which I said I didn’t know if I did or not. He said, “Well, I do have that power whether you accept the truth of it or not, since after all, a tree does not have to believe in photosynthesis to experience it.”

Hmmm, this man had less sense of the ironic than my mother. He continued, “As long as you admit you do wrong in your life and are sorry for it, your sins can be forgiven, even if you lack perfect faith.”

Since I was there and my mom was out in the church, I went ahead and made an unenthusiastic confession of some topical things like fibbing, self-centeredness, pride, annoyance with my parents and various peers, and my increasingly recurring outlook of condescension toward confession. He told me my sins were just venial and he hoped I kept them that way, because only a fool would not be afraid of going to Hell, a topic mentioned by Jesus at least seventy times.

It felt like a challenge to be told my sins were ‘just venial,’ so hoping to impress him I found myself saying, “Well there was something else….”

That was how an anonymous priest on Holy Thursday became the first person I ever told about the nameless thing the summer before that had constituted my one and only shared quasi-carnal act, but the priest failed to be impressed, just assigned me Hail Marys before dismissing me with my ego so bruised I wanted to huff and tell him: that does so count as something!

I walked away from that suckfest of a confession so fast my mom leaped from off a kneeler and chased after me going, “Wait, don’t you have to say some penance?”

“Yes,” I called back, “but I’ll do it later.”

I don’t think I ever did.

On the night of Good Friday, Gina slept over for Holy Saturday, and I told her about the trauma of that confession, and how the object of your love pulling you tightly against him in his car while you’re wearing a dress, and him holding onto you while your legs are on either side of him and a definite stirring on his part went on beneath you, separated by merest millimeters of clothing that was your underwear and his pants, was definitely something a priest should’ve take disapproving note, unlike that jerk.

Gina simply said, “Maybe you shouldn’t use confession as a chance to brag, El.” Then she added, “He’s too old for you.”

Et tu, girlfriend?

1st of April 2015.

I made a Facebook post announcing that I'd been offered a promotion again. 3 months later people were still asking me about this even though multiple times it had come up that it had been an April Fools prank. It was the last one I'd pull, small as it was and compared to some of the previous years quite a damp squib.

1st of April 1995.

It had taken months of planning, but finally, we were ready. Uniforms had been snuck out of the laundry, fake IDs had been made and we were ready. On the big day, we transported our special surprise the 17 miles to its destination, got dressed in our borrowed gear and snuck inside.

The Aprils Fools joke this year had been decided as taking dinner to the local hospital ward for the addicts and alcoholics wing. While this might not seem like much of a prank initially, it was cold Turkey they were served. The whole thing went off perfectly as planned as provided much amusement to our local lord of mischief. It was the first time we'd all worked together on a project like this, rather than trying to one-up each other.

1st of April 1990.

As it was a Sunday and I had nothing else better to do I took a walk into Saltcoats. Most of the shops would still be closed. The remaining influence of the church that prevented anyone from doing anything useful or fun on that day still prevailed, although anyone could see its hold was weakening against the commercial appeal. Still, the TV was full of legally mandated religious programs that were as dull as ditchwater and no one really watched, even if it was on the screen.  It was one of those cold, but bright days. On a whim, while walking along I noticed a bill poster outside a newsagent, declaring "Armed Robbers Wanted!". I couldn't help myself and walked over to it, adding beneath it "Apply within." Later that day I mentioned it to some of my friends who decided that the next year we'd have to have a contest to see who could pull off the best joke. Over the years this would grow to involve japes that would take months of planning and in some cases have repercussions that would last even longer. Still, on this day I had no idea how this one simple spur of the moment joke would spiral upwards and take wings.

April 1, 2019  The senior class, for their annual prank, transformed my room into a haunted house/graveyard, complete with headstones for all the students who had left their class prior to graduation, and an extra large one for our headmaster, Mr. Bowers, who was stepping down at the end of the year (they said he was "graduating with them"!).  They also put a full-sized black coffin in the middle of my room, which was left with me as a gift in honor of my famous Halloween story "The Black Coffin."  The coffin is still propped up in the corner of my room today.

April 2, 2007 Went to Major League Baseball’s Opening Day, which always kicks off downtown in honor of the Reds being the first professional baseball team. Landon’s father’s connection to TV news scored us a media pass that let us into some cool places at the stadium, and on my late grandpa’s behalf, as a proxy, I got to shake Pete Rose’s hand, something I had also done twenty years before when my grandpa got us into another meet ‘n greet. (I don’t think Pete Rose remembered me!) That evening I picked up my mom and we saw Celtic Woman in concert, which was better than it might sound. My mom’s boss/close friend had been in a serious car accident in March, and she’d been spending a lot of time helping his boyfriend take care of him during his recovery, so I was hoping to give her a night out to enjoy herself. I drove home to the loveliest moonrise, golden, full, huge and close to the horizon, inspiring me to pull over and get out just to stare at it. Truthfully life can be filled with Zen moments, if you look for them.

April 3, 1984 It was the tenth anniversary of the largest tornado outbreak in the history of the world, and our city had been right in the center of it. Maybe as many as a hundred-fifty tornadoes hit the Midwest and upper South that day, one of them west of downtown (shown on live TV) was rated F-5 the strongest twister on the Fujita scale.
 
Before Doppler radar, a tornado’s intensity was typically identified by the damage left behind, and with some of the most severe F-5 tornadoes, the horrifying fact was they left little wreckage and debris behind like lesser tornadoes did, their path was often simply swept clean. Nothingness. People couldn’t even find where their houses were in devastated subdivisions, it was all one big empty zone of total barrenness, with paved streets and cement sidewalks sometimes lifted and taken away, and the ground left as bare dirt, since the grass got ripped up by its roots. We’re talking erasure of a landscape here.
 
The mile-wide monster that barely missed downtown was so mighty that as it passed over the river separating Kentucky and Ohio, the bottom was momentarily visible. A thirty-foot deep, furlong-wide river, countless tons of flowing water, and the tornado sucked it away to expose the river’s floor. The water also turned the tornado eerily white for a moment, until it spun off the river water, flinging it in all directions at nearly 300 MPH, hard enough to leave bullet-like indentations in the concrete pillars of I-75’s Brent Spence Bridge, visible to this day.

So needless to say everyone who lived in the city on April 3, 1974  had a story about that nightmare of a day, and in 1984, amid the news marking the occasion, I remember listening to my dad and grandma and aunt tell my horrified mom about their experiences, how the storm approached as a wall of jade-hued blackness, and my dad still wasn’t home from his senior year in high school, and my aunt and grandma stood out front in those pre-cell phone days and nervously hoped he’d hurry. Finally with the boiling sky overhead lowering into fjord-like clouds, my dad drove up, mostly curious and slightly unaware of the magnitude of the danger around him, and he wanted to stay out front and watch, but my five-foot-five grandma grabbed my six-two dad by the ear and pulled him to the basement minutes before everything burst loose outside in gale-force out-drafts, uprooting trees and slamming down spiked, softball-size hailstones.

The only injury among them was my dad’s bruised ear, but just to the northwest a small tornado crossed the circle expressway and stayed on the ground for several minutes, damaging structures and pushing a telephone pole off center. (It’s tilted to this day.)

An hour later it was all over, since the front hustled past at seventy miles an hour, and the skies turned partly sunny, and my dad went and played basketball that evening with his friends in a school gym that had no electricity for lights, so people held flashlights on the hoops.

That afternoon in 1984 when I was hearing about all this as a curious five-year-old, my dad turned to me and asked if I knew what the moral to that day in 1974 was.

“No matter how beautiful it can be,” he said, “you can ever completely trust the sky.”  

(When I would tell this caution to my friend Mark another ten years in the future, he’d add: “Or trust girls.”)

April 4, 1995 Dana called me with shocking news, telling me she got this impulse to visit our comatose grandma at her care center, and when she got there she found Grandma’s door locked from inside, so she knocked, but it was at least ten seconds before the door was opened by our twenty-three year old cousin Adam, who had a guilty look on his face. He had been in the room alone with our grandmother, and her head was resting strangely, with one of her pillows sideways under her neck, like it had been pushed back under her fast, and Dana was overcome by the strongest suspicion that Adam had been preparing to smother her.

Dana said Adam walked by her fast, straight to the parking lot, so after glancing in at our grandma she went after him and asked what he’d been doing, and of all things for him to say, he asked if she realized how much money our grandfather was spending keeping our grandma alive.
 
Dana said this revolted her and she asked, “Is that what this is about, he’s spending your inheritance?”

He didn’t answer, just got in his car, and Dana reached in and punched him as hard as she could, then called the police, who said there was no proof any crime had been committed in the room but that Adam could file charges against her for hitting him. He would always maintain he hadn’t done anything that night except go see his own grandma, but Dana to this day believes otherwise.

4th April 2016.

Discussed with a workmate how well Vladamir Putin would fit into the WWE as a comedy heel character.

Nothing has changed there then. Still a cartoon villain.

April 5:
1991: Watched The Exorcist and cried for the old priest, who was sick but still went to help another person. Twelve year old girls can be empathetic creatures.
1994: Read The Bell Jar while I went with Gina’s family to her brother Mark’s baseball game, which his team won 23-0.
1997: To St. Xavier’s Church downtown and free-associated about life with a patient Jesuit named Father Huber, who often told me I had “scrupulosity” and worried too much.
2004: My co-worker in Austin asked if I’d read The Tibetan Book of the Dead, and I quoted: “In the Occident, where death is much feared, the art of dying is little practiced.” Then he admitted his wife was shifting blame for their dying marriage onto me, and when I told him she had to know we were just close friends, he said, “But we’re not, are we?” I said I should give them space, and he said, “Please don’t, I’ll fix this.” (It was soon a mess.)
2005: Saw Little Shop of Horrors on stage.
2013: To Shabbat services with Edie and her family, a mixture of formal and informal, scholarly and comfortable, the past and the eternal now. Once again I envied Jewish men their yarmulkes.
2019: Almost seven-year-old Trinity, who’s never known a shy moment in her life, put on a dance show in our living room. She planned it, printed up tickets, charged us a quarter each, then wore her “dance outfit” and headband, and twirled and pranced and leaped and stopped mid-show after announcing, “So thirsty!” before drinking juice and finishing her second half. Best concert money I ever spent.
2021 I went out that morning and leaned over the balcony, and below me was the most beautiful, scintillating dewdrop. It radiated a bronze hue into many eyelash-fine strands of light, and as I changed my perspective, it shone in green and blue and golden rays. I vowed to remember that moment. 

April 6, 1994 Dana picked me up so I could gawk while she got her belly button pierced. She selected a 14K gold US-made ring because she said Chinese jewelry could make you sick, and though she was nervous, she laid still as a statue til it was done, then bled like crazy while the area swelled. I asked if it hurt much, and she said yes, even high on adrenaline. Then she drove to Arby’s, where she got a large jamocha shake and a huge wedge-shaped cherry turnover, saying, “f**k calories, I need sugar after using so much adrenaline.” I watched her eat without getting anything myself, which she said was bad manners and griped, “You’re making me feel like a pig for eating in front of you.”  She then, for the first time, called me “Fallen Saint” her nickname for at least a year til it lost its savor on her tongue, so I told her, “If you don’t shut up with that, I’ll pull out your piercing.” She threw a curly fry in my hair and said she liked it when I was assertive, so in the spirit of assertiveness I ate the curly fry even though it had been defiled.

April 7:
1989: Took a school field trip to the factory where Airheads candy was made.
2005: Paid an eyewitness to a death a thousand dollars to tell me what he saw.
2016: Listened appalled as my dad told me a major reason he was divorcing his second wife was he was bored with her.
2017: My husband informed me he had been visiting a terminally ill woman with whom he used to be in love in the ‘90s, and who was on a heart transplant list. Soon our daughter would begin visiting her too…
2018: Took my two youngest to a firefighters’ museum.
2020: Read a shocking/humorous declassified Cold War file that showed in the event of war, the KGB would immediately target Walter Cronkite, believing his death would disrupt the dissemination of US “wartime propaganda.” In response to the KGB’s plans, the CIA was instead to immediately take Cronkite into custody in the event of hostilities, and place him in a safe location, where he could broadcast….US wartime propaganda.
2021 Tired this night as I worked far from home, I found myself alone and writing a dialogue that felt like communicating with another person. I’d read about automatic writing, which apparently is documented as a psychological phenomenon, just never expected to experience it, and still don't know what to make of it.

7th April 2015.

I visited my FLGS (friendly local games store) in Glasgow, which was no longer local. Not that it was overly friendly either. I mean I liked Tom, but the word for him would have been odd. If Nylarthotep had a human avatar, it would have been Tom. Still I liked him and he always gave me a 10% discount. I'd been buying games from him since my first RPG (WFRP 1st edition). He wouldn't be closing his doors until May (my birthday no less) and we already had another trip planned down to Glasgow before he was due to shut, so I told him I'd be back to spent too much money one more time. I felt sad about his closing like little else.

7th April 2009.

Having spent the day clearing out the possessions of a dead man who I had never met before and whose name I didn't know. The whole thing was done in complete silence, not a word exchanged between myself and the other guy I was doing the job with. I'd have paid good money to have some music on or something to break the atmosphere.

8th April 2013.

It was announced that ex-prime minister Maggie Thatcher had died. "Hey, Ho the witch is dead" went straight to number one on the download charts. Someone interrupted my celebrations on her death to point out she had been a person with a still-living family. I replied so were all the people she put out of jobs and the lives she ruined still had to go on. I had no doubt her children (one is a journalist and the other an arms dealer who was involved in a plot to overthrow an African country) would survive and be fine. Many of her policies (not all of which were bad), still have ramifications echoing through today, but the longest-lasting ones have had powerfully effective negative traits, even the ones that I agree with.

As it was approaching our two-month anniversary, but we were still having to live in different countries, I booked Kristi for an online date. We both put on The Princess Bride and watched it as together as it was possible on different continents with an ocean between us. We each had a picnic and made the best of our circumstances. Although we weren't expecting to be reunited for another 4 months, we'd get a surprise when her visa was approved much more quickly than the 6-months we'd been told we'd have to wait. Still we didn't know that this night and it was a magical evening together.

April 8, 1994 Listened to Concrete Blonde in the car coming home after school with Mom, who stopped at the park for twenty minutes while I practiced tennis serves on an empty court, then went to Gina’s, where we were supposed to be doing our usual mountain of homework together, but instead we crossed the creek near the end of our street to go to the store for Doritos and Mountain Dews, and came back to see my mom had the news on and they were saying Kurt Cobain had killed himself, and in my shock I thought they were saying Kirk Cameron had, then it hit me who they meant, and I stood motionless with the bag from the store clutched in my hand. In death he’d become the year’s biggest celebrity among people my age, far outshining River Phoenix from last fall, but before the night was over I heard this joke: “Did you know Kurt Cobain had blue eyes? Yeah, one ‘blew’ this way, and one ‘blew’ that way.” Ugh.

Last year- on this day, I was a year younger than I am today.

About a year later, some anti-drug group put up a billboard with Cobain's picture and a slogan that read:
"I need drugs like I need a hole in my head."
I laughed at the time, but in retrospect, it was pretty tasteless.

Drugs are a symptom of something in your head that makes feel the need to do drugs. Anger, pain, confusion.
I drank for the same reason. Can't cope. I know. I tried to shoot myself with a 12 gauge slug. Didn't work. It was on the floor and I triggered it with my toe. Jumped. Good thing I was on the second floor! Scared the f**k out of my neighbors!

April 9:
1993: Good Friday, up at sunrise and walked the Immaculata’s steps with my grandma, who’d done this since 1934. Had tea afterward on Fountain Square, by the 1871 Genius of the Waters statue, symbol of the city.
1994: Down a set, I changed to a western grip on my tennis racquet to get more topspin, and came back to win the match. Tennis is a more subtle sport than most people think.
1995: Woke up with a cold, so laid in bed most of the day and watched it rain while reading about Coco Chanel’s love affair with a Nazi.
1997: My dad bought me a new dress and shoes and took me out for dinner at a fancy restaurant in Hyde Park called J’s, where the maître-d’ thought I was his date, which made my dad chuckle but made me feel like hiding under the tablecloth the rest of the time we were there.
1998: While President Clinton visited Kentucky, my birth state, I saw that someone greeted him with a sign that read: “Hands Off Are Tobacco.”
2005: Got up early with Landon and watched the royal wedding. Why? Why not?
2022 We don’t normally get snow in April but this day we had the sort that soaks you like rain, clumpy streaks falling like lazy fireworks, and stuck inside, my thirteen year old and her friend watched a video on Sufi dancing and decided to try it, only to end up lying on the floor, motion sick.

9th April 2020.

Convinced Ash to start walking by having me and Kristi sit on opposite sides of the room, then putting him in the middle we then alternated in asking him for cuddles. He got up and started running back and forward between us. I'd been sure he could walk for months and just needed a reason to get up and try it. I took a video of it for a couple of minutes, but in total we spent 45 minutes with him running back and forth.

9th April 2017.

After trying to get to see it for quite a while, I finally got my hands on a copy of The Void. I sat down with much anticipation and was not disappointed. While it had its limitations as a movie, I felt it worked well within them. It wasn't the best Lovecraftian film I'd seen, but it came close.

9th April 2010.

I went to see Clash of the Titans today. My hopes were that it would have stop motion monsters and no bloody owl, or failing that at least not be terrible. I was to be disappointed on all counts.

April 10:
1987: School field trip to White Hall, the home of 19th century Kentucky statesman Cassius Clay.
1994: Heard my first rumor that Courtney had Kurt killed.
1996: Read Brian’s dad’s journal of his 1973 European trip that told of seeking Jim Morrison’s grave, and fleeing after flinging a bottle at a giant German, who had hold of a protesting waitress.
2007: Went to Houston to see a museum showing of Roman art and artifacts.
2009: My Irish aunt told me her toddler was being joked about at day care over here for having a foreskin, apparently the American workers’ only experience with ever seeing one. I told her people everywhere grow provincial in their ethnocentrism.
2014 I was upset to be summoned to federal court in New York, where several co-workers had been held in contempt for refusing to answer the same unanswerable questions I knew I’d be asked.
2016 Stunned to learn my friend Amy had been diagnosed with breast cancer.
2018: Was offered a position doing deep background checks on red-flagged job applicants. Easy work, regular hours, bor-ing.
2019: Chose to attend my daughter’s soccer match instead of doing Game of Thrones trivia night at Rhinegiest Brewery.

April 11, 1987 My parents (well, mostly my dad) took me the USAF Museum, a cool place. Rockets, jets, old planes, all free to see. Had no idea then the role WPAFB would one day play in my future. Stopped by Pizza Hut afterwards and got this dense stuffed pizza called “priatza,” and I couldn’t even finish one piece. Went to a book store near the museum called The Mountaintop, and my dad got a book about the mystic George Gurdjieff, and I got a bookmark made to look like a rainbow, which hadn’t been appropriated back then, so was still just a pretty rainbow. Drove home to Kentucky, where we’d lived for a year and would for another two, and helped my mom with her garden that always grew splendidly for her, as if she brought some fey magic to the Bluegrass State. Sat on the back patio at twilight and told my grandma about my day, the cordless phone sizzling with static every time a jet went overhead aimed at the nearby international airport. Eight was a pretty good year in the Ellieverse, and that was a darn fine day.

12th April 2016.

It was an early start. MT collected me from the house a couple of hours earlier than I needed to be picked up because an officer was going to the airport too but for an earlier flight. I was a bit miffed about this as it cut short my last few hours with Kristi, but it's all part of the job. When I'd went to book my flights the travel cell had said if I found any suitable flights, let them know and they'd book the requested flight for me. It was slightly gratifying to see the officer's face as he waited in line to book with Easyjet while I went off to the exclusive departure lounge for British Airways. It was only an hour-long flight to London and then I'd to drive a hire car to Brize. Bearing in mind that I had only just passed my test, this was not a drive I was to enjoy. The Sat Nav failed and nowhere seemed to sell paper maps any more. It took three times as long to get there as it should have, but  I got there in the end. Then it was a 14-hour flight southwards with a brief stopover in Ascension. I had never been anywhere quite as humid as that before. The entire flight they kept bringing us out more food. There was no inflight entertainment, but I'd been expecting that so brought books. I didn't dare fall asleep as those who did sleep just got food piled on top of them.

After the flight landed in the Falklands I quickly met my predecessor, got a handover and then we all went out drinking. He was due to leave in the morning. I got a quick phone home to Kristi to let her know I'd arrived while drug dogs ran over everyones luggage. As far as I could see they didn't find any though.

April 12, 1991 I think I was traumatized. The day before my dad had taken me to the site of the Beverly Hills Supper Club, where 165 people perished during a fire on Memorial Day weekend 1977. It was overgrown with weeds and scrub-trees, but on the ground there were also charred textiles, broken plates, and scorched dinnerware, and Dad had paced off the distance from the cracked paving of the drive to show me where the vast Cabaret Room had been, where most of the guests had died piled atop one another while fighting to reach the single exit as smoke choked their lungs. Later in bed I had nightmares, and my mom came in and sat with me, and on this day, the 12th she was giving my dad a cold shoulder after demanding, “Why on God’s blue Earth would you take her someplace like that?” I tried to tell her I wanted to go but Mom was incurably bent out of shape. In fact she possessed the Irish superstition that you could visit a place and bring its energies---good or bad---home with you, something she believed we had clearly done. For a long time after that, to be honest, the Beverly Hills tragedy was an unfriendly tenant haunting the corridors of my young brain.

April 13, 2001 It was Good Friday once more, and I was working a week-long stretch at a site on the East Coast, so I couldn’t be with my family. If I had been able to go home, I would actually have picked a bad time, since the entire city was shut down under curfew amid the worst riots since 1883, with arson and lootings and vandalism and the retaliatory beatings of innocent people by mobs, all of which the subtly supportive national media seemed content to sum up as “protests.” The riots were so bad that downtown business owners would soon flee to the suburbs, leaving block upon block of the once-trendy uptown deserted, and sending the economy crashing so hard in those same urban neighborhoods most affected by the lawlessness that it would take a generation to recover, and leave already-impoverished residents jobless. My main memory of the day was of my dad telling me Marines were on guard around the federal building where he worked, and that the tradition of the faithful walking up the hillside steps to the Immaculata Church had been canceled for the first time in 150 years. I’m not sure what good the people vandalizing their fellow citizens thought would come from their actions, if they thought at all, but nothing did.

April 14, 1995 It was yet another Good Friday, and some six years before the tradition would be paused for rioters, and a quarter century before it would be again during Covid, I walked the Immaculata steps with my Aunt Christie. We were doing it on behalf of my grandma, who before her stroke that winter had not missed the tradition in over half a century. When I got home my cousin Allie, who was sick with strep throat she’d picked up on spring break in Cancun, asked if I’d felt Grandma’s spirit with us on the steps, and much as I would have liked to have said yes, I had to tell her I hadn’t. I didn’t talk to her long, though, because I had to be someplace my mom, if she was still in town, never would have let me go on Good Friday, and that evening I went to Dayton with Brian to hear an REM tribute band that sounded more like REM than REM did, and didn’t get back til after two. Yeah, a real sacred holy day.

April 15:
1985: My grandma came home from visiting Caracas, still nice back then before socialism, and brought me a Spanish-language version of my favorite game, Guess Who.
1994: I realized I’d never filed taxes for working a week at the cookie shop at thirteen, and wondered if the IRS was going to come kick in my bedroom door.
2003: It was a happy moment when a friend of mine in the military called from Tikrit to tell me the city had been taken and he was well. He’d survive being in Iraq for a combined total of over three years, undertaking some horrifyingly dangerous activites.
2015 An intern told me at her school fights between boys seemed to happen a lot, and when they did everyone would watch with total attention, so during one she and her friend lifted their shirts to flash their bras, and no one noticed!
2018: Tyler surprised me by saying college bored him and he had a friend who was enjoying being in the Coast Guard in Alaska, and he speculated that maybe he should do something similar.
2021 My neighbor cut down a century-old pine tree I had driven past all my life. It was like something from a primeval forest, and when I asked why, he said, “I was tired of it.” I could have killed him. I mentioned this loss to my father, who told me about amor fati, the Stoical notion of finding good in sorrow. Shrug.
2023: Saw a mink down by the river around dawn. Had never seen one before this, only tracks.

April 16, 1996 It was Right To Life Day at my school, the most slow-moving and unenjoyable day of the academic year this side of Hell Week, but I consoled myself that since I was a junior I’d only have to endure it one more time. When the day finally ended I went over to Brian’s, and afterward laid in his bed and read him a short story he was supposed to have already read for one of his university classes. It was called Fungus Life, and it was about a socially disaffected grad student in a bacteriological lab class, who serially and compulsively stole lipstick from girls he encountered, then smeared the lipstick against a petri dish of flesh-rotting fungus, before slipping it back in their purses. While that character sounded like the kind of anti-hero you could root for, in fact the story was kinda lame. Came home and walked Charlotte Sometimes, then saw a news story about a local girl I’d often beaten at tennis prepping for a wildcard spot at Roland Garros ahead of the French Open, and wondered what my life would have been like had I kept playing competitively: probably a lot worse, honestly.

April 17:
1989: Dinner at my friend Tracy’s house, where her mom had an aquarium filled with painted turtles. Tracy was my first best friend, but we lost touch when I moved that summer.
1992: Good Friday, walked the stairs with my relatives, and that night watched Stephen King’s Sleepwalkers.
1998 Stopped at a store run by a nice Korean family named Ahn, and Grandma Ahn, a little lady who was always laughing, was behind the counter while her grandson rang up my nachos, and she gasped, “No nachos without drink, or make holes in stomach!” She grabbed a Coke and handed it to me saying, “For free, drink or you make holes in stomach!” She was so sweet.
1999: To a wedding in Maine with a boy I knew named Greg, who asked if I’d go, so I did. Freaky factoid, his stepmom’s family was related to Anna Kendrick.
2000: Watched Clerks with Jackie, and ordered a pizza that never came.
2005: Went to Clare’s bridal shower, where her mom gave me her standard “you broke my son’s heart” icy stares but it was actually a nice event.
2006: My scary Aunt Judith invited me to a Japanese restaurant called Mei, and I kept wondering why, but it seemed she actually did just want to get together.
2007: Back when I was an Amazon top 200 reviewer, I got an email from a writer who wanted me to plug her book about women picking out clothes for men, and she said, “It occurs to me a woman like you might have more than one man in her life.” Really?
2011: Palm Sunday and we went to mass in a 14th century church, once allegedly trashed by Cromwell’s cronies. I was too pregnant to gracefully genuflect, so I nodded.

17th April 2016.

In an effort to keep Kristi amused, even from a long distance I made my first blog post trying to look at life in the south Atlantic from a humourous point of view. I'd end up keeping this going for the entire 6 months I was down there.  Towards the middle part, the funny bits seemed to drop off as I hit the half way blues and was aware that I still had just as much time in front of me still to do, but I did my best to keep the tone lighthearted and skipping out the darker stuff. When I'd finished it all, more than one person wanted me to send them a copy of the whole thing, so I guess some people beyond its intended audience must have found it interesting to read. This was a big change from me normally. When I write, I generally am writing for me and it used to come as a surprise when other people wanted to read it.

April 18, 1996 Woke up at 4:14 AM upset by a dream, nauseous and with the room spinning because of an inner ear condition that used to afflict me more then than it has in this century. In the dream I was walking with my boyfriend in this strange dark place, and as we walked I asked him how he thought we’d end, and he said, “Because of you.”
 
Those words in a dream seemed more upsetting to me as I came awake than the fact I knew I was going to throw up in reality. I hurried into the bathroom and the lingering aromatherapy smell from the tub where I’d taken a bath before bed seemed to assault my senses, and I saw my face in the vanity mirror and my skin was chalky. I didn’t throw up but I had to sit on the edge of the tub for two hours til my inner ear stopped hating on me and I gradually felt all right again. I didn’t mention to my father that I’d felt sick, and even drove myself to school, where it was a day of pop quizzes, my advisor bugging me about study papers, and my semi-stalker classmate Roger Morgan asking me if I’d go the junior prom with him: “Since obviously you can’t have your boyfriend take you.” (Why?) It was end to end the kind of day you just want to be over, but it held one more bump when my friend Gina got miffed at me because I didn’t want to go to her house and see the taped Melrose Place she’d been waiting to watch with me. Going to bed and blocking out the world could not come fast enough.

April 19, 2019 While we were in my car waiting to go into the waxers, my friend and almost sister in law Clare, who always got nervous about what lay ahead there, asked me to say something “weird and spontaneous” to distract her, so I said: “I wouldn’t have wanted to have sex with Robin Williams.” She said that definitely counted as weird and spontaneous, and laughed. I was glad to help her out while she fidgeted* with dread about something I always thought of as a minor inconvenience compared to the result. (*”Fidget” was even one of her brother’s nicknames for her, along with Éclair.) Even to this day if you zip Velcro around her, she’ll flinch. I would think her pain tolerance is particularly low, except as a dancer she’s endured strains and pulls and muscle cramps over the years that would have benched an NFL lineman. I guess everyone has a scary pain-thing, and getting waxed was hers. Oh, and hangnails. She goes nuts pointing them out. Even show her a picture of a hang nail and that girl will lose her mind like Aunt Polly chased with a spider.

April 20, 2005 It was my “normal” cousin Jared’s twenty-eighth birthday, and knowing he liked Sting, I thought it was a nice coincidence that Sting was playing locally on Jared’s birthday, so I offered to take him. He drove two hours down from Columbus to meet up with me and we drove another hour to the venue, and on the way I asked after his mom, my fearsome and grudge-holding Aunt Judith, and Jared said her firm was consulting on some sort of fight over the census department’s projection that Ohio was set to lose population by 2030, when the state’s own figures showed it gaining seven-percent above the current birth rate. If the federal numbers were taken as accurate Ohio would be cut out of millions of federal dollars it otherwise would have been getting, so it was a big deal and a feather in her firm’s cap to be involved. Anyway though, Sting gave a mellow performance that night, mostly his post-Police material, my cousin seemed to enjoy it, so I counted it a successful birthday present.

April 21, 1996 It was a gorgeous spring Sunday, so I asked my grandpa what he had planned, thinking I’d go visit him at his house, but he said,” I’m going to play golf with some friends, Ellie Bean.” Then he asked if I wanted to tag along, so I inquired if he was just being polite or actually wanted me to come, and he said ah, come with us, it’ll be nice. So I went to his country club, where Grandpa had a guest pass waiting for me at the front gate, and he introduced me to his golfing friends, Mr. Paton (pronounced “Pate-un”), and Doctor Cooper, a semi-retired pulmonologist, who, if he lived into the next decade, probably endured a lot of Big Bang Theory jokes.

I knew little about golf and wasn’t all that interested but the private club had a beautiful lawn, and being with my grandpa was pleasant, so I walked with them through the morning while they whacked little white balls around and told stories about playing in Scotland and the Bahamas, and mostly seemed to smack talk one another’s shots like high school boys.

Grandpa won the nine holes they played, so the rule was he had to cover the other guys’ first round of drinks, which were all single-malt scotches that apparently cost him two twenty-dollar bills minus whatever the tip he included, and he bought me a club soda with lime. It was all very posh, I guess you could call it, reminding me I was, as my cousin Adam rarely missed a chance to tell me, “the poor cousin.” Actually I was glad I’d had the sense to ditch my t-shirt and shorts and put on a white sundress so I didn’t stand out like a dork amid people in Fitzgeraldian casual attire, money almost dripping in the air.

At one point at the table Mr. Paton told a joke about a man who walked in to find his wife in bed with her gynecologist, and he stopped just before the end and winked at my grandpa and Dr. Cooper, giving me the impression it was an old tale, and he said, “I’ll use the punch line for when a granddaughter is present among us….” And even Grandpa laughed knowingly.

They each paid for a round of scotches and their cheeks turned red with tipsiness, and I got the feeling I was a fifth wheel, so I said my goodbyes and let them have their fun time together.

April 22, 1994 On the day President Nixon died we had our ninth grade science fair. Since we had to work in teams, I had been paired up with a boy named William Miller, and we invested four months on a project which involved keeping six female mice of similar ages in coops in his heated backyard shed. All the mice were fed the same food and given the same regularly-cleaned bedding and shelters, though half were provided natural day and night cycles, the others were kept under constant light (with a box for them to get into to sleep). We built a maze and timed how long it took mice from each side of the experiment to journey through, then I wrote a report that showed the rodents who had a cycle of light and dark were faster. In view of our findings we moved all the mice to the light and dark cycle side of the shed, and the speed of the rodents previously kept under full-time light improved, hinting that it was important for living things to have contact with periods of darkness. We both thought we had a prize-winner but ultimately only got an Honorable Mention from the judges. Maybe William should have flirted a little, huh?

23rd April 2010.

I was on my Tornado Q course down at Marham. This meant memorising 3 pages of acronyms. Things like CRPMD. Why they just couldn't have been sensible about things and just given the parts proper names I not know, but if they'd said "The Bob box is broken. Go replace it", it would have meant a lot more to me. It was a 6 week long course and the weather was glorious the entire time. The constant switching off of the power to our blocks every weekend got boring fast (they told us it was to test the emergency power supply, but honestly I think that much "testing" was a money-saving thing. Normally the power would come back on about 12ish, but this day it stayed off until after 4. I got irritated enough about it to go out and berate the guys running the test about it. The electricity was back on within half an hour and it wasn't turned off again, at least not while I was down there. I have no idea if that was just a coincidence. Bumped into an old friend who I hadn't seen for 7 or 8 years and he was acting all tough and stuff. Not in an aggressive way towards me, but he was trying to come off as a hard man. I can't remember his real name, but we always called him Dipsy because he looked like a Telly-Tubby which kind of spoiled his attempt to reinvent himself.

April 23, 1995 In his ditty “Atheists Don’t Have No Songs,” Steve Martin extols the joys of Godless Sunday mornings by singing: “….Atheists just take a pass/Watch football in their underpants…” Well on that day I actually did something like that. With my runaway mom absconded among her native folk in the verdant hills of Connaught, I stopped going to Sunday Mass and stayed in my room catching up on a Kevin Costner series I’d taped called 500 Nations.

Thing was, I went overboard in trying to impress people with how I’d ditched the divine, like when Dana came to hang out that afternoon I made a point of making sure she saw me setting my Mountain Dew atop my mother’s leather-bound Lives of the Saints, then in a bonus bit of immaturity, I referred to it as “Lies” of the Saints.

Time cannot always deliver us from folly, but it does remove us from youth, and shame on sixteen-year-old me for stunts like that.

April 24, 2004 I was working out of town for weeks at a time, sometimes in Texas but mostly overseas, then coming home for unpredictable stretches that could end suddenly, thus I couldn’t see sense in having my own dwelling place if it was going to sit empty, so a lot of the times I was back I stayed with my dad in the house I grew up in. It wasn’t a bad arrangement, but it did lead to me doing something that both annoyed and amused him when I shoved a woman he was dating out the front door.

Her name was Gillie (pronounced Jilly) and everything about her irritated me, from her fake blond hair and her too-white teeth, to the way she deliberately kept her voice artificially high. Sure, it was none of my business who my long-divorced father went out with, and I’d been OK with all the others, but there did come an afternoon when I arrived back hoping for some quiet time after the sturm und drang of Austin, where my friend’s ex-wife was threatening to have someone disfigure me, only to find Gillie, a mere seven years older than I was, not only making herself at home while my dad was away, but sitting in my mom’s old chair.

Long story short, after she resisted my efforts to politely get her to bugger-the-f**k-off, she said something smarmy to me, so I gave her the Irish Pub Rush and pushed her out the door. (I did at least open it first.)

My dad came home glowering after an ear full of Gillie’s whining, and told me how upset she was by my actions, and though I’m sure I put a damper on what was probably going to be a fun evening for him and his latest hot chick, he also kept breaking into an unwilling grin at my description of the way Gillie flailed and squawked while she clutched feebly at the door frame with her stupid fake nails.
 
I took Dad out to Steak ‘n Shake, which I’m sure entirely made up for me ruining his romantic night, and as for Gillie, she didn’t seem to want to be alone with me after that.

24th April 2022.

We were down in the south of England so I could visit the tank museum at Bovington. I was completely taken by surprise when I discovered it had a Panther tank. We didn't wander around every single exhibit, mostly because I spent my time wandering around the WW2 tanks and then raiding the museum gift shop. Ash was a bit overwhelmed by the size of the crowd there. Kristi commented that this was the first time she'd ever been anywhere, where the queue for the man's toilet was longer than the one for the women. Why women would be less interested in seeing tanks than men I have no idea. I'll put it down to them being crazy though. After the museum (and seeing the only original running Tiger 1 in the world), we headed back into London (Gatwick) to meet up with a friend (called Ashley). He was complaining that there were no game shops anywhere near him. In some surprise, I said "In London? Seriously." I then gave him the names of a few I knew about from adverts in gaming magazines, then did a quick google and showed him a map of several, one of which was 2 streets away from his house.

If ever you get half a chance, you should go here:

https://www.nationalww2museum.org/visit/plan-your-visit?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIpqn4oNjD_gIVk-zjBx3afgHxEAAYASAAEgI5EvD_BwE (https://www.nationalww2museum.org/visit/plan-your-visit?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIpqn4oNjD_gIVk-zjBx3afgHxEAAYASAAEgI5EvD_BwE)

April 25, 1995 “If you were going to kill yourself, how would you do it?”

That’s what I asked Brian that afternoon, but he wouldn’t answer, so I told him he had no courage in his imagination, and he slowly repeated that back, “No courage in my imagination…”

“Yes.”

Then he said, “Evelyn, you know how you ask me how you’re different than other girls? Well, remember when I read Arthur Rimbaud last year? He had that sex and death thing going, and you are starting to make me think about that.”

I just laughed, and Brian said, “And another thing about you, you think many things are funny.”

“Many things are funny.”

“You think odd things are funny.”

“Is that bad?”

“No… But one other thing that’s also unique about you is you don’t rush to get dressed afterward.”

Not having anyone to compare to, I said, “And that’s rare?”

He said, “It seems like all the others couldn’t wait to get something put back on. You don’t. But from my perspective that’s a good thing.”

He also said my body was softer since I’d quit playing tennis every day, and I asked if that was better or worse, and he said “just different.”

He and I used to lie there and have talks that went in every direction at once. It was something I came to look forward to like a post-credit scene in a good movie.

26th April 1986.

The talk of the school playground was Chornobyl. Its meltdown was all over the news. I recall the first joke I heard about it was "Have you heard about the new cereal, Chornobyl Pops? They come with Snap, Crackle and BOOM! Our teachers rarely addressed big issues happening in the world. The only two I can remember coming up were when the Americans shot down an airliner and maybe when the shuttle blew up, but they were talked about during our breaks. I do recall people not really understanding the difference between a nuclear explosion and a meltdown. While Chornobyl didn't come up in primary school, it would be mentioned a lot in my science classes when I moved on to secondary school, generally by Mr Beresford, who if I had to pick a favourite teacher would have been one of the ones in the running. That however was a couple of years in the future and my own life was about to get a lot more complicated over the next few months.

April 26:
1986: I slid down the bank of Big Bone Creek and cut my foot on rusty fencing half-buried there, then had to get a tetanus booster at Booth Hospital. Talk about a picnic that fizzled….
1989: A girl in my class named Cheryl C. showed us she was wearing a lavender-colored training bra. Seemed like a big deal.
1993: “You should be friends with my sister when I’m gone,” Brian said to me in reference to his returning to college, an innocent remark that later seemed eerily prescient, as becoming friends with his sister after he was “gone” was something I did.
1995: Had a tornado drill at school, and when I complained it was undignified to have to duck and cover wearing a skirt with a row of horny boys behind me, my teacher said, “It’s also undignified getting eaten by a tornado.” Well…yeah.
1997: Went to St. Xavier’s downtown and talked in the confessional with Father Huber about how Brian’s dad, Joe, was around too much, and Father Huber unsympathetically said I was too immature for the relationship I’d taken on if I begrudged a man recovering from near death time with his son. Sigh, nobody got it. (Absolutely beautiful 1840s church, though: https://www.stxchurch.org/photos/view/id/23236 (https://www.stxchurch.org/photos/view/id/23236) )
2003: I told Dana about how the father of this teenage girl, Sharon, I volunteered to mentor had asked if I would be interested in getting into a relationship with him. “You won’t want for anything,” was how he said it. Dana went, “You should’ve told him you would for a million dollars.” I asked, “What if he said OK?” Dana said, “If you ever get a million bucks for sex, please spend the rest of your life bragging about it.”
2020: On my last night home when I’d have to be away working, my mom called to tell me she’d had another of her fàisneachd dreams that warned if I went on this trip something bad was going to happen to me. I still went, I was fine, and to her credit she was glad to be wrong.

April 27 1994: democracy dawns and the New South Africa is born.

We all rejoiced and had hope that all would be well.

April 27 2023: the ANC has ruined the country with its greed, corruption and general incompetence.

Cry, my beloved country, cry. 😥😥😥

April 27, 1990 Still two months from her driver’s license, Dana hired a cab to take us to the mall, and at Spencer’s she picked up a t-shirt for eleven-year-old me and went, "This would be so cute on you!" I believed everything she told me, so when she bought me the shirt and said to put it on in the restroom, I did. Long story short, I walked around the mall wearing it, and later went over to her friend’s and she kept drawing attention to my shirt, and when she did her friends would snicker. Now, I may have been slow out of the gate but I started clueing-in to the fact there was something about the shirt I wasn't grasping, though I couldn't put my finger on exactly what, since it was just a plain white tee with a cartoonish bikini-clad bird on it, captioned: "I'm Hornier Than A Hoot Owl." It was hours before anyone took mercy on me and explained.

28th April 2015.

I decided to be a supportive husband this morning, but it all went wrong somehow. Kristi was upset about something and I tried to find out what was wrong. She told me she didn't understand something and was feeling confused. In order to help her, I patted her on the head and said "Its ok honey, you are a woman. It is perfectly natural."

Somehow this resulted in me making breakfast. I've yet to figure out where things went wrong. Chicks huh? Just this morning I got into trouble for using logic to help Kristi, and being overly cheerful first thing in the morning.

28th April 2018.

With her family over for Ash's modified christening, we all went down to Edinburgh. Since they are a very nerdy family we took them places like the cafe where Harry Potter was born, since they love Disney, we also had to take them to Greyfriars, and of course my favourite pub, Frankensteins.

28th April 2019.

I went on a trip to Morayvia, the local aircraft museum. I didn't go because I have any particular passion for aircraft. They are simply something I work on. It did, however, mean I was not working in the office for a day, and a day without working beside Jim was a worthy endeavour. I enjoyed the day as much as anyone can enjoy these things and I would go back again to show Ash it.

April 28, 2006 Never learning from past incidents, two days earlier I dove to make a return on the tennis court and bruised my ribs spectacularly. Nothing was broken but it hurt when I moved or sat still, breathed or blinked. I still went out that night to an all-Rachmaninoff concert ‘neath the massive 1870s confines of Music Hall, and when we came back Landon lingeringly brushed my hair for me, something that has given me a floaty, ASMR feeling for as long as I can remember. I couldn’t sleep though---what else was new?—and read Byron poems, which despite being good do sometimes cure insomnia, though I had the bad luck to come across this one, that struck me as eerie:

And thou art dead, as young and fair
As aught of mortal birth;
And form so soft, and charms so rare,
Too soon return'd to Earth.
Though Earth receiv'd them in her bed,
And o'er the spot the crowd may tread
In carelessness or mirth,
There is an eye which could not brook
A moment on that grave to look.

There’s nothing quite like a reminder that you’re one day going to lie eternally insensate to make you not want to sacrifice the time you have by sleeping.

April 29, 1999 In retrospect, if there’s a key to getting anywhere in the long-term with me, it might be patience. Landon met me in 2001, hung in there, and ultimately married me a mere eight and a half years later. Back in the late-‘90s a very nice boy named Greg played a similar game and ended up owning a place in my elsewhere-focused affections. Well, that weekend Greg’s eleven-year-old half-sister Diana was visiting him and when he had to work, he asked if she could hang with me. She and I rented the estrogen-oozing How To Make An American Quilt, and after that I took her to a notorious canal said to have influenced Stephen King’s IT, where we made wishes and threw in pennies while speculating on what might’ve been the most shocking thing under the surface. (Lore had it that during WWII a local black market abortionist used to dispose of human remains in the canal, and a pistol linked to a double murder had turned up a few years before when a man was magnet fishing.) Later we went to a store to grab dinner and there was Phantom Menace merchandise everyplace you looked, including a seven-foot tall cardboard cutout of Darth Maul. When the store manager made it clear it was neither for sale nor could we call dibs on it since he was contractually-obligated to destroy it on June 30th, Diana and I contemplated grabbing it and dashing off. In the end we didn’t, but I admit, Bad Goofy was orating most eloquently on my left shoulder.

29th April 2010.

I spent the day studying fast erection sequences. Given the previous day, I'd to study flange chaffing, I was starting to wonder if I was on a technical course, or just being expertly trolled by a sex pest. Still, in the practical exam, I managed not to tighten the nuts too much. Despite the lovely weather I was not enjoying being in Norfolk, a place that were you to draw a relief map of, you'd have a blank piece of paper.

29th April 2013.

The MOD decided on a campaign to promote testicular cancer awareness. Given the general sense of humour in the military, it was a terrible idea to get someone to dress up in a giant, pink, phallus shaped foam rubber costume and call him Private Parts. To this day I shudder to think of what they did to that poor man.

29th April 2015.

I decided to abandon the party that had received my vote in 90% of the previous elections and switch to a smaller party, much less likely to get into power, but one which was more closely aligned to my political views.

29th April 2018.

Today was Ash's blessing. I forwent my usual black outfits and went all white instead because while I might be a bad guy to the rest of the world, for him I was going to be something different. Kristi was slightly surprised that the church didn't burst into flames when I stepped inside, although I didn't tell her why. Representatives from both sides of Ash's family travelled up here to attend, possibly making her church the busiest it had ever been, boosted further by some religiously inclined people from my work.

April 30, 2017 Had a day out with Tyler, Dana’s seventeen year old son, whom I partly raised and loved very much. It was an almost perfect vernal afternoon and I first took him to see a display of Edo Period Japanese armor and weapons, and considering his prolific romantic life, asked if he’d ever made out in a museum, and when he said no, I said, “Then I still gotcha on something at least.” Which made him blush as only the pale blond can.
 
We went into 19th century Eden Park after the exhibit, passing a gazebo where a bootlegger once gunned down his wife, and chased lizards amid stone walls, then entered Krohn Conservatory, a huge Art Nouveau greenhouse where he and I used to go when he was little. He still knew the significance of the Herbert Hoover plaque atop the steep hillside above Krohn, where in his boyhood I’d carry him, and he’d grip me and say, “Don’t let go!”

At the top I’d always read the plaque, and tell him that once a President and a Governor and a Mayor stood on that spot, then in one of our traditions, we’d go to the hilltop overlook and see the river and throw old tennis balls and watch them bounce into the woods hundreds of feet down.
 
Before we came home we had a far-ranging conversation over chilled green tea with tapioca pearls, and he said our day out had been a nice break from the stress of his impending high school graduation, and I said I was glad, and told him about my last weeks of high school, remembering the whirlwind of sensation, his grandmother, my Aunt Judith, mad at me for declining to go to a university she’d helped me get into, and also thinking I was something of a slut for moving in with a man before I was even out of twelfth grade. (Nevermind that we’d been together almost a quarter of my life.)

“She always says you were put on this planet to make her mad,” Tyler told me.

He was leaving for Argentina in a few weeks to see his ex-pat sister and was toying with the idea of moving to Portland, Oregon, it being hip like Austin had been when I was his age, and it made me wonder if that would be it for him and me. It ultimately wasn’t, he would even live with us soon, but wondering so made that sweet afternoon almost painfully poignant.

May 1, 2018 I was on the phone with my friend Clare when her dad called to report that her paternal grandmother had died at age eighty-nine. Clare never knew either of her grandparents, because they disinherited and shunned her father for dropping out of college and the medical school path they’d laid out for him, when he married Clare’s mom, who was pregnant with her brother. I talked to her dad later that day and while he told me he’d “resolved” all his pain over his mother long before, I knew it had to have been hard to lose even an estranged parent. When I was a teenager and mad at my own mom for splitting up with my dad and going to Ireland, Joe used to tell me I shouldn’t take having a mom for granted, and shared his own situation with me and said it was not a complete life without family in it. When I called to express my condolences at his loss, I asked if he was going to go to his mother’s funeral, and he said, “No, I’m not, and I’m not sure my father would welcome me if I wanted to. He and my mother didn’t come to my son’s service either, though I reached out to them.” Me, I think I’d rather chop off my right hand than be estranged from my own children, and the situation with Joe’s parents/Clare’s grandparents left me thinking what utterly horrible human beings they must’ve been.

May 2:
1991: Up high enough to fall to my death, I went on his roof with my grandpa while he replaced shingles, impressed I wanted to come. He used to say I was fearless.
1992: Stopped at an estate sale and found a bar of 1930s Royal Soap that still smelled nice.
1994 For several years my mom took evening art classes and I’d often go with her to hang out on campus. This was the last night we ever did that together.
1997 After school I drove to Arlington Memorial Gardens and sat on a stone wall near where this girl named Dawn Sissie Baugh was buried. I didn’t know her, she was half a generation older than me, but her mother kept a graveside notebook in a plastic bag and had been writing to her for almost a decade, encouraging others to read and add if they wanted, a form of grief therapy for her. Being in a cemetery made me feel connected to my place in time.
2001: My Aunt Christie’s church did a massive helium balloon launch with quotes from Pope John Paul II tied on them. Some would go sixty miles.
2002: Bob Larson was in town and my friend Mandy tried to talk me into going with her while she pretended to be possessed, so she could spit on him. I told her that was low-class.
2005: Went to Clare’s bachelorette party, even though I hate the concept. There was a stripper from Columbia to whom genetics had been kind, and I watched otherwise placid women become squealing hedonists. Drove Clare back and we stayed up all night talking.
2007: Updated my will and left everything to Tyler. It would stay that way til Daisy was born.
2014: The joy I felt at my mother in law going home after a week with us went all the way to eleven.
2015: Drove Daisy to get a comic book for International Free Comic Day, and the proprietor was so resentful about the giveaway he griped about how she better appreciate it.
2017: Took the family hiking at Clifty Falls State Park, in Indiana. Cool place.

2nd May 2014.

I came very close to spending $3000 on a T-Rex skull for my mancave wall. I had the money to buy it, but it would have been all of my holiday spending money and I had to (reluctantly) pass on it. We took Mason and Bella out to the zoo and Utah's natural history museum. Kristi was still volunteering me to look after multiple special needs children at the same time, but never volunteered herself (she'd volunteer me for a lot of things this way), and while my resentment about this was building up, it would still be a while before I'd get angry enough about it to put my foot down and say no more. It was a good day generally, although I was on edge because, well frankly, even at a young age I could see Bella was an incipient psychopath. We'd caught her shoplifting earlier on that week (luckily before the store did), and she was hurting her sisters (including sneaking into their rooms after their birthdays and destroying all their toys). She also has an IQ they can't measure for her age. I hate to think of the rough time her dad must be having with her almost a decade on as she goes through her teenage years. Mason is just regular ADHD, but both of them behaved perfectly while they were out with us.

2nd May 2013.

Kristi was due to arrive in the UK toda. I'd had a dream that night about going to the airport and finding Herman Goering's body at the far end of the runway. The day went much smoother than that though. I had my friend Sean housesit as our bed was supposed to be delivered this day. We also had a prearranged signal, and I let him know when we were entering our street. He hid in the hall cupboard, and when Kristi walked in the house he jumped out, giving her a fright as her welcome to the UK.

May 3, 2010 Though the undertaking would have been anathema to a younger me, in the wake of terrifying news weeks earlier, I discovered that I could find comfort in turning to God. For probably the first time I pondered accounts of Jesus returning from the dead, and tried to think about these claims from every facet. I considered what if Jesus was deceased and his body cast into a trash heap, or what if he was alive when taken down off the cross and Romans were bribed to let him go, and I thought of what if it was all a story made up centuries later, deifying a backwoods preacher? Yet I kept finding reasons for feeling every scenario but one was disproven, so that in the end I stood frozen in the realization that the best explanation for the stories of Jesus rising from the dead seemed to be that he actually did. If nothing else, what short of a miracle could have turned his followers from men who ran away when Jesus was arrested, to individuals who told the world they’d seen the risen Christ, and held onto that conviction at the cost of their own lives? If it hadn’t been true, why would they have been willing to step into hardships, and even die for their claims? I admit I have had varying degrees of spiritual dedication since that day, but one thing I have not waivered on is that I still feel as convinced by the weight of evidence for the miracle of Jesus’ resurrection as I did exactly thirteen years ago when I first found grounds for believing in it.

3rd May 2013.

Decided for her first day in Scotland Kristi required a little spoiling, so a long lie (with massage and shoulder rub) in was followed by a traditional Scottish breakfast (eggs, bacon and tattie scones although since she had never had them before I gave her Scotch eggs rather than fried), with a glass of apple & mango juice (and no, I didn't forget to put a flower on the tray either). Ran her a nice hot bubble bath after which I decided since it was a nice day a walk down to the promenade and beach was required.

May 4:
1995: Dana was glum about having to visit her grandparents in Alabama, so I suggested she tell them this joke:  “What do maggots and Crimson Tide football fans have in common? They can both live a long, long time off a dead bear.”
1996: My dad came home from Washington DC and brought me a paper clip. I wasn’t impressed til he told me whose office he stole it from.
1997: As Brian and I drove to see Austin Powers he wanted to play Tupac’s Me Against The World, explaining: “You’ve heard Jagged Little Pill a hundred times.” I said, “Yeah, ‘You Oughta Know’ was starting to give me weird urges in theaters.” He replied, “101 times it shall be…”
2002: Before we picked her up to go to the Kentucky Derby with us, I told Landon my friend Gina was a twenty-five-year-old virgin, and he said he couldn’t decide if that was admirable or sad. I told him I always went with the first one since she was pretty. He kept looking at Gina funny the rest of the day. I don’t care how many times a man says virgins do nothing for him, virgins do something for him.
2012 When Rob told me he’d stood in line all day to be among the first to see The Avengers, I told him he was an “adultlescent.” I meant it as a compliment.
2020: Had my “witch’s mark” birth mark removed from my shoulder without anesthesia. (Because sod pain.) It was like losing an old friend. I asked if I could take it home in a jar, and they said no, so I thought about looking for it in the dumpster out back.
2022: Amber Heard’s constant talking to the jury instead of the lawyers annoyed me, so I kept throwing a Nerf ball at her face.

May 5, 2017 My husband and I watched Bambi with our children, who had never seen it, and oh, boy, tear city! I told the children that when I was little Dana used to tell me our deer hunting grandpa was the one who shot Bambi’s mother, making my son burst out asking: “HE SHOT BAMBI’S MOM????” Landon told them actually Sarah Palin shot her, and he found a parody video Conan O’Brien did that made it look like she did, but the joke was ultimately on Landon because none of our offspring had clue who Sarah Palin was. How I envied them….

May 6, 2021 Ever had an experience where out of nowhere a realization suddenly overloads you? Well that day as I was listening to my dear friend Clare tell me about how her dad was going to take her and my godson on a trip to Florida, I was abruptly hit by the memory of one of her dad’s gratuitously-shared stories from his drug abuse days, when he was a young sales guy, getting rich and living on top of a world he thought would never end. While he was married to Clare and Brian’s mom in the mid-‘80s, he went to a convention in Florida and hooked up with a hot saleswoman, and ended up snorting a ring of cocaine from around her nipple. OK, not earth-shaking, this was a long time ago, he’s not that man anymore, but the point was I knew things about her father I’m sure ever-adoring Clare didn’t, and that fact suddenly felt too awkward. I thought how insanely connected I had been with her family for most of my life---her brother, her parents, her, her son---and all the private things I knew about each of them which the others likely did not know, and which they in turn knew about me, and it was like this unfiltered awareness assailed me, pulling the air out of my lungs. For a second it was just too much.

May 7, 1994 I won a two-set match, 7-5, 6-2 when the other girl didn’t have the conditioning to hold it together in the second set. Many tennis players didn’t seem to grasp how important stamina was, but I focused on it.

Went home, got ready, eschewed makeup, and Dana came and took me to her dad, my Uncle Lark’s, annual Kentucky Derby party, which he held on his hobby farm on the northernmost cusp of the Bluegrass region about an hour and a half south of where we lived.

Her dad called me Ellie Two Shoes, as he had since I was little, and hugged me hello, as did his extremely pretty second wife, Mella, who had grown up on Antigua. (Uncle Lark liked to say, “I did good for a Catholic boy from Alabama!”) He was in a partnership that owned radio stations around the country, something still possible back then before the big conglomerates bought up every market, and it was through that connection that he had famous guests there from politics, sports, and entertainment. Dana, who was more used to being around the noteworthy, told me the only way to handle it was to not be any different toward celebrities than you would anybody else. “Be polite but don’t stare, and never drool.”

That day was the first time I ever had jalapeno poppers, which I discovered I really liked, and Dana made me take a swig of her mint julep, which made me gag so hard I almost saw those poppers a second time.
 
We watched the race (blink and you’d miss it) on a massive screen in this shelter house Uncle Lark had erected, and a horse named Go for Gin won, though that night in my diary I mistakenly wrote his name as “Gopher Gin” since that’s how I’d heard it pronounced.

Dana was staying late and was way too drunk to drive me home, so when he found out I was going to call my mom for a ride, Uncle Lark paid for me to take a taxi all the way back to Mason, Ohio, and I have no idea how much that cost him, but at almost a hundred miles it couldn’t have been cheap.

What a day!

May 8, 1995 When Charlotte Sometimes heard me pull up after school, she grabbed her leash and ran to meet me at the door, so I took her on a walk to a nearby bakery for a piece of her favorite treat, three-crusted pie, something I gave her maybe five times a year, not often at all. I was leaning against the side of the bakery letting Charlotte daintily take the pie from my hand, when a curly-black-haired six-foot tall woman in a Phish shirt walked up and said in this sour, semi-So-Cal tone: “Young lady, you shouldn’t feed dogs human food, and especially not sweets, their digestive system can’t handle it, so what you’re doing is abuse of an animal.”

This rebuke made me feel like a little kid being dressed down by a grown up, but my unprepared brain went through my options: A. ignore her; B say something mean back; C. try to shock her by eating the pie Charlotte had been taking slobbery bites of, though I noticed she looked like the type who probably ate after animals on a daily basis.

After I’d stood in stony silence another moment, the woman told me I was a bad “animal sister” and moved on with a backward glare, but she ruined my happy moment with Char, and I went home deflated.

May 9, 1997 I sat in the school library at lunchtime and experienced schadenfreude as I watched juniors cram for upcoming Hell Week exams we seniors were spared, and also from a distance listened to a vile girl named Andrea brag about how she would be spending a gap year in South Africa, courtesy of her P&G exec parents. But mostly I was thinking about something discussed in Honors Theology that morning.

We’d been talking about Lourdes, and I snidely piped up that Carl Sagan had said the rate of medically-documented spontaneous remission in terminal illness in daily life was actually higher than that of unexplained healings at Lourdes. The Jesuit who taught us said those statistics didn’t account for truly inexplicable, like a British man from Liverpool who’d been shot in the head in WWI and as a result had lost so much of his brain tissue he was left vegetative, and was granted a lifelong full military pension. After the war this man’s sister took him to Lourdes, where he rose from his wheelchair and suddenly became lucid again. Doctors examined him, and concluded his healing was beyond explanation. The man wrote his Member of Parliament saying he no longer needed his military pension, but there was no provision in British law to rescind funds granted to a veteran declared disabled beyond hope of recovery.

Assuming this was all true, exactly what transpired at Lourdes that day, and why isn’t it headline news even now?

10th May 2019.

I ended up escorting some classified stuff that needed to be urgently shipped overseas. It was supposed to be a 2-day trip over a weekend but ended up being 4 days. We were in a 2 articulated truck convoy and my driver was in full uniform. I asked him why, given that we were in unmarked trucks and carrying sensitive stuff, was he advertising that he was in the military. He told me that it was standard orders that their warrant officer had declared they would drive in uniform to look more professional. I countermanded his orders telling the driver that I was responsible for the cargo and he was to pull into the first layby to change into civilian clothes. It wouldn't be the first time I'd change the orders of someone much more senior than myself, but it would be the last time such an incident would arise. The whole thing was all organised on a very short notice with only a days notice.

At the end of the first day, we were staying in Gretna Green which is the wedding capital of the UK. I got the honeymoon suite, complete with a jacuzzi. I learned an important lesson from this.

If you want bubbles in a jacuzzi do not use one of those small sample bottles of shampoo that you get free in hotels to make them. You will find yourself running from the bathroom with armfuls of suds and throwing them out of the hotel room window.

If you had to spend a weekend working, it wasn't a bad way to have to do it. There was a woman at the bar who tried flirting with me. In the morning, I'd see her and her husband leaving from the room next door to mine. Despite this, this is really where I started to feel that the military life was no longer for me. I'd had family come up to visit and was now going to be missing half their stay. I missed my wife and son. I felt the orders I'd overridden were insanely stupid in a security-conscious environment where we were actively trying not to make ourselves targets for terrorists. Lee Rigby was still in our minds. It was just a feeling that I was not fitting into the military environment anymore. For better or worse, this was a feeling that would only increase over the next few years.

The trip itself was relatively pleasant. We had good weather for it and really nice accommodation (because the driver of the 2nd vehicle was a civilian they had to put us up in hotels rather than barracks).

May 10:
1994: Got out of class for two hours to watch a solar eclipse.
1996: Went to Goodwill with my friend Mandy and got cool stuff. Came back and she asked if it was OK if she smoked a jay at my house before we watched The X-Files, and I told her to do it on the patio. She was so baked she watched under a beach towel.
1999: Shel Silverstein died, and I was sad.
2006: We went to UC to hear Ron Jeremy debate anti-porn activist Craig Gross. Pretty goofy event.
2008: Saw Carmina Burana at the ballet
2009: My first ever Mother’s Day. :-)
2010 Our eighteen-month-old was sick and my husband stayed with her the entire time, worrying over her and comforting her, and in eight and a half years I’d never felt more admiration for him.
2022: I turned 15,843 days old.

May 11, 1989 My parents and I were on the back deck of our house in Burlington, Kentucky, when in the direction of an international airport we spied one of the “UFOs” we often saw. We never did figure out what they were, though maybe they had something to do with gases rising from the nearby Ohio River that became luminous in sunlight, but if so, the gases seemed to be capable of doing peculiar things. As we watched this particular UFO, it struck me that in a few weeks we wouldn’t live in that house anymore, or see those UFOs, and all the friends I had there would fade out of my life. Sure, my parents extolled all the great things we’d enjoy in Mason, Ohio forty miles north, a bigger house, a backyard pool, King’s Island being a few minutes away, and we’d be much nearer my extended paternal family, but that night it didn’t matter, I was leaving a house where I’d been happy, and the sadness I felt was the most real thing in my life.

May 12, 1998 It was one of those days when stress seemed everywhere. There was a boy in college named Greg who (setting humility aside for candor) was in love with me. He was a great and kind person, probably the most normal boy I would ever get close to, but he was not the person I was in love with. He asked me to go to a Green Day concert that evening, he didn’t like the band much but knew I did, so had mostly gotten the tickets for me, and I said I was going home for the summer, so no.  He asked why I wanted to go back to where I “used to be from” when I had a life there all my own. I said, “Because that’s where I live, Greg.”  He nodded and quietly left, hurt, knowing nothing he could do would ever make me feel for him what I did for another, and right after that my dad called and told me I’d also hurt my mom by slighting her on Mother’s Day. I told him I’d sent her a card, and he said that was worse than doing nothing. By the time I was done listening to my dad list my faults and failings, I asked myself Greg’s question, why exactly was I going home? There was only one reason, really, and when that evening I called the person who was that reason, my talk with my dad came up, making Brian tell me: “Divorced or not your dad wants his wife home again, and when you slight your mom it makes him worry hurts may never be healed and so his chances of reconciling with her become that much lower.” It seemed a theme that in those times everything I did hurt someone.

13th May 2014.

I was in the US visiting Kristi. I was still getting use to the meds I was on and took them without quite eating enough in advance. It left me feeling as if I was trying to think through a cloud of cotton wool. Kristi was wearing a bright yellow blouse and I decided I had to get a matching shirt. I wrote this about the experience:


13th May 2012.

Kristi flew back to the US after her first visit to the UK. I had been a fun week, although she spent most of it suffering quite badly from jet lag. I had said to her not to come over for less than two weeks to give her time to adjust. I think she enjoyed her trip though.

May 13, 2007 It was Mother’s Day and I was such a nervous wreck I could barely enjoy spending the afternoon with my mom, or focus on the creative meal I was making her. A loquacious soul, she’d say something and I’d have to sheepishly say, “Sorry, what?” It was like I was too jittery for words. Within hours Landon and I would be boarding a plane to Los Angeles, from there to fly to New Zealand for almost a month, and though I’d been taking flights all my life, this one had me worked up. It wasn’t that I worried we’d crash, and even the long distance that lay ahead of us with nothing below but the Pacific Ocean wasn’t unnerving, since I’d crossed the Atlantic too many times to be superstitious about traveling above water, but some nebulous factor was eating away at me with all the drip-drip-drip of British water torture. (Uh-huh.) All I know to this day is never in my entire life did a pending trip draw my nerves so tight. Once we were on the plane I felt cool as ice, but even in the airport I was as jumpy as laspeyresia saltitans inside a Mexican bean, flinching when Landon touched my shoulder. (Obviously everything went fine.)

May 14, 1991 Every once in a while my poor mom would rekindle her misguided notions that she could teach me to play piano, and this day contained an episode of that recurring tragedy.
 
At the keys I had never been able to handle anything more complex than Chopsticks, so once again my mom sincerely tried to teach me what music was about, and once again it went down like the Hindenburg. She actually sat in stunned silence after the lesson and asked if I was messing with her. I wasn’t, I had really tried.

“Are you just not interested?”

“Well, no....”

“Not even to make me happy?”

“That was why I tried at all.”

It was a mess, and yet through chapters of my youth Mom would get these recurring urges to try to teach me, and they’d usually begin with her playing something gorgeous, then asking, “Wouldn’t you like to be able to do that?”
 
Whenever I heard those words I knew maternal heartbreak was coming. Recently she’s asked my children if they’d like lessons, so I guess dashing yourself against the rocks of suffering is an Irish specialty.

it's may 15th here. i lost my sweet kate on this day 3 years ago, and nobody told me she was in hospital, so i didn't get the chance to take of her or say goodbye. i'm still trying to understand why her daughter did that to me, maybe someday i will. at least i know that she knew how much i loved her.  :bluesad:

May 15, 2019 Took the departing interns from work on an outing to a river federally designated as “wild, scenic” to see nature and find fossils, and have sno-cones in a park on the way back.

We talked about the litter of endangered African painted wolves born at the local zoo that week, and we were all pulling for the little ones to make it.
 
I also pondered the fact that my daughter Daisy was ten and a half and I wondered if she’d like to spend part of the upcoming summer in Ireland, seeing the country and getting to know her relatives there. I made a note to call my cousin Donna and ask how she might feel about keeping an eye on Dizzie for a few weeks, offering to return the favor if anyone in her family wanted to come over here.

I made sushi that night and watched the riveting finale of Survivor: Edge of Extinction, which capped off my almost twenty-year-old fandom with that show.
 
Ran two miles on the treadmill before bed and sent an email back to Donna, who said Daisy was always welcome.

It was a full day in the Ellieverse.

May 16, 2005 Made my third visit to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, still convinced there was something wrong with enshrining a genre meant to be nihilistic. They had an exhibit about Tommy, The Who’s “rock opera” and I said it should just be called an “opera” without the “rock” qualification. (I was full of opinions, if you notice.) We wandered around Cleveland, which Southwest Ohioans are required by custom to refer to as “the Brown End of the State,” and bought a small-press novel called Articles of War, on the recommendation of The Man in Austin (who has terrible taste in reading material, truth be told), and saw Bright Eyes/Conor Oberst in concert that same night. Driving home we heard some comments on the radio by Britney Spears, who said her best days were behind her, she didn’t care about her looks anymore, and expected she was going to have weight problems the rest of her life. Personally I think she’s held up well over the years considering her life has been filled with exploitation. Coming back I observed how when you leave the cities and hit those long rural stretches of interstate, it can get pleasantly dark under those star-filled country skies.

May 17, 1990 My several-houses-down neighbor Rachel had a fourteen-year-old cousin, Randall, who visited from Pittsburgh, the best-looking science nerd (and Jewish person) I had ever seen. This kid was an alpha, could’ve had a teen drama show, jet black hair, confident aura to him, muscles, golden eyes like a bird of prey, and yet, rarer still, he was actually nice. Somehow it even made him still more appealing that he’d broken his wrist doing ramp-jumps while waterskiing in the Bahamas the summer before.

I’d been outside that afternoon waiting on Gina to get home so I could tell her about my dream that our school burned down and mice had survived by jumping into my locker, so naturally to pass the time I undertook my recurring hobby of seeing how far I could walk down our sidewalk with my eyes closed, taking my seventieth step minus one, when from somewhere in front of me I heard Randall ask what I was doing. I opened my eyes and there he was, wearing a black U2 War t-shirt, looking amazing.

I blurted out, “I did sixty-nine.” Realizing I’d left out the fact I meant steps, I turned my back, my face flushed red, while I heard Randall cracking up. Oy vey.

May 18, 1995 For years Dana told me there was no way I was going to be able to sustain my status as an honors student and all–around good kid, and predicted: “When you finally fall you are going to fall hard.” At the time I thought it was one of the rudest things anyone ever said to me, but when I’d talked to her the evening before, one of the few phone calls my suddenly Draconian father allowed me to make, she told me with a certain degree of admiration that the collapse of my virtuous life had been: “Spectacularly Victorian.”
 
Getting in my car and driving off in the middle of a school day to disappear for hours had been a last straw, and I was no longer allowed to drive myself, and my dad had started this regimen wherein he drove me in mornings and I waited supervised on school grounds doing homework til he came and got me at day’s end to bring me home for dinner (which he made me partake of, no tolerance for eating disorders), and then he studied with me for the next couple hours, and that was pretty much my life during most of May 1995. Early to bed, going nowhere.
 
Yet oddly my father was also excessively nice to me during all this, he wasn’t mad or even seemingly upset about the things you might think he’d be mad at me for doing, it was more of a genuine worry that I’d reached a personal breaking point with all the misfortunates of the past seven months, and was volatilely wrecking my own life.
 
So I rode home with him after he got off work downtown that day, the 18th , and it was hello honey how was school, etc., questions I didn’t answer, just sat like a sullen statue. We came home and he said we should have something I liked for dinner. Whatever, I thought, so we had salad stuff, as salads were about all I was eating then, since I had to eat something or die, and he talked nonstop, not seeming to care I wasn’t replying, and I knew my dad understood interrogation and subtly breaking people, but he had never done anything to me like the things he was doing then, just locking me away from the world and everyone in it. The calendar may have said it had only been a couple weeks but it felt much longer.

That night he had his friend Bud over to watch basketball, and I was so bored in my room, where everything had been taken away---TV, phone, music, books, everything but my dog Charlotte---that I came downstairs and asked if I could watch the game with them, and Dad said in this kind voice, “Why sure honey, glad to have you.”

How nice he was to me in the midst of all this was the craziest part.

Bud, who’d known me since I was ten, told me to help myself to the snacks he brought over, and you’d think it was the Brady Bunch around there that night instead of me in this state of near-total lockdown, determined not to break, deciding I’d die before I broke, but knowing it was all wearing me down.

May 19, 2010 When I was working on an Air Force base, I spent the day listening to a government efficiency expert probably two years out of college brightly try to tell a group of us how we could better do our jobs. I asked my co-worker to give me a sip of the “coffee” he had in his thermos, and after the bourbon fumes finished burning my throat, I endured the academic airhead a little better, and soon we were fugging with her hard enough to have her flustered. Later I drew a picture of her with fire shooting out of various parts of her body that made my co-workers laugh, and it was like middle school all over again, except in middle school I wouldn’t have drawn a picture like that, I’d have behaved. I dared one of my co-workers to ask the efficiency expert if masturbation, when judiciously used on the job as a stress reliever, improved working performance, and he actually did! The poor young woman stepped away from her PowerPoint slides like a deer caught in headlights and I actually saw her cheeks redden and her forehead begin to glisten. It was a goofy day spent with non-conformists who were nothing like the popular stereotype of people who worked high-clearance jobs.

May 20, 1995 Still keeping me in a restricted state, Dad had to be in Virginia for a few days, so he shipped me across town to stay with my Aunt Christie, with the situation being that except for school I was to be nowhere but her house. Normally I wouldn’t have minded, I liked being with her, but truthfully life sucked, and I refused to say a single word to my father on the drive down or even tell him goodbye before when he left for his trip, even though travel is always slightly dangerous.

“All this is overkill,” I complained, walking into my aunt's living room and hurling my backpack onto her posh sofa about as hard as I could.

She sympathized, but asked what could she do?
 
I told her my dad had changed and wasn’t always nice like he used to be, and she said I should understand that recent events of life had affected him too, and asked didn’t I understand it wasn’t just me who was going through a lot? I told her I got that (but honestly I don’t know how much time I had spent thinking about it).

I explained I was coming to see my father as dangerous in a way, that he was trying to break me and brainwash me, and that how he’d always treated me growing up was only a version of him, maybe the least real version of all, and that realizing this was yet another scar after also finding out about Grandpa’s  “kept women,” or learning my mother was unhappy for years in her marriage, or losing my tennis career after my own near-death, or grandma having a stroke, or the possibility my cousin may have tried to kill our grandma, or much else of late, and along with all that I was also now seeing my father as a person who could take away my freedom, if he wanted, for the next two years, and nobody could really stop him.

She said I wasn’t being fair toward him, since every good parent was a flawed person hoping to do what was best.  She also said my dad was an extremely intelligent person, always thinking far ahead, but that I should remember he wanted good things for me.

I opened up for a second and told her about something that had been puzzling me, that I didn’t understand why my father wasn’t mad about parts of my behavior you’d think he’d be upset about, how all he seemed to be interested in was getting me to confront that I was angry and upset because of things that had hurt me, and to get past them. It was like he was focused only on wanting to heal my mindset, not punish my deeds. Except for the glaring fact he was keeping me in virtual lockdown, he had actually never been nicer to me or more patient. There was a weird dichotomy and I didn’t trust it.

My aunt said she thought I was probably right about his motives and said I should be smart then and cooperate with what he was after so I could get through this and put it behind me and begin living again.

Thing was, I didn’t want to put it behind me or cooperate, I wanted to…win.

I took a long walk with her after studying for Hell Week exams, and saw Reform Jews going to the Valley Synagogue for Saturday services, including some neighborhood party girls I knew who were modestly wearing long skirts that one day a week, making them look silly considering how they usually dressed. We saw squirrels chasing each other up and down century-old oak trees, and she asked if I’d heard Connie Chung got canned from the evening news, and because I was full of self-pity I said good, she deserved it.
 
She asked didn’t I feel like all women sort of benefited from her opening up new fields by anchoring the news, and I said I thought the best person should get a job and gender shouldn’t be a factor, which made Aunt Christie say, “Well maybe your generation will live in a world where that’s possible.”

It’s almost thirty years later and my aunt’s been gone for eight years; do we live in that world?

I was bored today.  Boring.  Long windiness is so boring. 

And yet you apparently read it!  :bouncegiggle: Your icky obsession with me makes me feel like I'm in high school again. I'll have another for you later, so you can go back to pretending you don't read my every post.

PS: just gave you good karma for being such a faithful follower.

What I wrote wasn't about you; I didn't and don't read most of what you write, but you are indeed long winded.  It's a coincidence.  Do not write to me privately again.

May 21, 2010 Living in a new house might’ve spared us some of the wear and tear issues that come with owning a place built in 1920, but there’s a quaint archaeology that goes with having an inherited house, like that day when we discovered metal tubes under the soil at the wood’s edge, and when we pulled them out from the clinging grass, we saw there were six in total, all varying in length from a meter to around half that, and we couldn’t figure out what they were til by chance my dad saw a picture and said, “Those were my mom’s wind chimes from the 1960s that she had hanging from an old locust tree.” We cleaned up Grandma’s chimes and restrung them and hung them on our patio, where to this day they make a merry noise in the breeze, like faint church bells. We wouldn’t get finds like that with a new house!

May 22, 2005 Began the day visiting Landon’s cousin’s wife Lindsey in a mental institution, where she’d self-committed after her most recent “bad spell.” (Think Zelda Fitzgerald.) She was cheerful, though understandably less sparkly than in her manic episodes, and asked, “Guess you heard I went too far, huh?”
 
I’d come to love Lindsey, and it wasn’t pleasant seeing her in there.

Talked then to my friend Rob, and almost went with him to see Star Wars---or for purists, A New Hope---then in limited re-release. He told me geometrical bruises were his new thing, brought about by taking a wooden dowel with an image cut into the end, and hammering it into the flesh til a deep tissue bruise in that shape formed. (I can’t think why the fad never caught on….)

Ended the day by going with my father to Covington, Kentucky’s magnificent Cathedral Basilica of the Assumption, to hear a choral event known as May Festival. The concerts had been part of the local arts scene since 1873, and arose among the German community as a New World continuation of the traditional sangerbundfests of their Mother Country.

Had tea with him afterward at a 24-hour dive called Anchor Grill, which literally had not been closed since the 1950s, and watched some drunks have a shoving match right outside the front door. Sat in the same booth I’d sat in almost exactly a decade before, then a teenager in love out with college students older than me, and felt memories of that night so strongly my throat tightened up and for a moment I was lost in a cruel time warp of heartache: the past always with me, but out of reach.

On this day in 1970... I was born.

On this day in 1992 ... I graduated from college.

On this day in 1999 ... I got married.

Big day! :D

Hope you had a good day  :smile: :thumbup:

23rd May 2016.

My rather drunk roommate Loz decided to cut a chunk of my hair off. He spent the rest of the night in mortal dread of what I was going to do back to him when I fixed him with my stare of death. He was too afraid to return to our room to sleep and instead slept on the pool table at work. I would actually take my revenge, but it would be in a form he would never expect. This wouldn't happen for some months as I carefully bided my time and chose the right moment to strike (the day we went home).

23rd May 2015.

I was playing an online wargame. The player commanding the US betrayed and backstabbed me, but I defeated his invasion and launched a counterattack, landing in Miami and advancing northward from there. Originally I'd planned on stopping in South Carolina, but I figured "You know what, I had this huge army sitting here, he (or it could have been a she), has nothing left to stop me. So I kept on advancing north. I happened to mention to Kristi about what had happened when I was marching on Washington. She got out of her chair, started running in circles around the man cave shouting "The British are coming, the British are coming!"

23rd May 2011.

Today I wished everyone in the world, a very happy Monday. Well almost everyone. I made 49 exceptions. Who those exceptions were and why I left them out I have no idea.

May 23, 1996 Wanted to study for junior-year Hell Week with Gina, whose classes were much easier than my own, so I came home, gulped down some leftover stir fry, and ran to her house.

Came back brain-fried three hours later and my father was in the family room pointing at the bowl which in my rush I’d left on the coffee table, and in an aggrieved/amused tone he said, “Why don’t you tell me to go wash that up for you?”

“Ummmm, why would I do that, Dad?”

“Ummmm, beeeeecause when you don’t take care of your own mess, you’re expecting somebody else to do it for you, so I figured you might as well at least ask.”

Seriously? I was going to do it when I came back, but I’d been in a hurry to nobly save my friend from bad grades. If it bothered him so much you’d think he’d have just taken the one little bowl to the sink instead of going for a teachable moment. Not like he’d have had to haul it “down to the crick” risking the arrows of aboriginal warriors hidden among the wilds of the Miami Slaughterhouse, as our area was called in the 1700s on account of it being filled with warriors of the Miami tribe, highly talented at slaying white people.

Anyway, I washed out the stupid bowl, which so made Dad’s day he grabbed me by the hands and did a goofy dance around the kitchen singing, “Praise God, my kid’s learned responsibility at last!”

Wow, glad to make your day there, Dad. (Um, he’s not coming off looking too nice in these recollections, is he? lol)

May 24:

1994: Dreamed Jim Morrison revived in his casket, screaming in terror, buried alive.

1996: As we were heading out, Brian stopped to see his dad, and when we walked in Joe was dressed casually but nicely, and I thought, wait, he’s coming with us? I decided if so, I would go home. Turned out, ever the he-slut, he was waiting to meet a woman across town. He gave me a hug when we were leaving, something I always thought he could surely tell I didn’t like him doing, and the whites of his eyes were peculiarly discolored, one of the first signs of an illness doctors would soon say was going to kill him within a year. That night everybody seemed to be talking about an upcoming movie called Independence Day, and afterwards we went for the last time to The Red Frog, which was closing down. I asked if I could take a menu for a souvenir, and the bartender said, “Take a whole f**king table, babe, I don’t give two s**ts.” I tried but it was too unwieldy.

2007: Rode in a hot air balloon in New Zealand, and dropped little rubber super balls over the side.

2016: My friend Edie came home after taking a tour of Auschwitz with her temple, and seemed more upset by the fact it had a gift shop than by it being a site of mass murder. When I mentioned that observation, you’d think I’d given her temper a wedgie.

24th May 2014.

Kristi asked me to get her a surprise from the fridge. I brought up a cold can of beer and put it down her back. Mission accomplished.

24th May 2013.

Following the murder of Lee Rigby, David Cameron said that all military should continue on as normal and keep coming into work in uniform. Nice to be told that by a man who lived in a street that is blocked off from public access by a big iron gate and guarded by the police 24/6 and who has his own security detail who will quite happily arrest a jogger for accidentally bumping into him. He should have stuck to f**king pigs instead of going into politics.

24th May 2011.

Despite the recent volcano eruption disrupting international air travel, we had a perfectly clear sky today. One of the guys I worked with, well known for getting away with every scam he pulled was trapped in Cyprus due to the ash clouds. He thought he'd lucked in once more and would get free time off, but was gutted when he was told he would have to put leave in for it. I wasn't sure that was a legal decision, but since I didn't care for the guy I didn't mention anything about that to him when he got back.

24th May 2010.

In contrast to the weather a year later, today I got to see the first cloud in weeks. It was a hot month and I was glad for a break in the weather.

25th May 2020.

For reasons that were important at the time, I had to balance a sock on one ear. I have vague memories of doing this, but the reasons why have gotten lost in the mists of time.

25th May 2019.

Since I'd been advised to turn toilet rolls around to stop Ash from spinning them until they were all unwound and lying across the floor I decided to film what he would do. Sure enough Ash walked into the toilet and span the roll around on the holder. When he didn't get a strip of toilet paper hanging down, he looked underneath, saw what had happened and simply span the roll the other way around. I sent a copy of the video to Mike who after 4 kids of his own was impressed that Ash had figured out this one so quickly.

25th May 2018.

Kristi went out to the local shop by herself. She was gone for twenty minutes. By the time she got back, I'd drawn a Ming the Merciless-style beard on Ash's face. I had meant to send the picture to my brother via FB messenger, and then clean Ash up before Kristi got home. Unfortunately I stuck it up on facebook instead and Kristi saw it before she got back home.

May 25: This day in 2011 would be among my happiest, since my beautiful son was born, but in 2000 it was the last day for months I wouldn’t be owned by a powerful sense of sadness that followed word of a loss so horrible it would leave me almost dysfunctional all summer, and still echoes as a dividing line across my life.

May 26, 2017 It was the last day of school, and Daisy was fretting, being the rare sort who truly liked going. She read late in bed, and when I went in to see if she was all right, I ended up staying up with her, and she told me more than I strictly wanted to know about a woman named Corrine, whom my husband had asked to marry him in the ‘90s, and who turned him down for reasons I perfectly understood. Across town in the present Corrine was dying from a virus that damaged her heart, and my husband had been going to see her at the hospital almost daily for several weeks, and had begun taking Daisy with him. In true Daisy fashion, she’d quickly gotten close to Corrine on these visits, and told me she and Corrine played cards, and Corrine told her about her daddy as a younger man; about when they went to Jamaica together in 1998, three years before he and I met. After hearing about the trip, Daisy became obsessed with going to Jamaica herself. Corrine said she hoped Daisy went there with Landon, so maybe he could show her places they saw together long ago. Poor dying Corrine comfortably earned Daisy’s highest praise: “Corrie’s totally nice, Mom. You’d like her.” I’m sure it was true. Whatever my faults, let it never be said I am a possessive or jealous sort, right?

May 27, 1989 Went with my mom to get our hair styled, and felt very grown up. Out in the parking lot a young man of about twenty was playing acoustic guitar in front of a worse for wear late-‘70s car, with his guitar case open for donations most passersby didn’t seem inclined to provide him, but I put my only three dollars in, and my mom gave him a five, and she asked if he knew “Why Worry” by Dire Straits, her motto and sometimes theme song, which he picked out competently for her, so my mom clapped for him and I did too. He said: “Need gas to get to WKU in Bowling Green, where I got a cooking job, and I don’t mind playing to get there.” She gave him a ten on top of the five and told him she hoped he made it. As we walked away he began playing something else, a song I didn’t know, strumming hard on his guitar and belting out the lyrics in a deep downstate accent, less a twang than a whine, seeming if not happy with the state of his life, at least at peace, and I bet not a month has gone by this last third of a century but I’ve remembered that man and wondered about him.

on this day, at this hour even, 35 years ago, i got the call that my twin nieces were going to make it. the experimental drug to accelerate their lung development had worked. it would be 6 months before they went home, but they got there!  :cheers:

May 28, 1995 I wasn’t sure if three weeks of being “imprisoned” in my own home were getting to me but I was gradually beginning to see my dad’s point when he said he had only done it because he loved me and wanted what was best for me, and that I had been out of control. So that evening I abandoned my silent treatment of him and had a three-hour talk, and he never got mad no matter how emotional I got or what I said, just conversed in the same patient tone he’d used ever since he pulled me from my normal life.
 
I asked if there was an end point to this, and he said yes there was, so I asked if he’d mind sharing what it was then, and he said, “It’ll end when I feel like I can quit worrying about you so much. If you saw yourself from outside you’d get it. I made huge allowances because I know life hasn’t been easy the last eight months, so I tried letting you find your path back, but you found the wrong path, and I take some blame for that.”

I went, “What have I ever done to deserve this?”

To my chagrin he rattled off a list that began with my being taken from a church screaming and cursing at my aunt, to my mistreatment of my estranged mother, to my GPA taking a strong hit, to taking advantage of my other aunt while staying with her, to repeatedly hurting almost everyone who cared about me, and finally concluded by saying something that broke my heart: “This person you’ve become has taken away the daughter I always knew, and I miss her.”

I still told him I didn’t deserve this, and he said I’d needed a shock to bring me back to myself, and he hoped this did it. He said as far as he was concerned if I kept my grades good, didn’t break laws, do drugs or drink, I could more or less do whatever I wanted beyond that, and I thought, um, that’s not a bad deal, especially since I didn’t have any interest in getting high anyway.

While we talked the power suddenly went out at the start of a spectacularly vivid lightning storm that he and I stood outside and watched, awed past words. The news later said it was a rare 1% intensity electrical storm with pyrotechnics 99% of storms didn’t produce. All I knew was the sky lit up constantly with cascading lightning, including some streaks that burst outward into branches like Christmas trees, yet there was little thunder after the flashes, which was stranger still. The storm lasted two hours, and I never saw anything like it, no rain or hail or wind, only non-stop intersections of lightning across an indigo sky, like the world was ending in the sheer inhuman beauty of primordial nature.

May 29:
1992: Last day of seventh grade, and Brian, who’d been working at my school, a senior headed for college, said goodbye to me. He held my hand a second and kind of did this thing where he ran his thumb across the back of it, and I almost choked up, sure I’d never see him again.
1995: At 11:25 AM my grandma died, but they didn’t tell me til after school. I tried to tell my dad and my aunt how sorry I was for them, but all I could do was cry. I held onto my dad and my Aunt Christie, and she cried too, my dad being the only one of us to keep his emotions together. I sobbed so hard that it felt like I was suffocating.
1996: Exactly a year after losing my grandma, Dana’s daughter McKenna was born, and they gave her my grandma’s first name for her middle name.
2007: In Hamilton, New Zealand, Landon and I visited one of the finest gardens in the world.
https://hamiltongardens.co.nz/collections/
2020 After the lockdown we were looking for just about anything entertainment-wise, and Clare talked me into having a professional bra fitting, so I stood in a booth while a woman did odd things to my uppercarriage to the point I inched closer to a cumulative lifetime lesbian experience.

May 30, 2017 Never getting a heart transplant, Corrine died on this morning, leaving Daisy devastated at the loss of her new friend. Landon said she could come with him to Corrine’s funeral in California, and this seemed to console her. “It’d help me if you’d go,” was what he told her, giving her a role in supportively lifting him up, which I thought was admirable. I told Daisy we’d buy her a new dress for the service, and she could wear my grandma’s pearls, and she said thank you, and I don’t think she cried very much after that, but several times that day she did run to her father and hugged him saying, “This is so awful.” (I didn’t overly shield the children in life, but I did wonder if Landon letting our eight-year-old get close to a dying woman was the wisest thing to do.) In summing up Daisy’s reaction later that night when we were alone, Landon did say one thing that kind of made me laugh a little, which was: “Daisy’s a quarter Irish, and Irish are happiest when they’re sad.” I also knew one of the great obscene truths of loss was that somehow people almost always seemed to find a way to go on, no matter how much pain there was. For weeks Daisy would talk compulsively about Corrine, but now it’s been years since she’s mentioned her. (Keep breathing, girl, it’s all you can do.)

May 31, 2017 Took Daisy out to a boutique for a black dress to wear in California, and she was not herself at all, being difficult and taking every chance to argue and treat me like I’d somehow wronged her. I tried not to let it hurt me and told myself I must not have been as bad as she was acting if I was letting her go to California to see off a woman her daddy had wanted to marry before he even knew I existed. I told Daisy how my aunt had wanted to bury my own grandma wearing the pearls I was letting her take to California, and it was something of a minor argument in the family before my grandpa spoke up and said no, he wanted the pearls to be passed down. I told her that the day, May 31st, also marked the twenty-second anniversary of my grandma’s funeral, and Daisy said, “Then maybe some dates are just cursed.”

Yeah, maybe.

She and her dad, who had never lost anyone before, would stay gone for two weeks.

June 1, 2019 A week earlier I’d impulse-bought an obstetrical textbook from 1899 because it caught my eye, so went to pick it up (usually easier than having things delivered to our house), and when I came out there was a note left under my windshield wiper, and when I unfolded it I saw someone had hand-written: “God wanted me to tell you an angel is going to give you a hug, and it will all be OK.”

Went downtown that evening and heard Rob Lowe tell stories about his life he said he usually only told his friends.
 
The Bunbury Music Festival was also underway, and as we walked to the theater we could hear Fallout Boy playing onstage in a park down by the riverfront, and when we got out Stone Temple Pilots were jamming their classic ‘90s tunes. They were never a band I listened to very much but hearing them did take me back. I also liked the Wilde reference in the festival’s name. (I’ve been a Bunbury but, alas, I’ve never had one of my own.)

June 2, 1998 In my semi-subconscious desire to reach out toward sibling figures, I was over the moon to finally meet my roommate’s oldest brother, Trey, who coming from Wyoming to visit his family, and about whom I’d heard many stories describing how awesome he was. Although I wondered how one person could be all the things Jackie gushingly claimed, in person I found he really was a master of life, self-confident yet down to earth, and he had done the most incredible stuff, like camping on the side of cliffs, and catching and micro-chipping rattlesnakes in Texas, and alligators in a Florida sinkhole, and tagging baby bald eagles, and setting controlled forest fires with flares on his job with the National Park Service. Jackie’s days-long recitation of the list of his achievements never seemed to stop. He was even advanced scuba-certified via some difficult Coast Guard civilian program, and had a pilot’s license for both planes and helicopters. Me, I got a sense of achievement when I mated my socks out of the dryer instead of throwing them chaotically into a drawer, and this man had tagged venomous snakes? How did one person do all that in under thirty years on the planet? I finally got to meet this uber-achiever, and he was everything Jackie said, making me wish her parents would adopt me so I could have a brother like that too. In time he and I would climb Mount Katahdin together and he would show me how if you walked in a figure eight you would jump the same deer you spooked earlier. He’s still pretty amazing at fifty-two, and this spring I was going to walk part of the Arizona Trail with him and his family, but it sort of fell through for now.

^ Do you have a diary or something? I have no f**king clue what I did on any day at any time. Maybe one or two. Like a f**king holiday.

Yeah, since I was barely ten. It's between 7,000-8,000 pages. Plus I used to have a more precise memory but I had a series of micro-strokes in the past related to on-job exposure to toxins, and I don't test nearly as high in recall as I used to. I have a condition called parahyperthymesia that makes me extremely past focused, almost irresistibly so. Sometimes it makes me feel like I am hurrying through the present so it can become the past. It's really very odd. So....yeah, I am obsessed with the past. Lol

...yeah. Ok!

June 3, 1985 It was my last day of kindergarten, which because of snow days we’d had to make up, fell on a Monday, and I remember being worried I was going to fail for the year even though everyone told me that was a crazy worry, nobody ever failed kindergarten, and besides, my grades were good. (I took my teacher a rose as a parting gift, but I wondered if I should have made it two roses, in case I needed to bribe her.) Well, spoiler alert but I didn’t fail, and my Grandpa picked me up so I could go over to his house for the afternoon and swim and help him mow his grass. (i.e. drive his lawn tractor at about 1MPH while he walked beside it and made sure I didn’t steer into trees.) He asked if I wanted a present for being a kindergarten gradate, and I said yes, please, I wanted this cool thing I’d seen two of the boys in class playing with, something green and gross called Slime. So we stopped at Kay-Bee Toys, a can was a buck, I was a cheap play-date, and that was my present for finishing Catholic school kindergarten in the mid-Reagan years.

June 4, 2017 From Los Angeles Daisy told me about Corrine’s funeral, and she said there weren’t many people there, just her cousin Veronica (“who is nice”) and her sister Tabby (“who is nice”) and her sister’s two sons, who didn’t even know Corrine, plus “some lady who knew her in school” and just a couple other people plus a funeral director lady in a purple suit. I asked if it was sad and she said a little but she didn’t cry there, nobody did, but she did later, and it wasn’t a long service. She said Corrine didn’t believe in God, so nobody prayed. I asked Daisy if she said a prayer for her and she said no because that would be rude if Corrine didn’t want people to pray. I said yeah, good manners. Then she said Clare’s mom Bethany (who’d hated me for years but loved my daughter, go figure) told her it was good to pray for people who have died because it sent them grace. Then Daisy said Corrine looked very alive lying there and she kept expecting her to get up again.

Funerals are so morbid.

June 5:

1992: Dana quit smoking (for a month) and withdrawal made her a tennis hooligan in the stands watching me play, shouting: “f**k that b***h up, El! Wear her ovaries for earrings!” She got asked to leave, though I appreciated her sentiments even if laughing at them did mess up my serve all match.

1994: Went with Brian to Traders’ World, this magical hundred-acre flea market halfway to Dayton, met Ukrainians there, failed to find a recording of Dylan Thomas reciting poetry, and got sunburned, but I counted it a great day.

1995: Amid sizzling humidity, went to a Reds game with my grandpa, who told me that when he wanted to buy his house in 1965 he had to get lawyers to threaten to sue, because a clause from 1920 restricted the owner “in perpetuity” from selling it to anyone but a white Protestant.

1997: Did regression hypnosis that afternoon, and that evening played volleyball in a pouring rain shower that was followed by a rainbow when the sun came back out. Brian had a thing for wet hair and when I came home he stared at me a second like he was entranced.

2008: Less than a week before I was supposed to be godmother to Clare’s son, I almost backed out because I did not want to be in the same church as her father. I decided I could get through an important event that wasn’t about me, so I made a vow to myself I would put others’ needs first no matter what it took in me not to react to him.

2013: My cousin Alison was thinking of getting a tiny tattoo of a hummingbird, and I said, “Mark my words, I’ll never get one.” She said, “Yeah, like you said when you were fourteen mark your words you’d never lose your virginity in high school, never not go to grad school, never have a kid before you were thirty, never get married, never get a speeding ticket, and never quit waxing.” I said, “Hey, I’ve never had a speeding ticket!” She said triumphantly, “I knew you quit waxing!”

2017: I declined to give Rob fifteen-hundred dollars to launch his web-comic, Power Monkey, about a super-monkey in 1960s Tokyo who had a nuclear battery, thus depriving the world of reading about that marvel.

2020: Glad to be out after Covid, I took my girls on a summer drive and saw General Grant’s birthplace, and coal barges on the river, and got amazing smoothies at a little country creamy whip stand we’d never seen before and were never able to find again!

June 6, 1991 I was allowed to have an end-of-school pool party and invite about fifteen girls, and Dana surprised me by coming too, even though she was turning seventeen and most of us had just finished sixth grade. She brought a giant clear-plastic beach ball with flashing lights inside, and the day was a blast, though someone did drop an open bag of chips in the water, and I had to run and cut the filter before they floated in. Dana was at the height of her short-lived Doors infatuation, and played us three of their albums and told us after seeing the Olivier Stone movie, she wondered if Val Kilmer was Jim Morrison reincarnated. I did the math and said that would’ve been impossible but Dana told me the existence of oversouls meant it could. To my delight, considering there were many cooler girls than myself attending, my party went well and most everybody stuck around past dark, leaving me very pleased.

7th June 2012.

For reasons that will never publically be exposed, I ended up running around the US wearing a tee-shirt featuring garden gnomes.

June 7, 1990 On this day my best friend Gina and I decided to make predictions about the future, and here are some highlights….

Me: People will land on the moon again by 2005 and we’ll go to Mars by 2017 and by 2025 we’ll have permanent lunar bases. Ordinary people will be living in space by 2040.

Gina: Speed limits on expressways will be done away with in ten years time. IBM will start making computers that are like Macs. Black athletes will start taking over golf and tennis. Two more people will be President in this century.

Although at the time I said my predictions were better than hers, in hindsight she was mostly right.

June 8, 2008 We were in the midst of a seventeen-year cicada swarm that saw the ground vibrate as millions of the critters rose and took to the air. It was also the day I met my friend Edie, the most forward human being I’ve ever known, a mouthy holy terror of spoiled, self-described “Jewish Princessness,” but also utterly loyal to her friends and generous to almost everyone behind a smokescreen of biting sarcasm. (“Retaining a little water once in a while might be a good look for you, El, so have some more salt…”) She is like some long lost relative of Joan Rivers, minus Joan’s famous tact.

9th June 2014.

It was announced that Rik Mayall had died. This put me in a bit of a downer as I'd still been holding out for a third season of The Young Ones. Selfish prick. I celebrated his life by watching Bottom and the Flashheart episodes of Blackadder. Still miss him.

9th June 2013.

Picked up a copy of the newest Mega Deth album. Buying them has always been something of a lottery. It used to be that every 2nd Mega Deth album sucked, but really since Symphony of Destruction it has all been downhill. Mega Collider turned out not to be worth the money I spent on it.

9th June 2012.

Headed back from Salt Lake City. I'd be returning in 14 weeks at which point I'd end up proposing to Kristi much earlier in the relationship than I'd ever thought I would. My general rule was to be with someone for a minimum of 18 months before I'd ever propose. Kristi got there in roughly a year. We'd went to a midnight showing of Prometheus which turned out to be a disappointment. Even Kristi who found Sixth Sense scary and couldn't sleep for days afterward found nothing about the movie to be frightening, other than perhaps how much Ridley Scott's filmmaking powers had diminished.

9th June 2009.

I woke up in extreme pain from my foot. It was the kind of pain that you can't ignore and the only thing you can really do is be in pain. I got the ambulance to come pick me up from the block simply because I was incapable of walking. They signed me off of work for 3 days, all of which I spent in agony with the strongest painkillers they could give me without sending me to the hospital barely touching it. Although I didn't know it at the time, this was the end of my long runs up to the lighthouse and back (about 5 miles) as running on soft surfaces was aggravating the problem.

^ If I can ask, what caused your foot to hurt?

It was a combination of a muscle in the arch of my foot being trapped between two others, and plantar fascia. The RAF paid for a professional civilian podiatrist to have a look at it and he told me that I could get the pain down to a lower level, but that I'd never be able to run completely pain-free again. A year or two ago I found out that this particular podiatrist was infamous for having rather old-fashioned views and that I could with a careful plan of exercise get back to running no problem. I have the exercise plan, but the thought of starting from scratch and building myself up to running long distances just isn't very appealing to me. I believe I lack the particular hormone that gets people addicted to going to the gym or working out, because I just don't get any enjoyment out of going lol. I loved running because it was something I could just go and do myself without anyone else. Four hours of blissful peace and quiet, just me and the quiet early mornings.

The best way I can describe the pain was as the most intensive cramp I have ever had across the arch of my foot. It felt like there was a drill inside my foot, drilling its way out. It remains to this day the most physically painful experience I have ever gone through.

Dang! I know for a few weeks when I was pregnant with Daisy I got late night muscle cramps in my calves and feet that were truly agonizing, so I can maybe kind of imagine a little of what you suffered. My toes would literally bend back right in front of my eyes and it was....some kind of horrible, tell you what. Hope you're never afflicted again!

June 9, 1987 The short-lived Will Shriner Fan Club met that morning with a non-member among us, Becky, who lived at the far end of our street and who was friends with one of the founding members, Tracy. Becky did not share our eight-year-old devotion to Will Shriner, and asked, “Why do you watch this stupid guy?” As we had no sergeant at arms to expel this apostate, we were glad when she went back to her house, but were annoyed when she returned with a tiny kitten named Ollie, and said he was a teacup cat that would never get big. When we asked if we could hold him, Becky refused, and finally when we lost interest and went back to Will’s closing jokes, she burst out, “Ha-ha, fooled you silly millies, Ollie isn’t a real cat, he’s my Pet Pal.” And it was true, the little klafte had been cuddling a stuffed animal so ultra-realistic it fooled us at a six-foot distance.

I would imagine giving birth is more painful, but yeah it was pretty intense. Everytime I tried to get back into running, I could run for 7 to 9 minutes and then it would start up again.

june 9th, 1982. i went on my first official date with my beloved curtis. i walked out of a movie( the shining) and he still married me 9 months later, to the day. 40 years later, we still watch the shining on june 9th.

10th June 2011.

After receiving 100 requests per day on facebook I finally just blocked Farmville. I'd been drinking heavily the night before and had a rare hangover, but still booked my flights for a trip to Norway, sorted out travel insurance and bought some bottles of whiskey for the trip.

10th June 2010.

I took a much-needed break from World of Warcraft and asked my fellow officers not to bother me with anything for a couple of weeks. That night I got a message from Jacko asking me to call him to deal with some urgent problem. They'd decided to vote out another officer who I liked and they expected me to do their dirty work for them and demote him. I refused but did get dragged back into the game by constantly being pestered by them not having the balls to deal with whatever problems did come up. I had the nickname of the Guild Rottweiler. Their persistence in contacting me though was the beginning of the end of my enjoyment of the game, although I'd keep playing for the people I did like in the guild, and then in a few year's time when Kristi started playing. These things extended my time in game, but would not do so indefinitely. The writing was on the wall.

June 10, 2008 Six years before Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s death I had a conversation with my cousin Allie, whose protracted battle to get clean was an unlikely story of triumph against huge odds, and came after several overdoses. She and I were watching The Talented Mister Ripley together and Allie abruptly remarked that she could tell Hoffman, who had a role on there, was an addict. I asked what made her think so, not getting that impression from him myself, and she said, “It’s like how gay people can identify other gay people with innate gaydar. If you’ve ever been an addict you can spot other addicts.” When I heard of the circumstances of Hoffman’s passing in 2014, I had cause to remember her words in 2008.

June 11, 1995 Brian was on vacation in England with his mom and Clare, and he sent me a package of oddities, knowing I’d appreciate them. He included a vial of water from the Thames and similar vials containing soil he gathered near Parliament, (“Who knows, maybe Churchill once peed on the spot…”), Windsor Castle, Stonehenge, and on the grounds of the Tower of London, though he deflated my impressions of that sanguine place by noting: “The Beefeaters don’t talk to you, they recite the same lines over and over and look dead-bored out of their eyes.” All my life I’d wanted to go to England, a place so elevated into legend in my imagination that no reality could ever have matched it, and I would finally get there in 1998, though I could never have envisioned the circumstances of that trip.

June 12, 1992 I was staying with my grandparents that week and decided I’d hack a trail into the thick jungle-ish foliage of their woods. As a result I ended up the worst, most unimaginably tormenting case of poison ivy of my life, sheer un-abating misery that nothing helped, and all I could do was wear mittens on my hands to keep my self-guiding fingers from clawing at my flesh. While lying on the lowest landing on the stairway, knowing torments akin to damnation, I listened to my grandpa, who had no idea I could hear him, rant at the utility company for cutting down trees on the edge of his property instead of trimming them. “Yeah, how about I come to North Carolina and deck you?!” Later that night Bill Clinton came on TV and spoke after the release of the Gennifer Flowers phone tapes. I liked Clinton and didn’t want his campaign derailed, and felt like high-fiving him after he was done, though in truth I don’t think I could have raised my hand that high without surrendering to the ruinous desire to scratch my epidermis to a bloodstained mass.

June 13, 2022 I’d been in Ireland for a few days following my grandmother’s death, and back in the USA it was the wedding anniversary of a girl I’d known mainly through her (half-) brother, Greg, but who became a friend of mine in her own right, which is kind of a theme of mine, if you notice. (Same girl who almost stole a Darth Maul cutout with me in 1999.) Mentioning the anniversary led to this conversation with my cousin over the phone:

Dana: “Greg is who you should have married, and I could never figure out why you didn’t.”

Me: “What was wrong with me marrying Landon?”

Dana: “Landon is the one you should have had fun bedding to your heart’s content, and then moved on when it was time.”

Me: “But I knew Greg before Landon.”

Dana: “You were supposed to go back and meet Greg again in your mid-twenties. Don’t you know anything about life-scripting based on rom-coms?”

Apparently I did not.

13th June 2020.

I spent the night with severe stomach cramps. In the morning I found a copy of a book called "Handbook for the recently deceased." I hadn't realised just how bad the pain had been I guess.

13th June 2014.

Spent the day arguing with football fans after being unwillingly dragged into a conversation about it. Every so often one of them would rally slightly and attempt to mock my team. Since I didn't have one, it meant these counterattacks faltered fairly quickly. Mocking sports fans is like shooting fish in a barrel though. 22 overpaid guys running up and down a field, kicking a ball.

I also hate when fans say "we" and "us" when talking about a team, just like they themselves are there on the field sliding through the sweat and mud puddles of steroid blood.

I've always felt that was a sign of someone who felt they had failed in life and was trying to achieve reflected glory by living vicariously through other people's achievements.

June 14, 2022 Back home the heat index was 111, but in Ireland it was a more comfortable mid-sixties. I went for a walk in the afternoon and saw a Polish skinhead wearing a Bart Simpson shirt, and I almost asked him what the Polish caption said, but he was deep-scowling, and as I’d been told many times that Poles and Irish tended not to mix well around there, I refrained.

Toward evening was my grandmother’s wake, held the traditional ten days after her death, and it was notably subdued by Irish standards. There was sobriety and the tone was religious more than a boisterous tribute. A quote favored by my grandmother was read at one point:

“The first step to humility is recognizing one is proud.”

It was by C.S. Lewis, an odd choice for my exceedingly Catholic grandmother, given Lewis was a Protestant of Orange stock.

June 15, 1994 In my diary I wrote: This was the greatest night of my entire life.

That evening, though I was only fifteen and a half, I got included among college students to go hear a girl I was exceedingly jealous of named Paige sing on stage in the uptown by the university, and meet up with Brian and his friend Dave, Dave’s girlfriend Susie, and Susie’s friend Taylor, who had a “Marilyn” piercing above her lip. They sat in this dive that had a cool ambience but also duct tape covering rips in the vinyl booths, as we killed time before the show. They ordered beers, and the server said normally she wouldn’t bring them to a group that had someone underage in it, but she knew them so was cool about it, and they downed their beers, making me feel left, out but I’d have said no if I’d been offered.

The older girls were giggly, and Brian, who the year before had said I was his snare----as in trouble---put his hand over mine on the tabletop and announced to his friends, “This girl is some sort of genius. I swear. She’s the smartest person I know, so I don’t know why she gives me her valuable time, but she does.”

That embarrassed me because it was definitely not true that I was anywhere near the smartest person he knew, but it also made me feel good that he’d say something ridiculous like that about me to his friends.

When we left Brian said if we looked more like a couple, cops maybe wouldn’t notice I was fifteen, so he put his arm around me as we walked and he smelled like beer and spearmint gum and this aftershave smell, and I loved how his hair was doing that flip over and flip back thing in the breeze, not really long but longer than it’d been in his high school days, and I could have walked all night like that.

We went a few blocks to the club where Paige was going to sing, it was basically a building that’d been old row houses with the lower floors gutted and converted to a stage and audience area, nothing fancy but a gig was a gig.

And there I finally met Paige, Brian’s “sort of girlfriend,” and I could see why he liked her. She was one-quarter Japanese, one-quarter Hawaiian, the rest, “reg’lur American” and was so amazingly pretty that honestly some bit of hope about ever having a chance with Brian died inside me right there. I mean OK, I was an all-American blonde, but this girl could’ve been a Hawaiian Tropic model. Yet after that shock of first impression I kind of spitefully observed she was built straight up and down like a boy, but her face was amazing, and her charisma went to eleven. I also discovered something I’d find the entire time I knew her, and that was she was also incredibly nice, especially to me. She kissed me and squeezed my hand and said she was glad I could come hear her sing, and said she’d heard so much about me. Then she asked Taylor to please not smoke before she went onstage, and I liked her for that, too, because I hated smoking.

She hung with us for almost an hour and we six sat at a table while two other bands played, and Brian and the rest had more beers, which did actually surprise me because he wasn’t a drinker, and was always telling me how he never wanted to be a drunk like his dad, Joe, but he did seem to be handling it well and also wasn’t consuming any more than his friends were, so I thought well, whatever. So Paige and I were the only non-imbibers at the table, because she told me she wouldn’t drink either since I couldn’t and she didn’t want me to feel left out. (Oh, I hated her being so nice to me!)

Finally Paige went up on stage and I swear the room went quieter when she did, and right off she said, “Tonight I’m going to sing a song I wrote for someone I love.”

I thought, oh s**t, she wrote it for Brian? She just said she loves him?

Then she went, “Mr. Kurt Cobain!”

Huge cheers when she said that name and I thought, that’s a relief!

If her speaking voice was DJ perfect (she actually did do DJ work at parties) her singing was far above even that, reaching multiple octaves, and her original song was so beautiful I can still hear it now, almost thirty years later. It went:

“Tell my heart, tell my heart/That we belong together/Tell my heart, tell my heart/ What strength there is in silence/ Tell my soul, my hurting soul/He won’t be coming home annnnnymore…”

She did three songs in fifteen minutes, all originals, and finally said, “Thank you, gang, all twenty-two of you here tonight were the best audience in town!”

Everyone at the table stood up and clapped and cheered, even me/especially me, and she grinned walking back down in her black silk shirt and looked so exotically cool, moving gracefully like a dancer, her perfect hair like liquid motion, and I knew I was seeing someone absolutely amazing.

Afterwards we walked down the street to Dominos and sat in a big corner booth, and the guys who’d played with Paige onstage, Rod and Brummy, were hilarious, both were stoned and mellow, and we got two big pizzas, and Rod and Brummy and Dave went around to the parking lot to fire a joint up, and offered me some if I wanted to come outside, and I said no thank you, and Brian, who was sitting between Paige and me, leaned his head back against the booth while sitting slumped forward at the waist, like a pose planned to look casual, though I don’t think it was, and he said to them, “This one never does anything. She’s my angel.”

He said it like he meant it about me, and it was sweet but puzzling to hear. He turned to me and rubbed my arm and asked if I was doing OK, and I was, and Paige asked how tennis was going, and it surprised me she knew that about me.  I told her was going into the Jr. USTA tour when I turned sixteen and hopefully the full tour at eighteen, and she said she’d like to come watch me play sometime. She seemed so interested that God help me, I couldn’t hate her, I realized I really liked her, even though she was going out with someone I was in love with, and she herself was so far beyond me I should’ve probably abandoned all hope of him being in my life.

(Ah, patience, young Grasshopper…)

At the end of the night Brian said he was giving me a ride home, and Paige gave me a hug and kissed my cheek and slipped her phone number into my hand and said, “Call me, we’ll do something sometime.”

I thought, she’s so cool she doesn’t even mind him taking me back without her?

To Brian though she said, “Let’s see you walk some straight lines, or I’m driving her back.”

He smiled at her and more than walked straight lines, he jumped up onto this stone wall and walked on it, because like my cousin Dana he had one of those lightning-fast metabolisms that sobered really quickly and was honestly fine, so Paige told him she’d see him later then---which I think meant she’d literally be seeing him later that night---and went on, leaving Brian to walk me to his car doing this thing he would often do across all the years we were together, something no other man ever quite did, putting his arm not so much around me as rested on my shoulders, like a bar, and that always made me feel protected, like an enclosing fence.

The area was high crime, but Brian said we had more to worry about with cops than anything else, and told me I could pass for a first-semester college student, but not more than that, and I said, “Hey, wait a second, when you first met me in seventh grade, two years ago, you said I seemed mature, like I was your age, a senior in high school.”

He goes, “Nah, I was just flattering you to seduce you.”

Oh, as if!

And his fear almost came true, we had just started off driving in his car when a police cruiser came up behind us like a shark out of a reef. Yeah, great, if the cop stopped us there he’d be out alone with a minor in his vehicle, late at night, after city curfew, and the minor’s parents didn’t know she was out there. He also still smelled faintly of beer and was slightly not old enough to drink either but did on a fake ID. Wow…

He stayed ice-cool but it freaked me out so much it was like my heart quit beating, and when the cop finally turned off onto a side street I started doing that nervous laugh thing I do, which he said he’d missed hearing, then told me then he could just hear the cop asking him, “And how old is the young lady with you tonight, sir?”

So he played a Weezer CD and we drove on through the uptown, black people standing around on every street corner, some staring us down, most going on with their lives on a blistering summer night. We were almost back when I remembered my manners and told him it was a great night and thanks for inviting me, and he said he was glad I could come. Remembering Paige knowing about my tennis playing, I said he really did brag on me to his friends like he said, didn’t he? He said of course, I’d always been special to him, and then he called me by this nickname he’d made up that was like my name, Evelyn, turned into letters: FLN.

I hated for the ride to end, hated to see my neighbor Gerald’s yellow bug light burning on his porch, and I thought, when I’m in college will it be like this for me too, like it is for him and his friends, doing cool stuff all the time? Will he and I still know each other then? Will we always know each other? It was how I wished life always could be.

He let me off from up the street, and I went into my house, told my mom hi and prepared to fall into keeping up the lie I’d told about where I’d been that night. I took my dog, Charlotte Sometimes, outside and looked at the sky, and the only thing that made me sad after such a great time was knowing no matter how much I wrote about it in my diary or tried to memorize the way I felt then, time was going to make me forget little bits of it, and never get it exactly right if I ever told about it one day.

June 16, 1989 It felt like a big deal that I rode a bus alone downtown to meet my dad for lunch. I went to the federal building where he worked, and because he was running behind, I sat in an outer office and played checkers with his secretary, a nice lady named Jean, who regaled me with stories about living in Norfolk, England for seven years while she was in the Air Force, and I tried not to look at the pomegranate-colored scab on her cheek where she’d had a small skin cancer removed.

When my dad finally emerged he took me to a place called Red Squirrel, famous for double deckers, and we spent almost an hour before he walked me four blocks north to the immense downtown library, where I stayed the rest of the afternoon until he could drive us home, and life seemed particularly special after a day like that.
 
My dad was into Apple before most of the country had heard of it. In the mid-‘80s he sported a rainbow-colored Apple decal on his car’s bumper, and he even had a picture of a more round-faced, friendlier-looking Steve Jobs hanging in his study. On this day he got his third Macintoch, meaning he’d owned the original, the SE, and now the IIcx, which came with a whole megabyte of RAM for a mere $1,500.00. We were on a waiting list to get a second phone line put in dedicated to the Mac alone, but before the techs came almost a month later, the deal was Mom and I had to check if my dad was on his computer before we tried to make a call.

Here’s a confession unveiled now for the first time: I liked that chirpy modem sound so much I sometimes used to pick up the phone on purpose, just to hear it.

June 17, 2015 Encountered the creepiest bagger in Kroger's history, someone I never saw in the store before or since, who kept chatting at me in this monotone so dull I couldn’t make out more than one word in three. He reminded me a bit of how Andy Warhol probably looked at that moment, and if this dude wasn't a high-functioning zombie, I don't know what he was. He had this mop of frizzy white hair that surely had to be a wig, pale skin, and even his eyes looked glassy. My three-year-old clutched my arm and leaned away from him when we left the checkout and she kept her eyes on him, clearly determined not to turn her back. I don’t know what the bagger’s deal was except he didn’t seem sick and I don’t think he was an albino, but I can truly say I’ve never encountered anyone outside Halloween who so completely had the sepulchral appearance of an extra from a horror movie, so if he was doing the look for shock value, he deserved an extra ration of brain.

29 years ago, my son Eddie was born.
I named him Edward Clyde Merchant. I have 3 grandkids by him. 2 by my oldest son, Jed.

Happy birthday to him, RC!  :cheers:

^ Thank you!

June 18, 2015 Went to Starbucks that evening to do this self-tormenting game I was fond of for a while and stood in line to get waited on by the young woman with whom my husband had cheated on me. She had no idea who I was and I never could summon an active dislike for her since she didn’t know he was married when they messed around, or even know his real name, and he’d even dumped her cold without so much as a text, poor kid, but sometimes I’d get an urge to go be near her and keep a clandestine eye on her. Every time I was there I’d evaluate her, and found her friendly (obviously), with strong charisma, a nice body, really killer ass, a decade younger than me, sure, but I’d think….she isn’t worth a man risking his whole domestic life just to get inside her, you know? I’d also always leave her a five buck tip on a three buck tea, and when Edie saw me do that one time she laughed herself silly going, “That girl has no idea she’s getting paid for having sex with your husband!” Ohhhh, funny.

18th July 2017.

Everywhere I went people kept wishing me happy father's day. Each time someone said it, it was like I'd just been stabbed and the knife was twisted sideways. Losing Lilly-Beth still felt pretty raw. The first few times it was said, I did my best to take it in the spirit it was meant and not lash out at anyone, but they just wouldn't stop. The first person that said it, did so in a very awkward fashion that seemed unnatural and made me wonder if he'd been asked to say it. Eventually, while we were going up the escalator in Tesco's and Kristi was trying to point out some father's day presents being sold off to the side I had a bit of a breakdown. I wouldn't look around to see what she was pointing to. She asked me if she had offended me in some way and I just couldn't keep it together any longer and broke down in tears in the middle of the supermarket. Although I've never asked her I've always had the suspician that Kristi meaning well had asked people to treat me like any other dad. I know she'd been reading articles about women who had lost babies and did they count as being mothers in the time leading up to this. Maybe if she'd waited a few more years. Maybe what works for women just didn't work for me. That was the most pain I'd been in since she died. When we got home I stuck a post up on social media telling people to stop sending me fathers day messages.

June 19, 1989 I actually remember when my Uncle Pat called my mom long-distance on her twenty-ninth birthday to say hi and also give her the joyful news that he and my aunt had a newborn daughter, Celia Teresa, their third girl in a row. I ran to the phone to tell him congratulations, and said I was happy for them all, and couldn’t wait to come over and meet my new cousin. In retrospect that joy was ironic considering the negative role Celia would go on to play in my life, but not knowing this, I would grow to be close to her for many years, and just as I’ve often called Tyler “my son who is not my son,” Celia was the little sister I never got. I’ve pondered a thousand nature vs. nurture questions as to what went wrong with her, concluding she is a bona fide sociopath, but the happiness the news of her birth brought that day would sour amid the pain radiantly beautiful Celia would eventually bring into my life.

June 20:

1992: Didn’t likeThe Stand, despite being repeatedly told it was King’s masterpiece.

1998: Took a whale-watching excursion in Bar Harbor and saw minke whales, puffins, and what could possibly have been a mako shark.

2004: The Man in Austin talked me into reading the anticlimactic Da Vinci Code, which he loved.

2005: Attended an all-acoustic Alanis Morissette concert marking ten years since JLP was released.

2015: Went to a butterfly show with my children, young cousins*, my Aunt Sarah, and my visiting maternal grandmother, who later went to dinner at Sarah’s house and met her Jewish son in law for the first time. (Hell did not freeze over.) I pondered that my ultra-Catholic grandmother was once a vividly pretty girl of fey charms, who, so she abashedly told me, used to flirt with boys back in her youth. I could not imagine the serious, rosary-toting old lady being that way.

2016: My dad showed me the ring he got to propose yet another marriage to my mom.

2022: A bronze sculpture of the Capitoline Wolf, donated by Mussolini in 1931, was stolen from our local art museum.

* Earlier I said "niece and nephew" instead of cousins???? What Freudian corner of my mind did that come from?  :bouncegiggle:

How did you find her live? I went to see her once and I came away with the conclusion that either she owed her career to auto-tune or that she was having a very bad night.

Honestly not that impressive but she did seem into performing, unlike some other artists I saw live.

June 21:
1977: My parents met on this day.
1982: Moved into the townhouse where we’d live for four years.
1996: On the solstice went to my cousin’s daughter’s baptism, then on the other end of the spectrum, that evening saw a slightly racy movie called Stealing Beauty.
1998: Local news showed footage of a “UFO” over the region’s most infamous toxic waste site.
2001: Amid hail the size of shooter marbles, I was in a car when lightning hit a telephone pole in the same parking lot. Couldn’t see or hear anything for a couple seconds.
2011: Made everybody promise if I ever had a tombstone it’d say Wish You Were Here Instead.
2014: At our lakeside cabin and my husband and I swam out about a hundred yards in absolute darkness while a storm rolled in and lightning danced in the distance. Kind of intense.
2021: Went out with my son and youngest daughter and gathered river stones for our “henge,” and talked about the chance it might last millennia, like the Canadian medicine wheels.

21st July 2022.

The figures I have paid the most for, turned up today. I'd ordered them custom designed and made. About a week later one of the characters ended up being reincarnated in a female Orc body rendering the figure useless for him (now her).

21st July 2013.

A seagull tried getting in through the kitchen window. I was upstairs and heard Kristi shouting, so ran downstairs with one of my larger knives. The seagull decided to retreat, but this would be only one of several battles that summer with these hated birds.

June 22, 1990 It was the fourth day of a mini-vacation to Land Between the Lakes on Kentucky’s southwestern border, a guest of Gina and her family. Gina got to ride horses, which she loved doing, we hiked trails, found a ring-necked snake, went to a beach on Kentucky Lake, which was so wide the opposite shoreline was only a long green line on the horizon, and saw a bunch of soldiers from the 101st Airborne stationed at nearby Fort Campbell out on a party boat, having what sure looked like a great time. Stopped by a gift shop that night and bought my dad and grandpa some Civil War bullets, six dollars for a little pouch full, and then we made a campfire and sat out late til the coals glowed orange, and the sky was filled with more stars than we ever saw back home. It was the last great trip of my true childhood.

June 23, 1997 Damn, this memory should be on early-afternoon TV and be sponsored by Tide.

It was Brian’s twenty-third birthday, meaning we’d be back to it sounding like there were five years between us instead of four. I was three weeks out of high school, college was what I was supposed to be looking ahead to, but I was a few weeks pregnant, as I would be til a miscarriage early the next month. When people hear of a pregnant eighteen-year-old they think it’s what the irresponsible idiot deserved, but conception can occur no matter how careful you happen to be. I was making the best of things by thinking of the nice parts of having a child, a boy I felt oddly sure, but not doing a great job of concealing my shock and low spirits.

Brian said I needed cheering up, so even though it was his birthday he got us tickets for a concert later in the summer featuring the improbable girl power duo of Tina Turner and Cyndi Lauper. (Spoiler, we wouldn’t go; I’d be far away by then.)

I had him open his two presents before his ever-present father was supposed to come over, and I’d gotten him a t-shirt with a montage of about fifty Monty Python illustrations, including the famous crushing foot, and I got him a ratty but charming 1958 black market edition of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl that looked like it was published in a Brooklyn basement.
 
Then his father showed up on time, always on time, his father who was perpetually around, almost like he knew somehow he had such a limited time to be with his son, and he kissed me on the cheek as he always did, which I never liked, and because he was the only other person who knew about the baby---the only one who would for many, many years---he took both my hands in his and looked at me with this tender expression and said the news only made him happy.

Brian, too, seemed happy around his father, he always did, really, and honestly, if either of them were faking their joy about Brian and me being engaged and a baby coming, they hid it well, and in Joe’s case I hadn’t seen him smile so much ever. I thought I’d go on to know his son for decades, but it’s been the other way around, Joe’s the one still in my life a quarter-century later.

After Joe left we went to B-Dubs for two hours and met Brian’s college friends, a mixed sort, brainy, brawny, radical, gay, one of them a Serbian who spoke half a dozen languages and who would eventually go on to work for the state department. Sometime before the end of our stay there I felt unaccountably tired all at once and a sudden sense of panicky dread hit me, but I didn’t let on since Brian was having a good time. I thought of all the years at my school, K-12, all the hopes and expectations in my family that I’d be heading off that particular summer to begin the next chapter of my life at an illustrious university, taking the first steps toward the Ph.D everyone had always assumed I’d one day get. Instead I was on a path to be a teenage bride, a teenage mother. The things people were going to say….

Then without warning one of the least-loved aspects of myself appeared and I started laughing beyond my power to stop, laughing long and hard, waving away the others who were staring at me and kind of laughing along, puzzled, and Brian put his hand on my shoulder and asked if I was all right, and I nodded my head, still laughing uncontrollably, but inside I thought oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.

(Yet at times over the years I’ve wished so hard I had had that baby.)

Shrug, my soap opera.

23rd June 2015.

On the basis of claims that violent video games made people violent in real life, I started playing Tiger Woods Golf. It failed to make me a world class golfer.

23rd June 2017.

We took Kristi's cousins around Elgin cathedral. The older one was rather dull and didn't really join in much (although he'd quit complaining about everything after I'd given him a beasting and marched him around Forres at my fast walking pace. After that he was too tired to talk.

23rd June 2019.

In the D&D campaign, an elite assassin had been attempting to poison the party and kept failing in a series of disasters that were worthy of a Pink Panther movie. The party then had a disaster when they decided to eat some out-of-date meat and almost all died.

Video games make people violent like forks make people fat.

Who on earth could fail to be awed by the ruins of Elgin Cathedral???

It was my ancestor who burned it down, the Wolf of Badenoch (remember though that on a long enough timeline everyone is related to everyone else some way).

June 24, 2011 Went to Minneapolis for a Neil Gaiman event. He was great.

In the hotel room Landon asked me to tell him a story from my life he’d never heard before, so I told him about my twenty-third birthday/Christmas Eve 2001, when I got mildly toasted drinking a bottle of Swedish mead (“Made in the Viking Tradition!”) with my mom, who almost never drank at all. Under my giddy buzz I was fascinated with this thing I’d never seen before, my mom tipsy, like an anthropologist would feel observing a member of some little-known tribe. The mead made my mom giggly to the point I ardently wished she’d been an alcoholic when I was growing up.

Landon laid in bed next to me and after a moment said, “I can’t for the life of me imagine your mom intoxicated.”

“Yeah, remember Gidget?” I asked.

“Forrest Gump’s mom as a teenager?”

“Yeah, now just imagine Gidget with a few drinks in her. That was my mom.”

“OK, I can actually see that.”

“Yeah….”

24th July 2017.

Played Kristi's cousins at Betrayl at Hill House. Logan consistently ended up as the traitor. In fact, every game we played where someone is randomly a traitor, it was Logan. He also rolled really badly whenever dice were required. These two things combined led us to referring to him as our "Wil Wheaton".

24th July 2021.

Ash got ahold of a black marker while I was getting out of my uniform after work. This was the result.
(https://i.imgur.com/aOi62nX.jpg)

June 25, 1995 The second half of 1995 was infinitely better than the first, and on this day I came home after being away for almost a week in New York City with my dad, who had meetings there. We went back to the World Trade Center, which except for a memorial monument to the 1993 attack, was the same as when I was there before, still mighty, still swaying when you were on top, the elevators still made my ears pop, and the people who worked there were nice for supposedly gruff New Yorkers. Dad took me to Central Park, to museums (LOVED the AMNH dioramas!), we rode out to the Statue of Liberty and the water beside the boat was full of floating trash, including some embarrassing things to look down and see when you were standing next to your father. We ate at Nathan’s, we ate at a rock cafe, we ate standing on a sidewalk, we ate at Burger King, home of the then-outrageously expensive four-buck NYC Whopper. We broiled on some truly hot days, (and I refused to put on sunscreen, ijit me) we got messed with by a mime, and we tossed pennies off the Brooklyn Bridge, which made me think of someone finding them in a thousand years. It was all a blast, but I slept about one night’s worth of sleep in the four days we were there, because it was noisy and bright, and by the time we got home I was so tired I found myself bumping into things. Some of the accounts I’ve written about my dad in here haven’t made him come off looking the best, but really he’s a great guy and someone I’ve always been able to count on. After several emotionally stormy months, this was a very special trip.

June 25, 2022. Last time I had alcohol. Yea, it's been a year since I've had any alcohol.

26th June 2019.

Having gotten annoyed at people posting up various things that pretty much boiled down to support me on this or get out of my life, I posted this on social media.



Every year since I have reposted this as a reminder to people that your cause isn't automatically my cause.

June 26, 1993 I went out of state and played in a fast-moving double elimination tennis tournament sponsored by Junior USTA, where instead of regular sets you played individual games, leading to a bracket made up of those who’d lost a game, and those who did not, with the last player left in each bracket playing one another for the trophy. Relying mainly on my speed, since stamina was not a factor in these, I won my first three games, then lost my fourth 0-40 because I was simply outplayed, then did well in the one-loss bracket, only giving up three points total amid several wins, til I finally got knocked out in the final game that determined who played the last player left in the winner’s bracket for the whole shebang. So in the end I only lost two games out of all I played, and though I liked regular sets and matches better than this format, I was proud that at fourteen I could hold my own against sixteen and seventeen year olds in an artificially high-pressure version of the sport. I also came to the notice of a recruiter for a camp in Florida that trained tennis players, but wasn’t interested.

June 27, 2022 In the spring I was invited by my erstwhile employers to attend a retreat in central Sweden, and went in early summer. When I pictured Sweden I thought of blue skies adorned with a midnight sun, forests of tall pines, cool northerly winds chilling the nights, and blond people constantly having sex with other blond people, but except for the non-stop blond-on-blond jävla, that wasn’t what I encountered. For starters it was in the upper-eighties, and while the sun did shine late, there was a peculiar absence of all wind, leaving flags draped to the effects of gravity. And while I’d pictured virgin forests if not virgin residents, there was a lot of heavy industry all around, putting more smoke into the air than I thought green-crazy Swedes would’ve allowed.

I don’t want to give the impression it was a bad trip, because it wasn’t, I’m glad I went, but it was not what I’d thought it would be. Where we were was as flat as the American plains, with picturesque birch trees here and there, and I left the retreat center for a walk down a country road, and about a mile and a half later saw a farmhouse amid a vast potato field. It wasn’t gorgeous but it did hold a certain rustic charm, so I paused to look, which triggered the farmer’s rather beefy dogs, who came hurling toward me full-tilt, all but foaming at the mouth with eagerness to bite me. It’s amazing how fast a person can run when motivated.

June 28, 2021 There is a park in the northeast of our county, built atop what for decades had been a small airport---til a tornado kind of ate it in 1999---and one of its attractions is an open-air observation tower from which you can see for a score of miles in every direction. Well that morning as I went there I learned a teenage boy had recently leaped off it to his death, which gave me a sick jolt since I’d spent many hours on the top-floor deck, always feeling a sense of peaceful retreat up in the sunshine and ever-present breeze. Shortly after the suicide the city closed the tower for “improvements” which included raising the height of internal railings, and somehow it didn’t feel the same there anymore caged-in by bars and with the place tainted by some poor young man’s tragic decision. I’ve rarely gone back since.

June 29, 1995: Although I didn’t know til afterward, and it freaked me out to learn about it, my boyfriend asked my dad if they could meet, and my ever-perceptive dad, who’d known about him for a lot longer than I thought he did, agreed. So they met in a restaurant and talked, my overly-confident, high-achiever boyfriend and my ice-cool, uber-genius professional tactician father. What could go wrong?

Dad told me he didn’t want to kill Brian when he got there and didn’t want to kill him when he left, but at some point in the middle he did want to kill him.
 
I raised my eyebrows and asked, “Where was your service pistol?”

“In my car.”

“Oh, thank God.”

But he also said he thought he was a nice young man who had strong feelings for me, and he could understand why my Aunt Christie, who’d bonded with him, said so many kind things of him. It wasn’t so much that my dad gave his blessing as that he pragmatically let things proceed.
 
Besides, we had that deal that as long as I didn’t do drugs and I kept my grades up, I could mostly do whatever I wanted; for the record that’s a deal I’d never offer my kids, should they ever read this. (And if you’re reading this, quit before I send you to convent school in Connaught.)

June 30, 2013 It was 115 in the Pacific Northwest and almost that hot where we lived, and I did something called a modified Ganzfeld experiment, that uses visual deprivation and auditory input to bring on an altered state. I’ve never done psychedelic drugs but have delved into hypnosis, sensory deprivation, meditation, fasting, sleep deprivation, and many etcs, and have always been interested in restructuring perception. For an hour I laid in a large dark closet and listened to white noise til I felt like I was bobbing in water like a cork, experiencing an actual conflict between rationally knowing where I was, and the testimony of my bewildered senses telling me I was floating in a lake.

That same 90-something degree evening my husband and I went to a Matchbox Twenty/Goo Goo Dolls concert in an open air amphitheater beside a river. I wore a tee and shorts and was glad we were so far back on the lawn I could lie on a blanket and look up at the sky, where bats chased moths and the lights made the clouds purple and hid the firmament behind humid mist, like a bridal veil. It was close to midnight when we got out and on the drive home I hung my bare feet out the window on the expressway and let the rush of air cool my skin, feeling drowsy, and happy with my life.

July 1, 2012 Scooted across to Hoosierland on this broiling day for our annual fireworks run, retrieving pyrotechnics illegal in our nanny state---the fact we have to look to Indiana for our wild times says a lot. I should have gone on a weekday, because there was an hour wait in the hot sun, and it annoyed me to see an obvious undercover cop sitting in a truck surreptitiously taking pictures of Ohio license plates to text to colleagues in patrol cars waiting across the state line. Really, couldn’t their time have been better spent catching child molesters or password sharers? If someone had been there to hold my place I would’ve given the cop tips on blending in and told him that hiding makes you stand out, so be seen doing something appropriate to the setting, though in my experience no one clings to a mistake like someone who thinks he isn’t making one. Anyway I had a solution to confound busybody law enforcement and dropped off my haul of festive explosives with an Indiana friend who’d bring them to our party on the holiday, so, I thought, let the yokels search my car if they wanted to, let them search….

1st July 2014.

I was working late last night and didn't get to leave until about half-eight. Just as I left the camp gates some guy stops me and asks if I work at the base. Not seeing how I could answer no, I sort of had to say yes.
He then proceeded to tell me at great length about how he was in psychic communication with his higher self and the voices had told him he had to come to Lossiemouth to serve. I was starving and badly wanted food but I didn't want this guy following me home. He seemed harmless but you never know for sure. I phoned security and let them know about the guy. The next year he was mentioned when I did my next annual security brief.

If he was recruited that night to put his psychic expertise to work on foreign policy, it might explain the general direction of things.

Over the years I have had a lot of A) crazy people and B) clueless morons telling me a lot about foreign policy. *shrugs* They are entitled to their opinion, but I am just bored of listening to them.

July 2, 2017 And now for something completely different. Ever experienced synchronicity, that odd repetition of themes played out within seemingly unconnected events? Carl Jung spent years speculating on it, saying both that it existed, and that it hinted at the presence of something greater than ourselves.

For several weeks I kept encountering story after story, account after account, of people having run-ins with shape-shifters. I bet across 99% of my life, except for Deep Space Nine and Peter Straub’s Ghost Story, I never heard an utterance about such things, yet in the summer of 2017 it was like something wanted me to contemplate the concept, since the subject was everywhere.

Well, after being buffeted for weeks with references to beings changing form at will, on this day I read a Howard Stern interview with Billy Corgan, who told of witnessing someone change bodily into “something else” right in front of him, and claiming it was “evil and demonic.” (About a year later he’d hint the person who transformed may have been himself.)
 
I shut the book of Stern interviews because that was too much, the topic of shape-shifting had been all around me for weeks, and I’d just discovered it showing up even in a book by a shock jock? Was God telling me something? Was I a shape-shifter and never knew? As far as I can tell, sadly I’m not, though after reading that, the baffling references abruptly stopped.

Existence is strange.

July 3, 2007 For eighteen years my maternal first cousin Celia and I shared some wonderful times, before things went bad. On this day she was with me at my house, finally in the US after dreaming about it for years, and I’d never seen her so happy. I’d gone to work early that morning on a military base and she slept til almost when I got back, then we went swimming and I showed her some crazy dives, and we played Indian Poker in the woods, and fed sugar cubes to ants while we laid on the ground and watched them swarm, looking drunk with joy. Celia drew a bright-colored flower on the arch of my bare right foot with magic markers while we were out there. Toward evening we took cans of food to semi-feral cats that lived behind a Taco Bell, and went saw the second Hostel movie, then met my almost sister-in-law Clare at Starbucks and listened to a mellow steel drum performance out on the sidewalk in the hazy-hot pre-holiday night, and gave the players five dollars. Celia and I drove home and I talked about all the good stuff we’d soon do together, saying we now had years in which to do it, not yet getting how good she was at playing people: me most of all.

3rd July 2012.

I heard an op being called, one I (or anyone else in the office) had ever heard called before. I tried googling the name and all the results I got involved vaginal mesh surgery. It turned out it was the code word for an airplane crash. Two 15 sqn Tornado's had crashed into the north sea. Three out of the four aircrew would die in the crash, the fourth survived but had no memory of the event. I never looked at the official crash report, but we all figured with the platform coming to the end of its life, the crew had been messing around a little and ended up colliding. This would have various short-term effects on my life, attending the memorial with prince Andrew (who I didn't like even before the allegations against him) and his daughters, Jim Holt sniffing the seats the girls had been sitting on (urgh!) and sorting out the personal effects of one the dead men, but all that would be in the coming weeks. Years in to the future I'd be involved in tracking down some missing paperwork behind the aircraft. It would eventually be found shoved into various cupboards somewhere in Marham which to be fair was about the standard I'd already come to expect from that place.

I went to see 'The Amazing Spiderman' with a guy from where I had just started working. I tried hard to like him, but he turned out to be what we termed a 'briefcase wanker'. I felt the film title had lied a bit and it should have been called The OK Spiderman.

July 4, 2007 It stormed severely that Independence Day, and that afternoon Celia got to experience her first tornado watch, fearless and even jovial about it, but avidly focused on an environmental hazard we learn to live with in this part of the world, and in fact we may have seen a small funnel while we were coming back on the circle expressway, her nose pressed to the glass while demanding in a tone of excited curiosity, “Is it going to come down behind us?” It didn’t, and when the front moved out around sundown things cooled off nicely and went great. After so much rain there was almost no chance of our illegal fireworks setting the woods on fire, and the patriotic sushi was a nice novelty. I introduced Celia to everyone I invited, and people seemed happy they stopped over. See, here’s something about Celia words don’t tell: she’s beautiful. So beautiful she attracts people, so charming she makes you want to like her, so winsomely Irish she disarms American sensibilities, and to put it mildly, she was a hit, and I looked on, proud of her. To see her come over after we’d planned for so long against the odds, and for her to be succeeding over here…. I was very happy that evening.

4th July 2001.

I woke up in the barracks having arrived the night before we were due to start training. We were all marched off to the administration section where we'd spend the next 3 days filling in various paperwork required for joining up. Johnny McAlany had managed to be the first one of us to get a bollocking when he called my name out. He took the shouting. For myself, I'd have pointed out I wasn't in yet and told her to shut up. Wasn't my drill instructor.  :bouncegiggle: I was rooming with two other guys, an English guy called Steve Brown who I am still vaguely in touch with and a guy from Paisley whose name I can't remember, but who picked up the nickname of Mike because his hair looked like a boom mic. Every person I've met from Paisley has always thought of themselves as some hard-as-nails villain and Mike was no exception. He decided he was the toughest person on the course because he'd been present while one of his friends had been shot by a drug dealer. The guy was training to be a Dental Assistant. I figured his family were most likely notorious on their local council estate. He was quite offended when he told me his family name and I didn't recognise them as some notorious crime family.

While we were waiting for some briefing or another, one of my DI's called me up to stand in front of people and tell jokes. I still remember the joke I told that day.

Q) What is the biggest drawback in the Arctic?

A) A Polar Bear's foreskin.

After I'd told that one I instructed to sit back down and not tell any more jokes. :twirl:

While people were still being shot at in Bosnia, the threat of any kind of a war of real size seemed to have retreated beyond the horizon. Our training was now geared towards smaller, what are termed 'police actions'. My my, but how the world would change in just a few weeks.

July 5, 2021 On this night, one person’s death made macabre waves in my brain.

It began when I learned a woman named Sally, whom I knew in Austin, had died suddenly in apparently perfect heath, and only a year older than me. Once, for four years, she had been part of my world, coming to know me because I was friends with her husband, who shared the same employer. She’d invite me to their house in one of the rich new neighborhoods in booming ‘00s Travis County, and we’d all do things together on Sixth Street and out in the Hill Country, and she and I would shop, see movies, I’d watch her explosive episodes of I-35 road rage, and it was fun as long as I let her basically decide every detail of what we were doing, since she had a controlling personality on steroids. She used to ask me to write papers for her in her college class, but I’d always decline. There came a time though that Sally absolutely hated me, blaming me (mostly unfairly) for having a role in the ending of her long-troubled five-year-old marriage, and I later found out she even toyed with the idea of hiring someone to throw corrosive liquid in my face. (Jewish princesses….you don’t f**k with ‘em.)

When I heard of her death, I was shocked, then when night came I was filled with unshakably morbid thoughts, recalling a time she was bent double laughing while gripping my arm, and she burst out, “Can you laugh so hard it kills you?”

In my phantasmagoric moments I kept thinking of Sally lying right then, in darkness, wearing something designer, her always gorgeous hair perfect, her makeup doubtless without flaw, her cosmetically-reshaped nose pointing toward the casket’s roof in a Jewish memorial park in Connecticut, where she was originally from, her headstone reading her favorite Hebrew saying:
 
“Hakol dvash!” (“Everything’s wonderful!”)

I imagined her hands folded over her, and had this crazy, pseudo-funny realization about how her breast implants were going to lie atop her skeleton forever.

For hours I was creeped out.

In the morning I was fine, but it made for one of the most intense nights of my life, because I don’t do death very well, especially when it’s sudden and unexpected…..and involves someone who’d surely come back as a revenant, if ever anyone would. (Uh, kidding?)

5th of July 2019.

Someone I know in the US had asked if I'd play a war game recreating the American revolution with him when I was over. I said, of course, I would and asked if he could send me a guide to the uniforms worn by the troops defending the airfields so I could paint them accurately. This joke spread a little and made its way to facebook where a debate started up on whether they should be painted cofveve, and perhaps it didn't matter just as long as the style was bigly and the skin colour was a bad tan, nicknamed Cheeto colour (Barri's suggestion on the skin colour).

5th of July 2010.

I got back in Scotland after a 6 week course in Marham. It had been lovely weather the whole time I was down there, but who the hell wants to waste good weather spending time in a swamp? I was glad to get back home, particularly setting my watch 30 years ahead to get back to the right time.

July 6, 2001 It was a miracle, early July and our high was only about seventy. It was a day to be outside, but after my regular job I spent thirteen hours alone in a massive empty house, cataloging a deceased bibliophile’s library so his grandchildren could have certain volumes appraised for individual auction. It was a creepy place, old, isolated, slightly Gothic Revival, lots of interior wood, many creaks and groans from the flooring upstairs, the furniture covered with sheets, the electric cut off, so I had to bring battery-powered lights, and only because I made it a point of personal honor not to let the ambience get to me did I make it through being there into the night without getting the heebie jeebies. (The contract stipulated I worked alone, and would bring no one with me.) The books were something else though, many rare and first editions, one signed by Charles Dickens, another in German inscribed by Bismarck to a friend, some works on parchment that I was instructed only to handle while wearing silk gloves, and I entered a description of each and every one for a flat fee. It was a job my father got me because he said he figured I’d think it was cool, which I did.

July 7, 1995 Crazy night, one storm seemed to follow the next for hours with only brief lulls in between. I went with Brian to a rave up near the university, getting in with a fake ID, and the music jarred the floors and walls and pounded into your chest like a second heartbeat, music that made you feel so alive you had to wonder how you could ever die someday, it was that powerful, like one long ever-building rush.
 
We stayed for two hours and the thunder boomed constantly outside, the rain sheeted down, and we were drenched running to his car with no way to dry off, so we got in soaking, the seats ran with water, rain hissed around us, droves of it spilling by the second, washing across sidewalks and pouring into gutters in this insane sky-burst, and it was so steamy the windows were misted completely over, visibility a hazard driving back, and we got inundated again dashing up the outside stairs to his flat and slamming into his door, we were in such a rush to get in, both as drenched as if we’d been swimming. We slid across the tile inset at the entryway, and I grabbed the wall, he grabbed the door which swung with him and he fell into me and we both went down in a heap.
 
It was a night owned by the elements.

I finally got home at 1:45, my body and mind reeling, ears still ringing, and storm after storm still came through, the sound of thunder from the next tempest over the horizon mingling with the booms of the thunder overhead, one system after another splitting the sky with blue-white flashes as I sat in the dark on the floor by my bedroom window, watching the lighting, feeling infused with the energy of the night.

July 8, 2019 Watched an American Ninja Warriors that had been taped in my home city, and though I’d never seen it, I liked it and wished I could give the course a try, sure I could make it. During a commercial I called Gina in Los Angeles, where she’d just moved with her family, and I tried hard not to feel her going away was a betrayal of our thirty-year friendship (which of course it was not, life eventually gets in the way of most friendships). I asked if she liked it there and she said, “Mostly so far, because the city feels like it’s the center of everything.”

The center of everything, I thought, knowing I’d lost her.

(Dang, for a second I thought today was the 9th. Now I won't have to write one for tomorrow. :bouncegiggle:)

(OK, NOW it's your turn, 7-9, you line cutter you.)

July 9, 2022 I’d been gone for a couple weeks in Sweden, and when I came home my children were away at Disney World with their dad and his folks, and had only gotten back the night before. I didn’t want us apart anymore, so we all went to my youngest, Trinity’s, horseback riding that Saturday, even though I knew Daisy, in teenage fashion, would’ve rather been catching up with friends.
 
Trinity walked into the barn and hugged her favorite horse, Dipsy, who had a solid white face and white ears like a rabbit, and Trin said she’d missed her. She had no fear of horses and even seemed to have a way with them, and plus Dipsy was a gentle beast with soft eyes and a calm nature.

Landon kept his arm around me as we stood by the fence and watched Trin ride, and actually said: “More than anything, I love you.”

Somehow that annoyed me, because, well, you’re supposed to love your children more, but also because I wondered why then had he left right when he knew I was coming home? The answer was life had to go on without me, and they’d had plenty of practice with that the last few years when the soul-devouring demands of my job dragged me away. Whether there was a comment beyond that in the timing, I didn't know.

At home that night I read a few pages in the OED, as I try to do for one hour each week, and learned of the Old English word “therking,” which means the period between dusk and night. Me, I’d always called post-twilight the blue hour or the gloaming, but therking snagged an appreciation in me, and now I use that term sometimes.

But we were together again that day, and that made me happy.

July 10, 2008 Had a gua sha session, a Chinese procedure similar to acupuncture, except supposed subdermal meridians were scraped instead of pierced, allegedly clearing up blockages that prevented chi from flowing. It didn’t hurt, but after the session it looked someone had beaten my back with a belt. I asked why I was reacting like that, and the practitioner said I’d had too much blocked energy, making my internal centers of heat and cold out of balance, leaving them like weather fronts colliding to make storms of redness on my skin.

Driving home I paused at a light and looked over to see a black woman unselfconsciously sitting on a bench at a bus stop, her shirt pulled up and one breast exposed, which she was cleaning with a diaper wipe while a baby slept in her lap. What amazed me more was that at the crowded bus stop no one seemed to be staring at her, so I averted my eyes too and drove on.

July 11, 1995 If I had to pick one long and gloriously crazy day to epitomize my mid-1990s teenage life, it might be this one.

My friend Gina quit her job at Pizza Hut, “home of the cleanest salad bar in town” so we got in my car and started driving around to get her applications for new employment, and we took her little brother Mark along, and I kept pushing the hair out of his eyes and telling him he looked like Simba, which he took as a compliment. He asked why didn’t I get a job, too, and I said I had a job, I was tutoring some kid in summer school, and Mark said, “Yeah, for like five minutes a week.” So I told him, “Want to see what I think about money, Markie?” And I threw the twenty I made tutoring out the window on I-71, where the wind sucked it away to flutter who knows where.

After we got bored doing applications, we went and saw Clueless at the only place in the city where it was in early release, and personally I thought it was approximately the greatest movie ever shot by the hands of humankind, and when we got out I asked Gina if she wanted to see it again, which she did, but Mark split off to see the Power Rangers movie instead.

After Clueless we waited on him to get out, and teased him sans merci about his Amy Jo Johnson fetish, and then went to an arcade filled with classic ‘80s games, where you paid ten bucks and could play all day, and we drank so many energy drinks we were all wired, and Mark said the baby doll top I was wearing made me look like I was hiding being pregnant, and I went, “I am not, see?” and pulled it up to show my totally flat stomach, making Mark, thirteen years old and brimming with hormones, walk funny for a minute.

High on caffeine and too wound up to be rational, we left and I drove blaring Smashing Pumpkins’ Gish CD at ear-damaging levels, and took us to the apartment Brian had just moved out of earlier that summer, and got out of my car and yelled to Gina and Mark: “THE GUY WHO LIVES IN THAT APARTMENT UNDER BRIAN’S OLD PLACE IS A COMPLETE AND ABSOLUTE PERVERT!!!!”

Which was true, sometimes when I’d be there waiting on Brian he used to do a pseudo-flirt with me and say creepy come-ons I couldn’t believe any rational man would think would get him anywhere in this or any universe. Just a real skank of a person.

Then---why not?----I ran up the stairs to Brian’s old door and pounded on it, and felt that soul-freeze feeling when you knock on an empty door, thinking of the sound permeating dark, unoccupied spaces, like a phone you’d buried with someone ringing in a grave. I bet the neighbors thought I was drunk, but I was just weirdly wired up, and then I came back down skipping the stairs so fast I almost fell, and whirled around on the last railing, leaving the ground, totally better than Miss Pink Ranger Amy Jo Johnson ever did, and jumped back in a blared my horn and hollered out the window at the perverted neighbor, if he was even home, as we drove off, and Gina was like, “El, be quiet, and get us out of here, but Mark started yelling out the window too, and we laughed hard about it and Gina was sure we were going to get the cops called on us, and she goes to me, “Are you just like PMS-ing hyper tonight?”

I was like, “Yeah, optimistic sign, don’t you think?”

Gina just shook her head.

Got back on I-71 and came back to Mason, where we lived, low on gas and I was by then regretting throwing out that twenty, and we went back to Gina and Mark’s and got their mom’s Ouija board out and went to their basement and all put one finger on the marker, even Gina, though she was saying, “This is stupid and it’s like messing with bad stuff, I wanna stop.”  But Mark and I kept our fingers on the planchette, and he was SO totally moving it, spelling out ELLIE WLL DIE SOON and so I tried to spell something about him, but he was pushing back against my finger to spell I LIKE TITS and Gina hit him and took the board away.

I stayed late over there, and though Gina fell asleep around 1:00, Mark and I stayed up til 3:00, first playing Battleship, and then talking about random stuff that halfassedly evolved into Never Have I Ever, til I got my fill of his trying to find out NOYB type stuff, and finally walked back alone in the rain to my house, and even though it was after three I called Brian to tell him about going to his former place, and when he answered I demanded, “How dare you sleep while I’m up?”

He was like, “What THEE hell, Evelyn?” Then told me few things scared him more than to be woken up by a phone in the middle of the night, so I said jeez, sorry go back to sleep, oh, boring one, and I laughed so much he actually asked if I’d been drinking, which I had but, you know, just energy drinks, and I knew I’d be awake into the morning hours, so while watching it rain in the darkness outside my window, one of my lifelong favorite things to do, I listened to my new obsession, Jagged Little Pill through headphones over and over, liking the optimistic line:

“….and what it all comes down to….is that everything’s gonna be quite all right…”

The suck fest that was the first half of 1995 had ended, and I was on a roll that’d carry me through the second half of the most contrasting year of my life, and for a while at least, it was gonna be quite all right.

July 12, 2002 Met a girl from Arkansas in a tire shop waiting room who had on a ring I’d never seen before, and she told me she got it when she became a Born-Again Virgin at her church, then proceeded to speak ardently to me about why I should become a Born-Again Virgin as well, I guess concluding that at age twenty-three I probably wasn’t one. She got a burning light in her blue eyes when she gave me the requisite speech about her fallen past, which to my ears sounded like it used to be more fun than the straight new road she was on.
 
I told her, though, I practically qualified as a BAV without the ceremony, since I hadn’t had sex since 2000, and she asked, “Because you realize it’s a sin?”

Having once been dubbed a “sexual prodigy” it wasn’t that, so I said, “No, because the person I expected to spend my life with got killed.”

I thought of my country-born neighbor Mrs. Glenn telling me that she had never in her whole life tasted a sip of beer, never smoked a cigarette, never taken the name of the Lord in vain, never said a bad word, and never “was touched” by any man before she married. I thought of my Aunt Christie, my grandma, and my mom all likewise marrying as virgins, and my best friend Gina still being one at twenty-three, then I thought of myself  as a teenager living far beyond my years, happily shagging a guy like there was no tomorrow, and felt one of my strange uncontrolled laughs coming on, not from regret or pride, in fact I wasn’t sure why, but in a rare display of discipline, I held it in.

The girl from Arkansas gave me her number, but I never called her. Still it was the deepest conversation with a stranger I’d had in ages.

July 13, 2005 I was in Boston, a city I’ve never enjoyed, to be honest, and saw The Passion of the Christ, which I called “torture porn.” At that time I believed it most likely our lives ended with a period and not an ellipsis, as religions taught, and my favorite movie about Jesus was The Last Temptation of Christ, not the least reason being it had David Bowie in it. I came out of The Passion thinking few people got Jesus right based on the accepted source material. To Bible thumpers I wanted to say Jesus moved among outcasts and was more concerned with helping the poor and sick than with about butting into people’s sex lives, saying not one word about homosexuality, by the way; to those seeking a purely humanistic Jesus, however, I’d likewise point out that far from being non-judgmental and anything goes, Jesus was quick to tell others when they were wrong, and forecast that Hell was the destiny of most people, never shying from a message that there was only one way to avoid eternal torment, and that was through him alone. I concluded of the two movies The Last Temptation came closer to how Jesus likely was, beset by conflict between his human and divine natures, and ultimately someone who gave his life for others in the face of what surely must have been the same instinctive desire for personal survival all of us share. But it would be another five years before I’d come to appreciate that.

July 14, 1992 My cousin Dana had her eighteenth birthday party, invited me, and by my meek standards it was a wild time. Her dad, my Uncle Lark, had rented out a clubhouse, which Jared, Dana’s younger brother and my year-older cousin, said cost fifteen-hundred bucks for the site fee alone. We sang happy birthday to Dana and she got a glittery cardboard crown which she wore the rest of the night even after the pool half-ruined it, and when she blew out her candles in one try, someone said she was a “champion blower” so Dana held her fist up in the air and went “Whoo-hoo, I know how to blow!”  She loved attention.
 
Sixty-ish people were there, I doubt Dana knew half of them, making the pool crowded, though I did watch a guy from college grab Dana, wearing her cardboard birthday crown, then leap into the deep end of the pool with her on his back, and when they came up Dana was pounding him with fists and cussing, which was funny.

Most everybody but me and maybe Jared was drunk or high, and to my shocked realization, word was things of a sexual nature were apparently going on behind closed doors in the nooks and crannies of the darkened clubhouse. Real live sex? Right there? Mere feet away? Mind blown! Anyway it was awesome being invited but I admit I mostly watched other people drink and smoke and swim and drunkenly bump into each other while red-facedly swaying on their feet. Dana told me I should have brought someone I knew like Jared did, who brought some girl named Amy, who in turn brought her friend Patty and her boyfriend Tim. But I didn’t know much about parties.

Adam, our oldest cousin and a jerk, had two girls with him and never said one word to me all night, or if he noticed I was there at all he never showed it, which was to be expected since growing up his name for me had been “Pest.” Our other cousin, poor sad Allie, came alone too, and truthfully I don’t think Allie was into dating, and in an ironic way, excluding her history of substance abuse, she was almost sort of virtuous. Jared told me Allie was “head starting” meaning she came to the party already drunk, and asked if I’d help him keep an eye on her, even though she was older than we were.  Unlike her stuck-up brother, Allie came right over and started up a friendly talk with me, and was very sweet and very wasted. I felt like covering her with a blanket so she could sleep it off, but somehow I lost track of her and couldn’t tell you how the rest of her night went, but it probably included more drugs.

The night was so humid it felt better to be in the clubhouse, despite my certainty it was the epicenter of carnality, and at one point I went into the restroom and there was blood spattered across the sink, making me fancifully sure someone’s nose was ripped up from cocaine, which was definitely there, and if I’d been curious to try it I’m sure I could have found some.

When I came out a black guy, completely girly-gay, asked who I was, and when I told him he said in this high voice, “Oh, I thought you were Dana’s stepsister.” (She didn’t have stepsisters, actually.)  He goes, “Dad or Mom? Which side?”  I said Dana’s mom was my dad’s sister, and he said that was cool.

About eleven I told Dana I had to be home before midnight and I’d be going soon, so all bright-eyed she said she hoped I enjoyed it, and then introduced me to this boy who was seventeen and his name was Barry, and I talked to him for a few minutes, which led to him mentioning we’d met once before at a fundraiser for Bill Clinton downtown at the Convention Center, and I didn’t remember him but it was true I had been to one with my dad and aunt. He even described what I had been wearing, and I asked if he had a photographic memory, and he said, “Nah, you just stood out because there weren’t too many people your age there.”  I hung out with him til my dad walked in and said happy birthday to Dana, his niece, and gave her a present, and she hugged him, and then hugged me and kissed me on the cheek and said she loved me, then told my dad I was “all good” there, though to me she’d said I wouldn’t know how to “submerge in the moment” to save my life.

As a postscript, the next afternoon I hung out with Dana at her job at a downtown mall (a mall that’s now a parking garage) and she showed zero signs of hangover and was still wearing her water-swollen birthday crown. Anything to draw attention to herself, I swear, but usually a good way.

July 15, 1997 A woman apparently stared at me while I was waking up in my car, where I’d slept all night, and I don’t know how long she stared but she asked if I was OK and I said sure, thanks, and hastily drove off.

I didn’t have to be homeless, everybody kept trying to talk me into coming back, but homeless was what I would be for a lot of that summer.

That morning, from the other side of the country, I called Brian’s dad Joe for news, and he was calm at first but got more upset as we talked, and like everybody, he said come home, and even offered to drive me back himself, which I said was unnecessary since I had a car. He said his son hadn’t quit doing normal things, including working, he’d just had no spirit since I left. He also told me that my dad came and yelled at Brian one of the first evenings after it was clear I had abruptly left without word to anyone, but he said he was sorry for doing that and Brian shook his hand.

I asked if Brian hated me and Joe said no, of course not, but he was definitely going through his own personal five stages over this, though mainly was worried for me.
 
I said I knew how bad doing this was and I didn’t plan it. Joe said he understood reaching a breaking point and so would everyone else, but coming back was the important thing.  Then he said again he would send money, and I said please don’t, I wasn’t broke.

No matter how many times Brian would later say he understood I’d broken from stress, panicked and fled to get my thoughts together, the truth was disappearing days after having a miscarriage and leaving behind the man I was supposed to marry was worst thing I’d done in my life.

15th July 2017.

I was woken up at 4am and asked to fix a steam engine because it was making a funny noise. I told Kristi to go back to sleep.

15 July 2020

Mom suffered a debilitating stroke today three years ago and has been in care ever since.

Not been a good day for me today.  :bluesad: :bluesad:

July 16, 2016 Growing up, when I told people how my dad had the temerity to marry a seventeen year old girl at the crusty age of twenty-one, they’d kind of wink and go uh-huh and assume it was one of those old-fashioned “have to get married” deals, but not so, I was born a respectable ten months and one week after the blessed nuptials. They got married for the simple reason they were in love, or in my dad’s case, obsessively in love. While my dad’s feelings for my mother never changed, and I don’t think my mom stopped loving my dad, things did not always go smoothly. Not only did my mom find herself married with a baby at an age most girls are wondering what they’ll wear to senior prom, but she left behind her country and family, and in due time found herself wed to someone whose job presented all magnitude of worries, including long absences. So it was that in the 2000s when the seas of life brought my parents back together again, I was happy, and when on July 16, 2016 my parents gave wedded life a second try, it felt like past was healed. If only my mom hadn’t gone on to eventually leave a second time.

July 17, 1989 Some days have lifelong influence, and this was one, since Gina, the girl I’d spend thirty years calling my best friend, long after she probably actually was, moved down the street from us that morning. We were almost exactly the same age, went to the same church, we’d both be starting the same grade at the same school that fall, and we bonded instantly, in part because we were both reading Laura Ingalls Wilder books that summer. She looked exactly like a ten year old Snow White, porcelain-pretty, with the darkest blue eyes I had ever seen. (Such a tactful person, me, one of the first things I asked her was if she was wearing colored contact lenses.) I missed the friends I left behind when we moved from Burlington, Kentucky to Mason, Ohio, but truthfully I became closer to Gina than I ever was with them, plus her brother Mark, who was seven at the time, is still my friend today, even after Gina and her husband and daughters (one of them my goddaughter) have moved out to Los Angeles. With Gina I’d ride bikes, do homework, practice makeup and hair styles, we’d go on trips and stalk boys together, co-write books we’d print off and bind at Kinko’s, and one day even live together for a year after she came home from a broken engagement in Merida, Mexico. And it all began that one long ago day at the end of the ‘80s….

July 18, 2005 Two years before she’d come over permanently, my cousin Celia was visiting me from Ireland for part of the summer, a reverse of me being over there in my younger days, and because projected storms held off, I took her to King’s Island, a big amusement park near where I’d grown up in Mason, Ohio, a great day, if I say so myself, riding coasters and going up on the one-third scale replica of the Eiffel Tower, where I told her how on 9-9-01 I was standing on that same observation deck thinking about the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and how dreadful falling from their height would have been: not prophecy, just coincidence, but made odd by the twin towers coming down two days later. We went swimming at my dad’s house afterward, and coming home at two in the morning, Celia fell asleep in the front seat, a cute way to end a happy time out together.

19th July 2019.

A friend from Denmark, Pernille came over to visit for a week along with her eldest child Phillip. I proceeded to engage in a week of tormenting her mercilessly starting with when I spotted her at the airport I ran up to her screaming her name and then diving to the ground and hugging her legs. I hid the coffee jar with a series of obscure clues to reveal its location. Being a rabid feminist tormenting her was like shooting at fish in a barrel when the fish keep swimming towards your ammunition and you are firing dynamite. This was helped by English being a second language to her. She told me she could never marry anyone who didn't speak Dutch as she wouldn't be able to argue with them properly. Pernille also said she could keep up with me on one of my walks, so we went on a 14-mile hike to a nearby castle. I started at my fast marching pace and six steps later she was begging me to slow down.

Anyway, Pernille was just getting over a divorce. She'd mistaken a bass guitarist in Denmark's biggest death metal band for someone important in the group and got married to him, then gotten pregnant only to discover a musician permanently on tour does not make for a constantly good dad or husband. He liked the idea of being a dad but not the work or responsibility. My antics helped distract her from the split. To this day I still send her jokes about bass guitarists (most of which I just changed from being jokes about drummers). I'd first met Pernille when she joined her boyfriend in our World of Warcraft guild. They didn't last long together and later on Peter would tell me that them splitting up was down to her being more attracted to me than him. I did ask Pernille about this later and she looked genuinely surprised so I am fairly sure Peter was wrong there. Besides, I was already in a relationship with Kristi before Pernille came on to the scene. Mind you Peter has a lot of failed relationships behind him alas. Anyway, she had a fun break and went back ready to face the rest of her tribulations.

July 19, 1994 I hadn’t eaten anything in several days and was a wreck, so even though we’d had a big fight the last time we were together, I called Dana in a panic as soon as I thought she might be awake, about 11:00, and said, “I really need to talk to you, please. Can I come there?”

I freaked my cousin out enough for her to drive an hour from college for me, and immediately I told her I was messing everything up. She went, “Over that guy?” I said no, but she still said, “That makes me want to kick his ass.”

I told her I was leaving for Ireland Friday and I asked if she could come with me, and she said she couldn’t, but sat in a parking lot rubbing my back while I cried against her getting her shirt all wet, and she asked if I was pregnant, and I laughed and said no, that was impossible short of a Biblical miracle. She said I was in a messed up place but would be OK when I got over there away from everything.” 

Then I held nothing back, telling her everything about my life, and she went, “So let me get this right. You’ve been in love with someone for two years, he has an attractive girlfriend who you have the sucky misfortune of liking because she’s nice to you, you have to deal with him being with her right in front of you, and it’s a mystery why you’re having a little breakdown? You’re totally normal.”

She said, “El, listen, you’ve set yourself up for an impossible situation and this is not where you of all people should be. Forget all this and concentrate on school because academically you’ve got big places to go. There’s not going to be a good outcome if you keep this up. You’re torturing yourself because you’ve got this man you are not old enough to openly be with, and I guess he’s seriously a good person or something for not taking advantage of you, but you need to be more realistic.”

I thought of the one and only time something had happened between us, the summer before, but refused to think of that as him taking advantage of me, and the idea she would only see it that way threatened to make me mad at her all over again, as I’d been the last couple weeks.

After we started driving again, I thought of how since I was about thirteen she’d been telling me she was going to get me stoned someday, so I asked if she wanted to make this the day, but she wrinkled her face up and said, “That is SO not what you need right now.”

She took me to the college town where she lived and asked my mom if I could stay a while, and I remember before her friends came over for the evening she sat close to me on her couch and said it was going to be OK, and from her it sounded possible that everything somehow would.

Over the course of the three days I stayed there I got a taste of what college life could be like, and how so many people wanted to be around Dana, who was definitely one of the cool kids on campus, friends coming and going having talks up on her balcony and the flat rooftop, a lot of pot smoked (not by me), and it was all like absolutely nothing I’d ever been part of in my life, a world I, stuck in an academics-heavy Catholic school, didn’t even guess existed.

July 20, 1994 I’d slept on Dana’s futon, and some of her friends had slept a few feet from me on her living room floor, not an unusual event, I gathered, like it was for me, and I laid there for about an hour, til 9:15, afraid to move and wake everybody, til I finally stepped over two guys who were boyfriends of each other, and passed another girl on the floor to get out of the room.

That afternoon Dana and two of her friends took me along to Lollapalooza at an outdoor music center down by the river, with its booths and bands and petitions for all kinds of causes, and some gray-bearded hippie in a tie-dye was handing out copies of a handwritten paper which said that week a comet was colliding with Jupiter’s red spot, and life in the solar system was doomed. I threw him off with an Oscar Wilde quote, having one for most occasions: “Sir,” I said, “’all influence is immoral.’” (Even in my personal version of de profundis, I still had Oscar to fall back on, you see.)

Dana was wearing cream-colored Capri pants, a skimpy halter and no bra, and told me I’ve been cheated by not retaining water, because it was like a temporary boob job a couple days a month. This being before she actually did get the first of her several boob jobs.

I managed not to get sunburned by slathering on SPF 30, and it’s nice in retrospect to say I went to the biggest traveling music fest of the decade, saw The Smashing Pumpkins for the first time in my life, turned down three different offers to sell me acid, but all in all LPLZ was not my thing, and I wasn’t sorry when we left late that night, my ears ringing so hard I wondered if I had tinnitus.

It was just not in my DNA to be hip like my cousin.

July 21, 1994 Dana slept til noon the day after LPLZ then took me home without saying a lot, leaving me feeling I’d overstayed my welcome, though she invited me back up, so maybe it was all good. I rode back feeling my escape was over and my upsets were unresolved.

When I walked in Mom asked if I wanted some creamed corn she’d fixed, and I said no thank you, then went upstairs and packed for Ireland. Since she’d moved to Dublin I’d be getting my Aunt Sarah’s room at my grandparents’ house (I used to have to sleep in the same bed with Sarah when I was a kid, she being the one there closest to my age, only three years off), so that would be cool, at least, though mostly I didn’t want to go, which was an old pattern: I dreaded leaving but mainly liked it when I got there.

Brian called me, so I reminded him July 21st marked the date of the events in Peter Straub’s If You Could See Me Now, a book he recommended I read when I was fourteen. He thought it was cool I remembered the date, so all but one of the years I knew him I mentioned when July 21st came around.

I told him about Lollapolooza, with its piercing tents and fire eaters, the pro-pot petition mafia who wouldn’t take no for an answer (in the ‘90s people didn’t emptily b***h on the internet, they confronted issues, see) and the freak show I wasn’t old enough to attend, but Dana, who’d gone in, came out talking about watching a man in there lift things with his... (Brian thought it was cute I didn’t say the word.)

I told him I heard two guys walking by, one literally about six-foot-six and slightly cross-eyed, talking about how you couldn’t throw a rock there without hitting a girl you’d like to have sex with, and he was like, “And I had to work that day!”

He said he hoped I had a good trip overseas and he’d see me soon, which was nice, but then he added, “Oh, yeah, Paige said tell you bye, too, and says she loves you.”

His hot girlfriend loved me. Great. Why couldn’t I have reason to hate her so I could stop feeling guilty about wishing she’d move to Tasmania?

There was too much stress in life, so for once I was ready for even the non-stop retro-Catholicism that always marked my time in Ireland, because at least going there got me away.

Sort of.

July 22, 1997 Living in my car wasn’t fun. I felt lonely, guilty, and because my calling card was empty, I asked a lady at a church if I could phone my dad from there, and assured her he would accept long distance charges. She said all right, then listened to every word I said to my father, like she thought if she stepped away I would steal the holy water. When I was done she actually asked if I wanted to pull weeds from around the sanctuary walkway and she’d give me five bucks. I said thank you but I had money, which was the truth though I was running low, and I think her attitude changed because she at first thought I was some unfortunate crawling to a church on her knees, but hearing what I was saying she started to see me as some runaway in need of a firm hand, so she said, “Why don’t you just straighten up your act and go back home? What are you scared of?”

I thought about telling her my parents were trying to betroth me Belial, so I couldn’t, but I wasn’t in a position to make waves, so I drove on, not entirely sure where I was going, and though for years to come I’d pass that church many times, I never felt well-disposed toward it because of that woman’s comments. I was legally an adult, for God’s sake.

That night a cat ate out of my hand and purred and climbed up into the car with me and sat in my lap. It was strange how kind that cat was, like he had empathy. It was my experience that if you tried to pet a cat too long it would bite you, but he let me hold him til it got dark and I set him back outside, and wished him well before I drove on. Had I known then how hard winters up there were on stray animals, I might have tried to take him with me, but I was never able to find him again.

I knew I’d brought my situation on myself, by choice, and I knew I’d been cruel to leave someone who loved me like I did, but it was like some strange inner directive was telling me to continue whatever journey I was on, so I kept going.

July 23, 2001 As I’d just come back after working overseas, I only had to be on-job a couple days a week doing training that month, so I had a nice break for two weeks, housesitting for my vacationing Aunt Christie in her 19th-century Italianate house, something I had also done for her in 1996.

My first night there my friend Rob came back to town after being at the Woodstock for nerds that was San Diego Comic-Con, and brought over his English bulldog, Punisher. He never got inside Comic-Con but there’s a whole sub-culture thing that goes on outside, and he enjoyed himself and brought me back a TARDIS keychain. He also told me he was thinking about moving out there, since he fell hard for a local girl, a photographer who, judging from her work, was deft at her art. One shot showed a paper bag ripping in two, sending a bunch of oranges inside flying in mid-air, but the speed was set to render the oranges frozen while the photographer’s friend stood looking startled. (One day I’d pose nude above a mirror on the floor for that girl while she shot reflections leaving out my face, but that’s another story.)

While Rob was there I got an email from an Air Force doctor who said my recent mild ulcers were likely caused by “pattern anorexia,” a diagnosis I disputed since I weighed 123 pounds, hardly skin and bones, and didn’t think I had an eating disorder, though the doctor wouldn’t back down and said I was 112 the year before, too thin for five-feet-seven and a half, and clearly showing too few calories for someone active. (I think the ulcers were from stress, and the low weight in 2000 had been because in the rough year grieving I hadn’t wanted to eat.)

Kinda annoyed at the doctor, I walked up the street with Rob to let Punisher poop in Jerry Springer’s yard, and we got back in time to watch Angel together, and citing post-trip tiredness, he asked if he could sleep in one of the bedrooms upstairs, but I said no, my aunt wouldn’t like that, so he griped and left, and ten minutes later I invited my friend Mandy to come sleep over, and said, “Just don’t tell Rob, it’ll make him feel bad…”

But of course she promptly called him with the news, just to miff him. Playground love, you know.

23rd July 2022.

I got to use all my fancy D&D terrain finally, running an Elvish monastery under siege by a vast Goblin army. It felt good to get to use it after spending several hundred pounds on the equipment. Everyone present seemed impressed with the terrain too.

23rd July 2019.

Took Pernille and Phillip on a cruise along Loch Ness. It was a fine day with the water smooth and calm. First time I'd ever been on the Loch itself although I'd seen it plenty of times before. We didn't get off at any of the stops.

23rd July 2014.

Kristi seemed to be having some hayfever-type eyes going on. I put a cold compress over her eyes. Unfortunately, because I didn't specifically tell her that she shouldn't walk around the house effectively blindfolded, accidents happened.

23rd July 2012.

Following some mass shooting in the US, I unfriended everyone from the states who in the following hours posted about how great guns are. Over the next few years I'd get apologies from a few of them who had decided to grow up a bit and not be childish about the issue anymore and get sent friend requests. Some I accepted some I just ignored depending on my whim at the time.

23rd July 2011.

I spent a lot of time speaking to my Norwegian friends, making sure they were all ok. We were used to these things happening in the US and France, but Norway was a new target for a gun rampage. I'd be traveling over there in a week or so myself and was amazed at how coolly and calmly the Norwegians handled everything, especially compared to what I'd seen in other countries that had to deal with these things more regularly.

23rd July 2010.

On hearing that the French had made insulting their flag or national anthem a criminal offence, I immediately posted up about how crap they both were. It is no coincidence that the middle of the French flag is white. I wonder if the two sides are made easy to tear off?

July 24, 1999 It was a dreary morning, because my college friends who had come down to visit headed home. I’d be seeing them in a month, but we great times and I wished they’d stayed longer. (Those New Englanders were shocked to find we had gas stations and electric lights in the Midwest, wow!)

To cheer up I went to the movies with my friend Rob, and Gina’s seventeen-year-old brother, Mark, who asked if I’d heard what a mess Woodstock ’99 was, how it was already being dubbed the week the spirit of the ‘60s died.
 
We saw South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut, which I thought was by far the worst movie I’d ever seen, and what’s worse, I didn’t get the double meaning of the title til Mark and Rob gleefully explained it to me doubling over with laughter at my dumbness.

“And what would you two know about being bigger, longer, and uncut?” I demanded.

“How would you know what we are?” Mark threw back.

Well, I would say he had me there, but I actually had caught glimpses in the past, Mark as a result of a swim trunk mishap, and Rob when he and Mandy and I were driving around in the middle of the night in high school, and too much Mountain Dew made him have to timidly stop beside a dark country road, where Mandy scared the hell out of him, leaving him running back toward the car, not yet fully tucked away. (I was laughing too hard to be able to drive, so good thing there really wasn’t a knife-wielding hillbilly psycho rushing out of the woods like Mandy had claimed.)

Though I didn’t admit it then, I guess it was kind of a funny movie title.

today( well, yesterday, the 24th) in my history, I BOUGHT A CAR!!!!! :cheers:

July 25, 1999 It was over 100-degrees, no rain for weeks, no shade, a burning, bleached-out cloudless sky above at high noon, and as I was walking a steep hill in the uptown, the tall buildings making a canyon of sheer heat, I suddenly slumped to a sitting pose on the baking sidewalk, my chin striking my chest, my mind swimming in a white daze amid a sound like cicadas in my brain.
 
The next thing I was aware of I was sitting in a patch of semi-shady grass, wondering who had dragged me there, my vision blurry, my head aching and ears ringing, the backs of my bare legs feeling roasted, while this soft-spoken older black lady in a nurse’s uniform dribbled bottled water on my head and asked, “Honey? You with me, honey?”

“I’m not sure,” I mumbled, gripped by nausea.

She helped me walk into a restaurant and asked for ice water, and wanted to call me an ambulance but I told her I was OK, I just didn’t handle heat well. Turned out she lived nearby and had been on her way to work as a nurse’s aide at one of the hospitals on “Pill Hill” when she saw me fall down.
 
She stayed with me as long as she could before she had to hurry on to work, and though I thanked her many times, I realized in my light-headedness I never asked her name. I went back to the restaurant and asked if I could leave a little handwritten sign in the window thanking her and listing my email, but I never heard anything from her. I was grateful to her for stopping, though, because no one else did, so I hope God was watching and gave her good karma.

July 26, 1996 When I was young I was more self-centered----and selfish---than I think (and hope) I am now. Having children will help you overcome that, and so will a conscious effort to lessen that fault once you see it in yourself, as I eventually did, but it took a while.
 
The first time I summer-housesat for Aunt Christie was in between 11th and 12th grades, and I stayed-in alone and read and watched movies, including Driving Miss Daisy, which was on that night. I had never lived alone and it felt like a huge cool thing, no one to tell me what to do, total independence of a sort. I tried to invite Brian over, he’d become friends with my aunt and had been to her house a number of times, but his father was having major medical tests run and just about all Brian was focusing on was his dad’s health, which was admirable but also annoying to me. The tests ruled out HIV and most cancers, but would eventually reveal that the way Joe had long lived his life, drugs, sleeping around, drinking way too much yet somehow managing to be a highly successful workaholic who stayed in good shape, had caught up with him at last at forty-two, infecting him with a rare, virulent form of viral infection closely related to hepatitis, and before the end of summer he’d be given less than a year to live.

All that wasn’t known yet but it was nervously suspected (his eyes had become a glassy-yellow and he had so little energy this man who’d jogged miles a day would get tired walking out to his car) so I called and wished Joe well and said I hoped he hurried home soon, and he said, “Thank you, Evelyn, that means a lot.”

He wanted to talk longer, I could tell under his billion-watt projection of confidence he was afraid, yet I got off the phone with him, because despite my words I was guilty aware I was also irritated to feel like I was being pushed aside because of him, selfish of me, but I did, and would often feel that way in years to come. I also had this involuntary sense of resentment that he was putting a damper on my pleasant stay at my aunt’s house.

After I hung up I reflected he was only twenty-some years older than I was, which felt way too young to die, then shrugged the matter off and went out back with my dog, Charlotte Sometimes. When you’re young life and death can be like that, distant, abstract, far beyond you, almost ungraspable: someone else’s tragedy, not yours.

I also had a way of seeing life as always being about me. Mea maxima culpa.

27th July 2009.

I got into work to find out a women who I'd been flirting with a bit at work and was working on asking out had been killed. She'd been at the junior ranks summer ball, then went out with some friends. On the way back home, a drunk driver was speeding through the town and just wiped her out. It is believed she died instantly. He died on the way to the hospital.

I hope he suffered a lot before that.

I was called in to see the JEngO along with my Chief. They told me I was being offered my promotion to NCO. They didn't understand why I wasn't over the moon about this. I also felt the promotion was a year overdue. I had to put quite some thought into accepting the job offer or not as I had been offered a high-paying role in civvy street. The promotion was initially a promotion in post which I wasn't overly wanting. I'd been doing that job long enough that I would never learn anything new about the equipment I was working on. Then I was offered a role on a squadron which was even less tempting. Finally, they offered me my dream post which convinced me I should stay in and take the promotion.

If only I'd known then how that would go. It would lead to the unhappiest three years of my life but after that I'd get back on track and end up being happier than I'd been ever before.

July 27, 1991 It was a very good day. My maternal grandfather took me, my fifteen year old Aunt Sarah, and my fourteen-year-old cousin Magda, who’d spent the night and slept on a vintage British army surplus cot, to the Dublin Natural History Museum. We left at 5:20 AM to get there for its ten o’ clock opening, and made it from Merrion Street to its doors in a few minutes’ walk with time left for me to run up and look inside the nearby National Gallery. The museum was always free, but I put money in the donations box anyway, and had the best time that day in my favorite museum in the world, beautifully old fashioned (it looks a bit like the house from The Aristocats) and filled with timeworn displays, nothing modern or interactive at all, just room after room of cool things, like the mounted bones of an Irish deer, a megafauna that went extinct long ago. Exactly what a museum should be! Grandfather, who though not a rich man was able to lay claim to having read 5,000 books, told us little tidbits of facts about everything, making my cousin Magda roll her eyes behind his back, but I could have listened all day to him orating in his soft, lilting voice. He truly would have made a fine professor had life allowed. We had to leave at four, and though I always figured we’d go back together, all of us, we never did, the trip there was singular, and one of those special joys that make up the treasured memories of a lifetime.

July 28, 1989 On this day I presented my new best friend Gina with the first lie I’d ever tell her (and there weren’t too many that ever followed) when I informed her my dad was away because he had to go to Philadelphia to do consulting work. Gina just said, “Oh,” like it was nothing, and we kept going there on her patio with our reading a Jean Plaidy book about Eleanor of Aquitaine. Well, the harsh truth was I had no idea where Dad was, it could have been Philadelphia (now I think it was likely West Germany), but he for sure was not a consultant. Growing up my mom would get on my case if she caught me in any fibs, but she had long conditioned me to accept that in our life we sometimes had to lie about my dad. Why Dad made us lie when he could have just told us a lie in the first place and we’d have thought we were telling the truth, I don’t know, but it wasn’t like that: we lied where his job was concerned and got used to it. Thus growing up my dad remained “a consultant” to all my friends, even when as a kid I wasn’t sure what a consultant was, only felt sure he truly wasn’t one.

July 29, 1994 I’ve often been writing about Ireland in my recollections lately because past a certain age summer was mostly when I went, and over there it was easier to go to Mass each day with my grandmother than listen to her bully and cajole me about it. That morning in church a little girl got a nosebleed and left crying, so I got up and went after her to see if I could help. Any excuse to get out of there, though I also did want to make sure she was all right, which she was. (“I ulways am gittin’ these,” she explained in that lifted-last-syllable way people there had of talking.)

That evening I went with my cousin Mags to Salthill and Leisure, a sort of amusement park/seaside resort that was a little like Blackpool or the Jersey Shore, only suckier. She was meeting friends to “walk the prom” as they called it, which basically meant stroll around the bay and see who they ran into and what they could get up to, a bit like going to the mall was to us, though with more anemic-looking gingers around.

Her friends were all couples, Dimmy, Pad, Shailyn, and Taryan, and Mags wanted to find someone for me, but I kept declining her offers. I was madly in love and didn’t want anyone else, but she explained away my reticence by telling her friends, “Her first kiss ever was over here when she was thirteen, and it was rape, so she blames all Irish boys.”

I thought……what? It was such a weird thing for her to say. Rape? Huh? I mean, OK, yes, when I had been out with Mags once a few years earlier, some yucky boy with greasy hair had abruptly tried to kiss me and did halfway touch me with his lips before I yanked back in disgusted surprise, but that hardly qualified as either the r-word or a first kiss. Still, Shaliyn, who was in Green Peace, looked at me like I was a victim to be pitied, that favored condition of leftists, and offered a smile, and in my mind I pictured pushing Magda off the promenade into the mucky sand of the tidal flat below.

We met up with Mags’ boyfriend, Dolan when he got off work, and he had his hair combed straight back and long, like a mullet, and wore a green canvas coat with the collar up, and boots with no laces, and as he smoked he looked at me and said, “American cousin then. That’s gassy.”  (Which I think meant “cool.”) His words came out as: “Uh-mirkin coozin then, thas ghassy.” And they thought I had an accent? Sometimes they’d even ask me to repeat myself or say things slower, but even by Connaught standards Dolan sounded like he had a mouthful of something oozy.

He also asked me, “Get craic tonight?” Only he said the word like Americans would the street drug of choice in certain ethnic neighborhoods, always slightly throwing me for a microsecond, even though I knew he was basically asking if I’d been having a good time.

Irish, I’ll tell you, they are just not Americans.

The evening capped off when Dolan led us over to harass his oldest brother, Flor, who was out with his wife and their two baby girls, and Mags bragged that Flor had “won sixty betting at the Darby” on a horse called Balancing (if I understood the name right), a filly who beat the colts. My cousin was addiction-prone in some ways, something which would eventually contribute to her death from a heart attack, she smoked, overate and liked to drink, and more or less had always had a gambling problem, being willing to bet on almost anything, so I gathered she held Flor’s winning Darby wager as an achievement on par with a racking up a Fields Medal.

She did however keep a promise to our grandmother to get me back before dark, which came late in summer, and then went off to see where her own Friday night would take her: my guess was Dolan’s bed.

July 30, 2014 Oh, gosh, should I write this here? Eh, why not, I could use a good blush. When my son was little he had this plastic spoon he loved that looked like a duck, and he went through a stage where he wouldn’t eat with anything but this spoon. He didn’t call it a “spoon” though, the best he could do was to say “poon” which became his all-purpose word for any sort of food. On this day I had him in his high chair and was putting bite-sized food on this plastic plate that suction-cupped to the high chair tray, and my son was hungry and cranky, and he started twisting around in the seat saying, “I want poon! I want poon!” Well, my husband was walking by and poked his head in and said, “What a proud moment, my boy’s only three and already knows he wants poon!” I almost fell over.

July 31, 1989 Because overseas loomed, it was the last day for three weeks I’d be spending with my paternal grandparents, and that morning my grandma showed me how to make a delicate sheet of paper by shredding Kleenexes into strands of fiber, soaking them, them pressing them out and letting them dry. I cut mine up into bookmarks and decorated them by potato-stamping on ink designs, then passed them out to people I liked. Because we’d moved that summer and I was given extra time to acclimate to the new house, I hadn’t been sent away to Ireland in June like usual and held out hopes I wouldn’t be at all, but I was leaving the next day for almost all of August, only a month instead of ten weeks, coming back right before school was to begin. Other kids were lucky enough to get Disney World or the beach or camping, or just spent summer hanging out with friends, but me, I got sent to a rainy land where I went to daily Mass, twice weekly confessions, said nightly rosaries, and had to sleep with my teenage aunt in her bed, but where I must admit there were fun times with my cousin Magda, and with Sarah, and trips around town with my grandfather, and all that seems golden in memory since those days are gone now and will never come again, which makes me wonder why we so rarely appreciate the present while it’s with us. Still, that night I was depressed to be leaving my new friend Gina and my new home, and I did not want to go the next day, so my ten-year-old self laid in bed indulging an overdeveloped feeling of self-pity.

August 1, 2003 The first of August has the peculiar distinction of being the birthday of both my husband, and Gina, the girl who was for many years my best friend. Because Gina was celebrating with her parents on her birthday in 2003, I promised her I’d take her chocoholic self out for Godiva-glazed crème éclairs the next day, and went to Landon’s twenty-seventh birthday party at his house near the riverfront.

Lots of people showed, including Landon’s cousin Vince and his wife Lindsey, whom I liked, and it was a fun time right up til when this drunk hot girl there, who’d shown up uninvited and whom I learned had something going with Landon maybe a year before he met me, made a big scene by offering to “do” something for Landon for his birthday. She even demonstrated the nature of the offer and left the neck of a beer bottle smeared with lipstick.

She was so luridly, loudly, obnoxiously forward that all activity froze until Lindsey came out of the kitchen and offered to drive her home, and when the staggering-drunk girl refused, Lindsey helped her out the door to the sidewalk, just as a Newport cop car was passing, so at least she did get a ride someplace that night.

Mostly the loud offer was laughed off after the girl left, and I asked Lindsey about her and she said, “Would you believe she’s actually a paralegal at a law firm that employs a former mayor of the city?”

I guess she was just one of those types who went wild with a few shots in her....and liked my future husband.

1st August 2018.

After around 30 years of wanting to, I finally got to play Kings & Things. Me, Kristi, Tina and Anders all sat around the very table I am sitting at alone right now. I don't recall who won the game, but I do remember Tina's face when she marched her massive army into an unknown hex only to reveal it was a sea tile and all her troops drowned. She was not amused.

1st August 2013.

My American wife who had sworn to me since the day that we met that she hated shopping and had a three-shop limit, went out shopping for 8 hours. This would be a taste of things to come. She had woken up and confused me by asking me to shave my moustache off, mostly because I hadn't grown one. It turned out she'd had a dream that I was elected President of the Moustache Club.

Whatever or whoever the hell they are. Real men don't need facial hair, only pretenders who desperately need to fake it.

Or men like me who are too lazy to shave daily.

August 2, 1990 Denis, my youngest maternal uncle, took me to the races in Galway for the first time, a huge event every summer where jockeys in bright silks sat above nervous horses that sweated white foam and stomped their hooves and in general got keyed-up before they ran.

Along also came some of my uncle’s friends and one of their brothers, a teenager named Oisin (“Oshawn”) who was missing his right eye. It was “sea windy” enough to flush my cheeks red, and while the races were short, the wait between them was long, and after the first excitement I was bored enough to make a game of counting hats on women in the stands behind us. (“Rich folks’ seats,” Oisin contemptuously declared them.)

Uncle Denis bet on a horse called Master Swordsman, who did not win, in fact I don’t think anyone had much luck, and it was a good thing we took a lorry there, as my uncle and his friends got drunk on “car bombs,” shots of whisky dropped into glasses of stout. (I think the name came from the fact they foamed up like a bomb going off…?)

Back at the house my grandmother jumped all over her eighteen year old son, still living at home, going: “Denis, look at the example you’ve set for your American niece, for saint’s sake!” (When she chided someone my grandmother honestly sounded like a character in a novel.) She seldom failed to remark on my nationality either as she viewed Americans as living in a perilously sinful land, from which most would surely be chucked into the wide mouth of Hell.
 
My poor uncle, though, from car bomb-swilling man about the racetrack to scolded teenager in a couple hours’ time.

3rd August 2017.

With my long-serving work shoes finally succumbing to the ravages of time and use, I finally gave in and went to get a pair of new ones. I tend to avoid getting new ones for as long as possible due to breaking them in being rather painful, but I spent the rest of the day wearing them. Halfway through the day, I'd to go to the med centre as walking was getting a bit painful. When I got home and took the bandages off, this is what it looked like:

(https://i.imgur.com/r5N1oDS.jpg)

The black stuff is where the sticky bits of the plaster they'd put on had grabbed part of my service-issue black wool socks. A veteran nurse with decades of experience ran out the room when she saw that injury. That is someone who'd dealt with wounds in Afghanistan and Iraq. I feel vaguely proud of that.

3rd August 2014.

Mum and Elizabeth were up for the annual raft race. The usual stalls and faire was there. Since my younger brother had terrified my sister at a young age on these rides I made an effort to teach her how to enjoy them. I even got her to have a ride of the ghost train, something she'd refused to for twenty years previously.

(https://i.imgur.com/IrcbmYi.jpg)

(https://i.imgur.com/yjPq9f6.jpg)

August 3, 2001 His wife Sally was at a wedding in New York, and my friend in Austin, whom I’ll call Hugh, (why is a private joke), was sitting on his back patio having the sort of beer-propelled philosophical talk that went with being out late on a Texas night so hot and humid you forgave winter its worst sins, when he segued into the first time he had sex, how it was with this much more experienced girl in Connecticut who had a jock boyfriend who was possessive to the point she got her kicks sleeping around on him and holding this information back for times she wanted to make him mad.

I said, “Jeez, that sounds like playing with matches at a gas station.”

“Yeah,” Hugh said, “but try living under the shadow of two older brothers who’d hit every hot shiksa in town under twenty, so without taking their leftovers I didn’t have much to choose from.”

“Hmmm.”

He went, “Don’t ‘hmmmm’ me, that’s what Jewish guys do, we have fun with shiksas and marry in the tribe.”

Anyway, he said his problem was the exact opposite of most males getting their first time at bat in that he couldn’t complete the occasion no matter how he tried. “So this girl, Jessica, finally blurted out, ‘Goddammit, what’s the focking matter with you?’”

“Oh, that’s terrible,” I told him. “And after that you actually had the courage to go on and have sex with other girls?”

He was like, “Yeah, but not til December, because after an argument with her jock boyfriend Jessica pulled my name out of the hat as the one to tell him about and make him mad, so he and a few of his football team friends paid me a visit while I was jogging and I got my arm broken in two places and had a big clunky cast on for the next four months.

“They broke your arm in two places for that?”

“No, they broke my arm for doing a good job of fighting back. I busted her boyfriend’s nose in front of his sycophantic friends. I finally got a girlfriend in November but she wouldn’t do anything with me while I was wearing the cast because she said casts were gross.”

“That’s rough.”

“Plus it turned out the girl I lost my virginity to, Jessica, lied and had actually slept with both my brothers, so I might as well have taken my charms elsewhere and saved myself a broken arm.”

My first thought was same girl all three brothers, but then I realized he had given me an archetypal Jewish story: disappointing, sad, grim, cynically-told, but ultimately triumphant in the face of persecution.

August 4, 1989 My maternal grandfather took me ‘combing’ along the muddy banks of the Corrib River, seeing what we could find. He did this himself a number of times every summer and had picked up some interesting objects here and there, with a man he knew finding a Viking Age silver coin five years before. I found mostly junk, and modern junk at that, (the Irish are truly pathetic litterers), but there were so many old clay pipe bowls that after a baggie full I quit taking them.
 
In retrospect I’m glad I spent time with my grandfather those summers I was over there, because he’s gone now, and was someone I came to admire. He was a humble, well-read man, very different from my sometimes cocky paternal grandfather back home, and I loved to hear him talk about the importance of the river to the local history, and how in late Medieval times the bay was a Spanish trading hub, defying the power of the English to uproot it, and that Spanish presence, he said, accounted for the many “Black Irish” along the coast, those hints of Spanish genes sprinkling among the fairer Celts to dot the population with occasional olive skin tones and dark hair and eyes.

It was a cold, gusty day with the salty smell of the Atlantic vying with the tang of the river, and I, who was still acclimated to the ninety-plus degrees and humidity of back home, regretted not taking a sweater when it was offered (truth was it was full of hair from where I’d petted Smoke, my grandmother’s fluffy gray cat), so by the time we got back I was chilled and actually had the sniffles for a few days after. But of course I wanted to go looking along the river again soon, a treasured undertaking of the summers in my young life.

August 5, 1997 It’s possible to be so sleepy you don’t remember the day you just got through, and that night in my car it had been too hot to sleep, so by sunrise I was drained. I took a shower at a university fitness center by convincing the glassy-eyed girl at the desk I was a student who’d forgotten her ID, then slept a few hours in the air conditioned library: Heaven!

As I left I thought it didn’t have to be like that, I could have been in another state, preparing to start at the well-regarded university that had accepted me, but which that spring I’d shocked everyone by turning down. I could also have still been in Ohio living with Brian, or been “home” with my dad, or off on my own, or any of so many other scenarios, but instead in the aftermath of all the stress boiling over in me, I’d taken off. (My Aunt Jude seemed to like the derogatory term “run away” but for the millionth time that summer I wondered how someone who was legally an adult could run away.)
 
It was strange how fast your idea of fun could change when you were removed from all the things you used to do, and I had the best time that afternoon walking around a mall with this guy I met and knew for exactly one day. His name was Boyd and he was getting his paycheck from Sears and asked if I wanted to go bowling with his sister and her friends and him, so I went, he bought us all pizza and Cokes, and before his sister showed up he said, “I want to tell you, she’s big-ass overweight, the token fat friend of her group, but she’s also fun to be with.”

I thought with her own brother saying that about her this girl didn’t need enemies, but Boyd treated her nicely and he was right, she was fun, a junior in high school, and even with my life in not the best chapter I’d ever lived through, it was a good time hanging out with them that evening.

It really was.

August 6, 1999 Went with a friend and saw The Blair Witch Project, which grew on me in the future but which only seemed OK that first time watching it, though he loved it and called it “a cinematic achievement.” (We’re more cynical today but you could still say that back then.) Although officially we’d been apart for months, after the movie I got a wild hare and drove by Brian’s, in part because I knew he was in Florida visiting his sister and mom, and walked around outside his house where I’d once lived, and even opened the gate and went out back amid the buzzing insects and tree frogs of nighttime, then in the dark sat on the patio swing where he and I used to look at the stars together, feeling a mixture of shock and angry sadness over not being part of life there anymore, things messed up because of my work, though I told myself one day I would be living there again, there was just no way he and I were really done. I was as sure of that as I was the sun would rise on the morrow. Instead in a year, like some twisted wish fulfillment from a Monkey’s Paw, ownership of the house would be offered to me by his father, but I said no, and today a family with five children lives there, knowing nothing about all that went on in the house long ago.

August 7, 2006 I was playing host to a friend of mine from my college days, Diana, the younger (half-) sister of a boy I knew from those times named Greg. She came and stayed a few days and that morning we went to King’s Island, and she got me to say hi to her brother on the phone, which was pleasant since I considered him among the nicest people I ever met.
 
In bed that night I watched one of the most engrossing programs I’d ever seen, an episode of The American Experience, with Kenneth Branagh reading the diaries of Joseph Goebbels. No commentary, no peripheral intrusions, only the words of that disturbed and disturbing man, rolled out to provide a trip into his horrible mind.
 
I was so impressed I called my friend Hugh in Austin to tell him about it, knowing he was fascinated with the Second World War, but he was upset because a much-loved friend had just passed away in a VA hospital, and he told me he didn’t know what to make of it, but the last time he’d spoken to this man, a day and a half earlier, his friend told him he had lost all fear of dying since he was surrounded by deceased loved ones who said they were there to walk him into Heaven.

He told Hugh he saw them as plainly as he did any living person in the room, and Hugh, who was an agnostic, said he sounded completely at peace.

7th August 2017.

I had flown down to Henlow the night before in order to be as fresh as possible for facing the med board. I took a care in preparing my uniform that I hadn't done since finishing my basic training. My accumulated injuries were to be assessed. Potentially (although I thought this outcome was highly unlikely) they could say I was damaged goods and could no longer serve in the forces. I got up early and found where I'd undergo the boarding. I reported to reception, got asked to take a seat and waited there in my pristine uniform.

The time for my board to start came and went. I was used to the admin and medical sides of the military not being as punctual as the rest of us, but this seemed odd and disrespectful considering how important this meeting could be. After about 15 minutes or so a sergeant came out, looked at me quizzically and asked me if I was Flight Lieutenant someone or other. I glanced meaningfully at the stripes on my shoulders that indicated my rank and said no, I am Corperal Corbett. He vanished back inside and then reappeared a few minutes later to inform me my med board had been cancelled months ago. He then asked me if no one had told me this. Felt like replying "Yeah, but I thought what the hey, I'll come down on a jolly anyway." My flight home and transport to the airport wasn't until evening time, but I called MT, explained the situation and got them to take me back to Luton.

I think the only airport I've ever liked is Oslo. The others are terrible. At the bottom of the list though is Luton airport. It is dull, grey and smells bad. On this occasion, it was filled with huge numbers of Hasidic Jews. Maybe it was some sort of pilgrimage or something. I didn't mind them, but there were more of them in the airport than I have ever seen in any place. Anyway, I went to see if I could get an earlier flight back home. British Airways will move you to an earlier flight for free if there is a space, but I was travelling with EasyJet this time and they wanted me to pay £170 (basically buy a new ticket), so I spent 9 hours waiting in that stinking excuse for an airport reading whatever book I'd taken with me.

My actual med board would end up not happening until 2021 and due to the pandemic, would be done by phone. I would still pass it. I could pass a modified fitness test that took my injuries into account and could still be deployed into a war zone if required. I did chuckle when they told me that they would review my medical condition on the 4th of July 2023. I had already decided that I was leaving and that would be the very day I'd be leaving. I didn't mention that to anyone at the time though.

TODAY. i just found the email that says i'm approved to take my social security as of november! YYYYAAAYYYY!!!!!  :cheers:

August 8, 2008 Played twenty questions with my future husband.

Landon: “Animal, mineral, or vegetable?”

Me: “I have no clue. What’s a blimp actually made of?”

Landon: “You’re thinking of a blimp.”

Me: “You are so brilliant.”

August 9, 1996 I was off on a trip with Gina’s family to Charleston, South Carolina, parts of which were almost surrealistically gorgeous, but much of the city was made up of neighborhoods full of desperate looking people, all of it surrounded by the same fast food places and strip malls you’d find anywhere in America. I saw Fort Sumter on that trip, and met a bunch of Marines from Parris Island: not recruits, they were stationed at what they termed “the Depot.” I got excited about hearing NASA’s announcement that a meteor found in Antarctica might have contained the first known sample of extra-terrestrial life, but as I remember that hope later fizzled. Stayed out late on the beach outside the hotel that night, Gina’s brother Mark and me trying to psych each other out about the fact so many shark attacks happened in shallow water right after twilight, though we both swam out fairly far, something that creeps me out more now than it did then. My dad gave me a hundred bucks spending money for the trip but I brought it all home again and asked if he wanted it back: he didn’t, yaaaay.

August 10, 1992 My cousin Magda and I almost got into it after it was building up so much all summer you could feel tension in the air, so she got sent home from our grandparents’ and made a disapproving finger-gesture at me while she was leaving. We’d been having a good day which went sour when I wouldn’t tell her answers to her nosy questions. She said she’d told me everything and I said since I didn’t ask her to, so what? She called me some names then and glared.

What made her the maddest was being laughed at, so I did that to her instead of saying anything back, and she fumed and said I needed my eye blacked, and for one second I was waiting to get hit, knowing that was gonna hurt, but she just went off on me verbally saying I was an American blahblahblah (a bunch of bad things) and nobody wanted me there, so go home etc etc etc.
 
What was funny was it didn’t bother me at all that she stomped off and I was glad to get rid of her. Even nearly getting punched in the face was a pseudo-rush.

It was an old cycle, almost every summer it built up til she got mad at me for some reason though this had been our second worst time, with the worst being when she ruined my Easter dress when I was seven and fought her back.
 
I told my Aunt Sarah and my cousin Eonne about what had happened that day and they didn’t think it was funny and asked, “Do you know how lucky you were? Mags punches everybody.”
 
Which made me wonder if it wouldn’t be wise to avoid Mags for a while.

In actuality though we’d hug the next morning and finish the summer doing many fun things together, including me watching her casting supposed spells by an old well, something our grandmother would have lost her mind over and hauled us both off to confession had she known about.

Ah, Mags, I miss you, you goofy Irish slob.

August 11, 2003 The news said it was 101 degrees in Kent the day before, the first time the United Kingdom had ever marked a temperature above a hundred, and if that wasn’t enough, Paris sported a life-endangering 112.

On this day my buddy Rob came over to hang out since we’d seen little of each other all summer, partly because his day and night sleeping cycles were all messed up, partly because of my job, and we watched Sid & Nancy, and then he asked if I’d like to see a picture of his new dog, the first he’d had since his old bulldog, Punisher, went off amid the fire hydrants of the Elysian Fields, so he showed me snapshots of Bow-Wowse (a pun on Bauhaus), a sleek black mixed breed, so full of energy he could leap six feet off the ground to snatch a treat held above him.
 
Rob said he found Bow-Wowse at the pound, and that about three evenings after he brought him home he was walking him in the rough part of the uptown where he lived, not far from the university, when several black guys carrying half-consumed forty-ouncers walked aggressively up on him and claimed Bow-Wowse belonged to one of them, that he’d gone missing, so hand him over. Rob said he tried to think how he’d feel seeing his lost dog owned by someone else, so despite having paid fifty bucks for him, he handed over Bow-Wowse’s leash, only to hear the guys start laughing and calling him stupid, and one said, “Man, you such a fool! This ain’t our dog, but now you gotta pay twenty bucks to get him back.”

And Rob did just that, he gave twenty bucks to get back his own dog, sullying the Mjolnir around his neck by letting himself get shaken down. He told the story like it was outrageously unfair, but personally I thought he was a wuss for letting it happen.

August 12, 2010 Straight up 100 degrees and so humid that when we had our all-night Perseids meteor shower viewing party which I call “Dog Day’s Night” everything from cars and lawn furniture to the surfaces of beer bottles ran with condensation, and if you took a swim and didn’t towel off, you stayed wet. The air was drunk on water, the night sodden with it, looking like it had just rained, which it hadn’t. Even the grass drenched your feet and made slushing noises when you passed across it. The clear skies made for excellent sky-viewing, however, and we saw many shooting stars, including a long-track one that not only streaked across the sky like a firework, but left behind a glow for seconds, burned on the black canvas like a halo, maybe the best I’d ever seen. Everyone who lasted til morning got a survivor’s breakfast and a couch to sleep on til noon. We were newlyweds and despite the grim news of spring, I was still alive after doing something daring in having people over. Life that morning felt very, very good, like a baptismal cleansing after some troubled months.

August 13, 1996 Another day that holds a special spot in my memory.

My grandpa picked me up for our long-planned trip to the Museum Center at Union Terminal, and embarrassed me by saying, “Any day is nicer in the company of a pretty girl!”

The museum was located in an Art Deco masterpiece, an immense structure built to look like a giant 1930s Crosley radio, and was once the bustling main railroad depot in the city, seeing hundreds of trains and tens of thousands of people pass through daily, and as a high school student during World War Two, Grandpa had been a volunteer there, answering questions of service personnel passing through town, showing them where to go, running and buying them cigarettes before their train left, being an all-around personal assistant for anyone in uniform who needed help of any kind.

Grandpa kept pointing out what had been where as we walked out under the vast dome called the “whispering arch,” since you can hear a whisper there at a hundred yards, and showed me a spot where he said he saw a black man in 1943 running from two other black men and a white man, and the runner was so desperate to evade his pursuers that he raced right in between two cars that were passing in opposite directions on the street, and at least temporarily got away. He showed me where he once saw a pretty, “well-dressed” young woman faint and fall flat on her back, and people rushed to help her, and he never did hear what was wrong, because he stayed too busy to ask.

He said the feeling in the war years was so patriotic that soldiers would leave their belongings sitting unattended all day and nobody bothered them out of respect for their service. There was also a custom back then wherein people who lived in the area would have soldiers over to dinner, and Grandpa would match up soldiers passing through the terminal with families who’d sent word they’d like to host a serviceman for dinner. The people might say they wanted two young men of Irish blood, and he’d keep an eye out for them. Or someone might say they wanted a Marine just home from the Pacific. Or “colored” soldiers were often invited to eat with a well-known black minister at his church dinner in the West End.

It was a busy life and exciting, because so much went on. There were always “G-Men” looking for spies and Grandpa saw training films on how to spot foreign agents up to no good. “It sounds funny now,” he told me, “but they were probably there.”

And he said there were prostitutes aplenty cruising for soldiers with a little time and money, and mostly the police left them alone. (“They were always flirting with a dapper blond kid like me, but I gave them a long pass….”) There were families passing through, and wives waiting for husbands, and children waiting for daddy. There were swindlers and card sharps and confidence men, reporters and Billy Sunday style preachers calling out that a man going off to the fight should not go unsaved. There were also priests always in side rooms, day and night, waiting to hear confessions, and, sadly, he said, there were funeral directors picking up caskets, always unloaded out of sight in the back, while around the terminal’s south side were ambulances for taking wounded soldiers off the trains. Along with all this Grandpa told me about visits from important personages, like politicians, generals, and movie stars in the USO. He told me he lit Dennis Day’s cigarette, then asked if I knew who that was. Thanks to listening to old radio shows with Grandma, I actually did.

His work was volunteer, but he and the others were allowed to keep tips, and sometimes those tips were good. Once Grandpa received a five-dollar bill from a fat old man in a white suit with a Deep Southern accent, for whom Grandpa purchased a fresh pack of playing cards and a can of talcum powder and took it to him on his train. He said that was like getting fifty bucks would’ve been in 1996, and ten times any other tip he ever got.

He did all this from about spring 1943 thru to about Christmas time 1945, although after VJ Day he went less frequently. After the war, Union Terminal was never the same again, he said, and airports were never anything like the miniature universe of a train terminal during World War Two.

Then Grandpa bought us sundaes at an on-site “micro-batch” ice cream parlor called Graeter’s, probably a thousand calories but a nice cap for a day that was special then and moreso in memory now.

Yeah, my grandpa was a cocky sort who ruined his relationship with my dad, ran around on my grandma and lived a bit like Don Draper, but he was also one of the people I’ve loved most in my life.

August 14, 2008 While we were having lunch on the south bank of the river, at a place in Kentucky called Habanero’s, for the first time my uber-Jewess friend Edie invited me to go bris-crashing with her, something she did so often it was her hobby. I asked why I’d want to do that, and she said, “Because it’s free fancy food, and the wine flows like the Jordan?”

I couldn’t help but catch that she emphasized the “free” part, a word I’d noticed in the past always seemed to sing from her lips with an almost holy tone, but didn’t bring it up. I did say thanks but it didn’t appeal to me, and she demanded, “Why? It’s pretty much an open situation, you show up, you eat and drink. Under Talmudic law it’s a father’s duty to generously host all guests on the day his son enters the covenant, so most families go all-out.”

I said, “To be honest a festive occasion built around hurting a baby wouldn’t be my thing.”

She was amused and plssed-off both and said, “Well that didn’t sound anti-Semitic, did it?”

I thought she was being tone deaf, though, since wouldn’t I want Jews to feel pain if I was anti-Semitic? Duh?

August 15, 2000 All summer I’d been withdrawn into grief, many days being with Brian’s dad in Brian’s old house, neither of us saying much, just sitting together staring into space, owned by loss, barely noticing when the sun went down, we’d just kind of look up and realize it was dark, that’s how bad it was, but for the first time in months I went someplace socially when I took Dana out a month late for her twenty-sixth birthday to Riverboat Row on the Kentucky side of the riverfront, where these steamboats were converted into floating attractions with a good view of the city, and I got her a piece of grasshopper cheesecake with a candle in it, then plied her with drinks while I nursed spring water with lime, kind of on auto-pilot, sadness by then my second nature. She told me jokes and made luridly funny observations about people around us til I finally did smile just to be polite, and she said it was good to see a grin crack my face again, even if it was fake. A family of ducks swam past our window, and some NKU fratters on a gangplank threw rocks at them, and I was thinking of going out and yelling but a bouncer beat me to it and chased them off. Neither Dana nor I brought up our dying grandpa across town, which heaped grief onto pre-existing grief----truly, it was just an awful summer---and after I dropped her off at her house and watched while she drunk-walked inside, I wondered why despite my efforts she had never liked Brian and he never liked her. I fell asleep wearing the dress I’d had on that evening, still in my shoes, not motivated to even care, and slid back into the cocoon of sadness that for weeks had felt like home.

August 16, 2003 Took nearly four-year-old Tyler off to lunch at Wendy’s where our Goth-esque cashier told us to: “Have a nice day, or else.” It was the best dismissal from a fast food worker I’d ever had. Very Anya-esque!

Tyler and I went back and did one of our pre-nap bug safaris, where we’d roam the yard turning over rocks and logs to see what crawled or slithered out. That noon we watched ants and found some “funakzoid beetles,” “crimmylots worms,” “goblinish maggots,” and followed a viceroy butterfly a good fifty feet before it flew up and away. We also watched a garden spider in some yew shrubs wrap up a moth that unwisely hazarded into her domain, and saw the most amazing sight of another spider floating at the end of a long strand as it navigated between two distant tree branches before crafting its web a dozen feet off the ground.

It was all amazing to behold, especially in the company of a child.

August 17, 2022 Ever had someone say something that shouldn’t get under your skin, but despite your best efforts it does?
 
“I was made to be middle-aged, you were made for youth,” Hugh, a man I’d once known well, claimed. “The best is still coming for me, El, but all you have ahead of you is looking back at what you were. Glorious, I don’t deny, but finished.”

I laughed hollowly in an attempt to show what I thought of his observation, but it bothered me, not because I believed it but because he did, and despite our friendship peaking years ago, his opinion still mattered.

I told myself he’d lost his looks, his self-identity, had sold his very soul to the job to the point he stared out at the world through burning raptor eyes, always sitting with his back to the wall, ever-suspicious of his own friends, his head full of secrets but now a morally compromised hull who deserved Hell if anyone ever did, and yet nothing I could think up quite tugged out the stinger of his claim. I could tell myself the sentiment was a sign of lingering resentment on his part going back almost twenty years when he never got the relationship he wanted with me despite how we felt about each other, I could tell myself I did not believe what he said, but in the end it was an observation only time was going to prove untrue, and it irritated me more than I would have ever let him know.

A year on it still does.

No matter what, my friend, you will always be 15 years younger than me - and I'm not old yet!!!

August 18, 1994 It was the last morning of visiting my mother’s side of the family that dramatic summer, and after a quick shower that ran hot on my face and cold on my back, Aunt Sarah and I left. I wished I could have told five-year-old Celia bye, and thought it was a wonder she remembered me from year to year and always ran to meet me, but I left her a lock of my hair since she loved twirling my hair around her finger when I held her. (She'd keep that lock for a very long time til one day she tried to hurt me by burning it.)

At some point on the road toward Dublin I went from sad to happy as we played The Joshua Tree, and paused once in our west-to-east drive and got snacks---I’d stopped my stressed-out hunger strike of the month before----paid our tolls and got to Dublin by early afternoon.
 
I went out that evening with Sarah and her English flat mates, and saw a big summer art exhibition at the university, and we went to The Heights and heard a reggae band amid ganga smoke all around us, nobody seeming worried about marijuana laws that were practically Judge Dredd level. Though I didn’t imbibe directly, I remember my eyes felt a little unfocused and things seemed a tad funnier as the night went on. My first, albeit indirect, exposure to the stuff.

I tried to stay up as late as possible, making Dublin last, and after the club my aunt and her friends walked us back the long way to stretch summer a little more, and they all offered me their beds, but I slept on their sofa and thought how Dublin was undeniably an ugly city in a mostly s**thole country, but one with a lot of spirit, and I decided someday I was going to spend more time there than my life had let me thus far.

The next night I’d be in Boston before going home, and I couldn’t put off thinking any longer about all that was waiting for me there, the good things and the things that had made me find some twisted logic in not eating for days, yet I was also sure somehow everything would work itself out, which it did.

August 19, 1996 I’d lied about my age that spring, making the people who ran the library’s “Defeat Adult Illiteracy” program think I was twenty-one, the minimum age to volunteer as a literacy coach, and I’d been assigned to mentor an Urban Appalachian woman named Tammy, who was functionally illiterate. Though she was intelligent and had a bright personality, the story of her childhood was a shocking one that saw her kept home from school in a backwoods family. As teenagers Tammy and her sister Grace Ellen had come to the city in the mid-‘80s, where they worked as maids in a motel, picking up a lot of Spanish from co-workers, and finding creative ways to get around not knowing how to read. (Her keen memory amazed me, and made me think it was probably how people tended to be in pre-literate societies.) She got married and had two children, and decided since her kids were heading off to school to learn to read, it was time she did as well. Working with Tammy was one of those experiences that made me feel good, and it wasn’t like some abstract assignment where you hoped you were making a difference, there I could actually watch her progress in the program workbooks as we met together, and when on August 19, 1996 she wrote me a thank you note, I hugged her and told her how proud of her I was. And I still have that note.

I was born on August 20th, 1962!

Thats all I have to say!  :drink:

August 20, 1989 We went to King’s Island, a big amusement park a few minutes down the road from where we lived, and had a great time. My dad rode almost everything with me, and my mom, not a fan of mechanical thrills, took our picture while we went down the big hill on the Red Racer, which for the record was the same coaster the Brady Bunch rode in an episode filmed there. (A little known fact is the camera was not properly secured onto the car two cast members were in, and this was only noticed moments before the scene was to be shot, and opinion was if the heavy camera had fallen-in on the kids while the Racer was doing sixty, they’d have been killed.) It’s very pretty at King’s Island at night, first because of fireworks, and then they turn the lights around the entryway fountains different colors, making it look like the water itself is spraying skyward in a rainbow of hues. That night a man was sitting by us and he covered his little girl’s eyes and said, “Abracadarbra-cadabra-cadabra-cadabra-CHANGE!”  And he’d take his hands away each time the lights were a different color, leaving this three-year-old impressed at his wizardry. Ah, the good old days….

August 21:

1989: Two LDS missionaries, about twenty years old, came by, so my mom offered them ice water and took some pamphlets, though told them from the start she wasn’t interested in converting. I asked where they were from, and one was from Salt Lake City, the other from Colorado. They were very nice and thanked her for both the water and her time.

2005: At Logan Airport, I spent the day hanging out with a rather deep-souled Marine. Never saw him again but we told each other our life stories while we waited. It felt like something out of a story, connecting with a stranger you’ll never see again. I told my friend Mandy about him and she said, “Probably a local who pulled that con to score with credulous women.” So cynical….

2006: Clare gave me a copy of Twilight and I read it on a flight to San Francisco. Century-old shiny vegetarian virgin vampire meets horny high school girl cursed with bad luck? Charming!

2008: To the Tousey House Tavern with Landon and pre-born Daisy, a restaurant housed inside an 1820s Federalist home in Burlington, Kentucky, near where I lived as a child. Henry Clay used to stay there, and of course as is de rigueur with such places, it had a resident ghost, simply dubbed the Colonel.

2011: Braved joining the black parade and saw My Chemical Romance in concert. Amazing how thirty-two seems ancient to a bunch of twenty year olds.

2012: Drove to a deserted university and slipped a card under the door to an office that had belonged to an acquaintance, Dr. Heather Bullen, a chemistry professor whose profession may or may not have contributed to her death from cancer at thirty-four. I hope her husband eventually found my card.

2017: The solar eclipse happened, and I let the interns at my dad’s office nosh while we waited for it, then herded them to the wide-open 19th century cemetery down the road to watch it. My dad griped because I let one of them bring along a case of vodka coolers: blahblahblah underage drinking, blahblahblah fines, blahblahblah police. What a worrywort.

2020: Sometimes I make up horoscopes for my children, and that day Trinity’s was, “Aries: You will soon encounter the tastiest Cheetos you’ve ever eaten.”

2021: A hurricane was preparing to make landfall where I’d gone to college, and Jackie, who still lived nearby, surprised me by reporting, “Yeah, no one up here seems to be paying much attention to that.” What?! TWC was going crazy!

2023: Spent lunchtime by myself, drinking chocolate milk, eating a pop tart, watching Courage the Cowardly Dog.

August 22, 1999 I went to a Reds game with my grandpa, and he was happy when they beat the Expos. No, the Big Red Machine of the ‘70s would never come again, but they had a good team that year.

Grandpa said I used to be easier to take out to dinner when I wasn’t a vegetarian, and I said for him I’d make an exception, so he took us to Red Squirrel, a downtown deli famous for double decker sandwiches, which we ate on the Serpentine Wall down by the river, lower than I’d seen in years, and Grandpa said, “Imagine all the shocking things we’d see if we drained it to the bottom.”

On that day Grandpa had exactly one year and one week to live. He was a heavy smoker who had refused all his life to quit, and his coughing was worse than the last time I’d been home, which he knew I noticed, and he said, “I’m glad you never started smoking, and I hope you don’t.”
 
I wasn’t so much worried for him by that point as accepting that whatever was going to happen it was probably too late, so even though I was twenty I held his hand like I was a little kid again, remembering when I was convinced it was the biggest hand in the world.

August 23:

1986: At our grandparents’ house my cousin Allie and I decided to see how long we could spin around before we were overcome by nausea. It didn’t take me long but she went on and on.

1995: It was the first day back in school, and as any Catholic schoolgirl could tell you, that meant you came home with sore legs, since after summer freedom you were back to sitting with them held close together all-day-long, lest you earn a demerit.

2003: I plssed off some Free Tibet types by comparing the Dalai Lama to a televangelist.

2006: Landon and my last day in San Francisco before heading to Portland, and I sent out postcards that read “Wish you were here.” Only they had Alcatraz on the front and in each case I inked in a little arrow pointing to the prison.

2007: Heat wave, 101, and I spent the day in an 1880s un-AC’d house with only open windows, stubbornly helping Landon clean it out so it could be restored. I thought I was gonna keel over.

2011: Went to the Carnegie Arts Center to see The Perfect Host, starring David Hyde Pierce, and one of my eighth grade teachers happened to be there. Ate at Dancing Wasabi, which had wasabi on a 1-10 scale, with 10 being so hot you had to sign a waiver. I stuck with a four.

2022: One of the volunteers at the food pantry where I worked was named Alberto, and his brother was on death row in a neighboring state. “As guilty as s**t,” as Alberto disgustedly told me, dismissing my awkwardly offered words of commiseration.

23rd August 2009.

I was half way through a week working 12 hour shifts on nights. At 23:30, I went out to the front gate as an SAC(T), then at midnight as my promotion was now official I had to remove my rank tabs and replace them with cpl ones. It felt silly, but the sgt in charge has insisted to the point where he said if I didn't, he'd charge me for being incorrectly dressed.

And that was it. I was now an NCO. No celebrations or congratulations. Couldn't have a drink because I was carrying a live weapon. By accepting it I was committing myself to another 12 years in the military, something which I had previously been looking forward to leaving, but they'd offered me my dream posting to stay.

Oh if only I had known what was about to come around the corner I'd have told them where they could stick that promotion, but then I'd most likely not have met Kristi then and I certainly wouldn't have been in a position to get married, so I'd needed to have known a lot about the future to make the right decisions there.

August 24, 2022 Sat out on the patio from the gloaming into the night with my oldest child, Daisy, first playing MTG, then a variation of Never Have I Ever but instead of shots we used apple slices.
 
“Never have I ever smelled socks to see if they were too stinky to wear.”

“Never have I ever fallen asleep in a restroom stall.”

“Never have I ever eaten cottage cheese on a hotdog bun.”

“Never have I ever lied about liking a movie star.”

(Sorry, the confidentiality inherent in the game forbids me to reveal the answers to these burning questions….)

August 25:
1995: Third day of school and I kept going around thinking of this rhyme from The Virgin Suicides: “The trees, like lungs, filling with air/ My sister, the mean one, pulling my hair.” There was something about knowing you were going to gleefully stop off after school and have sex that made daily chapel seem pointless.

2006: Landon and I were in Portland, Oregon, visiting his friend Justin, who was married to a woman named Shirley, his elder by a handful of years. The city reminded me it actually was what Austin liked to imagine itself to be.

2009: Already owning a box set of the graphic novels, I shocked myself by spending half a grand on a leather-bound set of The Complete Sandman.

2010: My friends Rob and Tara came over for movie night, chose Time Bandits, and couldn’t believe I didn’t like it.

2012: My second attempt at reading the series again failed to generate interest in The Wheel of Time, (“The wheel is stuck.”) so I gave it away.

2016: According to our back yard weather station, it reached 105 degrees, not heat index, the temperature itself. A camel would’ve asked for ice water.

2020: Tried Randonautica with Daisy; her intention was to be taken to something nice, and we were led to a book exchange box outside a school, where two titles she’d actually mentioned wanting to read were there for free.
Strange….

2022: Had this conversation with my husband, who managed to reveal both father issues and insecurity about being adopted.

Him: “My dying father has never once said he loves me or is glad I was ever born.”

Me: “Then don’t mourn him if you think he’s a bastard.”

Him: “Technically, I’m the bastard.”

August 26:

1989: Gina’s beloved Western-Rider Barbie was missing; Mark, her seven-year-old brother and inveterate Barbie serial killer, was suspected.

1993: Gina dared me to brush my teeth with grape jelly, so I did.

1994: A line from a Byron poem called Darkness got me word-high: “Darkness had no need of them; she was the universe…”

1995: Grandpa gave me my Desert Eagle and set paper targets at ten to twenty yards. Hollow-points blasted the dirt mound like geysers. All my years of practicing precision tennis serves had given me a good aim and I made him proud of me. Such a nice day together, and I still own that firearm.

1996: Met for the last time with Tammy, the Appalachian lady I helped learn to read. We’ve lost touch.

2006: In Portland we went with Justin and Shirley to a sort of Scottish pub called the Rose & Thistle.
 
2017: I finally told my father about being pregnant in 1997. Til then only one other person knew, that being Brian’s dad Joe, who to his credit never told anyone, as we’d asked him not to.

2020: I found out Michael Aquino, my favorite Satanist, died. He had bizarre eyebrows.

2021: My Spanish friend who claims to be a trance medium presented me with the interesting metaphor that my soul was “made of paper.” I’ve been scared of matches ever since.

2022: One of Daisy's fourth grade teachers died, and ten-year-old Trinity peppered her with questions: “Did it hurt when the teacher died? Did the teacher know she was going to die? Where is the teacher now?” I had to remind her to maybe ease up, but I wondered those things too.

August 27, 2012 I got a potato launcher off a website that sold both plans and finished guns, then bought fifty pounds of potatoes, and that evening Landon and I summoned Rob and Tara and we took turns blasting potatoes into the woods. We lined targets up and knocked them down. After dark we used wire cutters to trim sparklers and lit them in potatoes, so the sizzling spuds sped into the twilight. We shot off every last potato in the house and never got bored, and afterward came in and watched an animated version of The Watchmen. To this day we have wild potatoes growing in our woods.

28th August 2021.

I was seriously worried I'd miss my chance to see this, but we finally got to go see the Ray Harryhausen exhibit. I practically danced around the place looking at all the models that had played such a special role in my childhood. Going round the museum with Kristi and Ash is one of my favourite memories.

28th August 2015.

I staggered out of the room on rubbery legs. My eyes felt like they had blood running out of them. My heart rate felt thin and thready. I think my brain had been turned to mush and was ready to just pour out of every available orifice. I could barely comprehend how I had just survived the experience I had endured. Endured was the right word. You don't survive an experience like that, you endure it. I had made it through though even if I would never be quite the same person as I had been before.

I had done it though. I had watched The Star Wars Christmas Special.

28th August 2014.

Susie and her mum (Darleen) were visiting. We took them around Elgin (or El Gin as Susie kept calling it), and then went for a meal. Everything on the menu I was asked how large the vegetable portion with it was. Every time I replied "I've never eaten here before, I don't know." She would ask about the same dish several times. We were all hungry and waiting on her making a decision but it was just this endless stream of the same repeated question.  I would tell her she'd need to ask the staff, that I did not know. It did not matter, I still got the same question again and again and again. Kristi could see me getting increasingly frustrated by the exchange, but I remained mostly patient about it. I love Susie and her mum, but I'll never go out for a meal with Darlene again.

August 28, 2002 I got passed a counterfeit twenty dollar bill at US Bank. I’d tried to spend it and noticed it looked weird so I examined it up close and sure enough it was bogus. I returned it to the bank and they said they'd been getting some lately, all from the same general geographical area, and this one was part of a thousand-plus dollar cash drop some restaurant employees made. I was tempted to keep the ersatz currency and frame it as a souvenir it but I needed real money more.

29th August 2013.

My foot had started to hurt a bit while I was at work, increasing in pain as the day went on. By the time I was heading home, I knew I was having a full-on gout attack. I could feel my swollen toe pressing against my shoe. 5 minutes walk from my front door I was seriously considering calling a taxi to come pick me up. When I did stagger through the front door, Kristi panicked. My face had went grey. I pulled my work shoes and socks off, and you could actually see my toe swelling up. I had some pretty powerful pills to deal with it, and within about half an hour of taking one the swelling was retreating. I assume it breaks up the uric acid crystals or something, but however it worked I was just certainly glad it did. Me and Kristi argued over who was going to sleep downstairs (she didn't want to risk bumping my toe and wanted me to sleep in the double bed, but I did not want the pain of walking up stairs and wanted to sleep on the couch).

Eventually, I guilted her into letting me have the couch and she got the bed. The next day my foot was still tender and I was aware that bumping it against anything would merely result in a renewed attack, so I took the day off. Kristi did get her wish of running around and looking after me though.

August 29:

1994: Finished The French Lieutenant’s Woman, John Fowles’ magnum opus, the plot of which made you think you were in Masterpiece Theater country, only to find out at the very end that you’d been in The Twilight Zone.

1999: At lunch I told my Aunt Christie I was glad she was staying close to Brian, after my having to live on the east coast expended his patience back in January, no matter what we still felt for each other. In retrospect I’m glad she didn’t cut ties with him in what turned out to be the last year of his life. If I’d been here I think he’d still be alive, but also my children, these children, wouldn’t.

2000: My grandpa died of small-cell lung cancer. I was sad, but with the way he’d isolated himself it was also like he’d died months before and it was just his body catching up to the fact. Being 6’ 4” and mighty doesn’t spare you from death, neither does being pretty or loved or young or needed or anything else. “I tell you now to enjoy life.”

2008: In my third trimester my thoughts were about babies, so I asked my dad to tell me about when I was little. He said when I was a baby he put me in my playpen so he could study for college, but I smiled at him so big he picked me up and we hung out the rest of the morning instead. Heartwarming except upon hearing that I abruptly burst into tears. Being pregnant has a lot in common with being possessed.

2020: Driving home from Wright-Pat, I saw Larry Flynt’s Hustler Superstore was using a banner to advertise a signing by an adult film starlet, though probably not the great Pumpis Johnson.

August 30, 2016 On the day we heard Gorbachev died, I got Daisy from school and we went to the funeral of her fourth grade teacher from 2018-2019. There was a bus doing shuttle duty to the funeral home from a parking lot down the road, but Daisy and I just changed shoes and walked about a furlong, then changed shoes again before going in. The funeral home was packed, and while there Daisy impressively handled herself with a perfect fusion of dignity and polite sadness, making me proud of her. We didn’t go to the cemetery, which was north of Dayton, but we sat near some tall pine trees in a park and talked about the service and I told her in our funeral dresses we looked like a couple of hot babes, which made her laugh despite feeling sad. We saw a murder of crows sitting in the grass in front of us, and when a red-tailed hawk landed beside them, the crows started cawing and aggressing on the hawk til it fled. Since I’ve always had a fascination with crows, I could almost let myself see an omen in that, as the wise stay attuned to nature’s secret language.

The place sounds kind of cool, honestly.  I'd browse there for a while.

August 31, 2022 Ever heard about bad mojo attaching to an object? Yeah, that’s silly, right? Right? Went to a strange shop which was like some mad scientist’s garage sale, offering small taxidermied animals, unwelcome mats, headstones, urns, Victorian corpse bells, tiny pieces of the crashed plane that killed Carole Lombard, death masks, shed python skins, Anton Lavey’s umbrella, a ritual scarification knife from Ghana, embalmer’s tools, gallstone marbles, tobacco-stained 1970s AstroTurf, Bigfoot urine, petrified cobra eggs, saints cards Padre Pio cried on, Jerry Garcia’s cigarette butt, tragic fortune cookies, canned air from Graceland, Jim Crow 1950s canned goods: in short just the weirdest collection of eclectica I had ever seen, but I was too creeped out by the merchandise and the absolutely horrible energy of the store to buy anything, and felt like taking a shower in holy water when I left.

 

Sunday August 31 1997: the start of the third worst day in my life.  :bluesad:

September 1, 2002  Got up early to play three sets of tennis before three-year-old Tyler came to spend the day with me, then drove him up and bought a sandbox at Home Depot, which we sat up out back. I told him about Dune and how Dune worms erupted up from the ancient sands of Arrakis, and he wanted to see a picture of one, so I found images from the ‘80s David Lynch movie, and instantly Tyler said, “No, dat’s a peenus!” Nothing I said could convince him he was not seeing a giant male member bursting from a dusty landscape, so for that and many reasons it did not particularly shock me when as a teenager he told us he was into sex with boys….lots and lots of boys.

September 2, 1994 Driving to see Forrest Gump together at the start of Labor Day weekend, in the car Brian asked me to tell him something profound, so I said someone someday would be the last human being to hear a Beethoven symphony.

“That’s pretty good, Evelyn,” he said, always calling me by my birth name, as his sister and father and nephew still do.

I was reading The Spoon River Anthology, so the topic of death was in my thoughts, and I asked if he ever heard that when they opened the casket of Pope John XXIII, somehow his body had flipped upside down, which was held to be physically impossible.

“It was said to be a sign he was in Hell,” I added.

He thought it was my Irish genes which disposed me to talk about things like that, and along those lines recited a gloom-laden Sylvia Plath poem called Edge, which was composed days before she took her life.

I told him what a complainer I thought Plath was, blaming others instead of doing anything proactive, though the shoe filled with blood part of The Bell Jar was admittedly funny, and added, “Suicide is arguably the worst way to free up your social calendar.”

He cracked a smile at that and said if he had to guess Plath didn’t want to die, she probably figured she’d pass out and be found on the floor and it’d shake up her husband, Ted Hughes, and he’d quit having affairs with his students. Then he said, “But for the love of God, never say that in a class full of feminists with no sense of humor about their dead icons.”

Forrest Gump was OK and we weren’t out late.

September 3:

1992: In the twilight I stood with my neighbor Mrs. Glenn and watched this spinning circle of about a hundred starlings fly around and around for close to fifteen minutes. Mrs. Glenn said she’d never seen anything like it and to this day I haven’t either.

1993: Read about a quarter of Nightmares and Dreamscapes, didn’t think it was Stephen King's best writing, and wondered to my sorrow if I was already outgrowing him.

2000: After months of dormancy and dysfunction rooted in grief, Dana dragged me to Riverfest, a big fireworks show, telling me, “You’re alive, little cousin, so live!” To show off in front of her friends, when I got there she gave me this semi-lesbian-esque kiss which I didn’t really appreciate, but she was drunk and liked drama, so whatever, she’d done that before, her milieu being all about shock value.

2004: Because we used to talk about everything, my fifteen year old Irish cousin Celia told me she’d had sex for the first time, doing it mostly out of curiosity, and wasn’t impressed. When she said it was with another fifteen year old, I thought that was likely why she wasn’t impressed.

2010: Possibly related to Hurricane Earl dissipating to our east, the wind that evening did a strange thing, changing direction rapidly, blowing my hair one way and then another, sometimes at once.

2020: I had an irritating episode of “how stupid can some people be” when a woman in a store argued with me that the Scottish flag was another form of Confederate flag, and when I tried to show her online that it wasn’t, she said she didn’t want to see my “fake news and misinformation.”

September 4, 1997 It may be an exaggeration to say that my college roommate, Jackie, saved my life, because I had a way out of homelessness if I wished, but she did show great kindness toward me and got me out of living in my car by asking me to share her apartment with her, needing a roommate as she did. It was especially trusting considering she’d only known me a few days, and I could have been a machete murderess. I was also fresh off walking the Hundred-Mile Wilderness on the AT (where I heard Princess Diana died) when she contacted me, so we hadn’t seen each other across the last part of summer, yet it was me she thought of to offer the room based on only a few past interactions.

Thing was, I was a blank slate to her, and like others she assumed I was worse off than I was, and for a while I let her go on thinking that, only unraveling my past little by little as the first few weeks of the term went on, wondering as I did if she was going to get mad at me for not telling her everything up front and then casting me out again, since for the first year the lease on our place was in her name, not mine.

There are people who come into your life and leave it changed for the better by what they do for you, and few ever did as much for me as Jackie did in the late summer of 1997, giving me a place to live, instant friends through her own social circle, and even introducing me to her family, who invited me to their house for holidays. For over a quarter century she has been a loyal friend to me, all arising from some chance meetings which could have gone a million other ways than they did had she not been the open-hearted soul she was and is, and I’ll always love her.

September 5, 2001 I got invited to a Riverfest fireworks party at a loft downtown, and all day I didn’t plan to go, but did at the last minute, and that was where I met the man I married. My first impression was that he was a well-dressed, charismatic sort who kept looking at me with a strange intensity from across the room while his date sitting on the arm of a sofa beside him tried to crucify me with a venomous gaze, fully aware he was focusing on me. He came over to talk and basically ignored his date for the rest of the night and has told me many times since that he felt drawn to me from the first second he saw me and that “there was no way I was going to resist coming over and meeting you.” Few men have ever had a more protracted path to a relationship than he did with me over the next year because I was still very much in post-loss mode. I sometimes wonder if I had not gone to that party, would my life have been completely changed, different path through the years, different children, or are we fated to meet some people, and if I had not met Landon there, would it have happened somewhere else soon after? Ironically, we’d later figure out that every time I’d go visit my grandparents growing up, I’d drive past the street where he lived, and once we were at the same event at the college he attended, he just starting there, me visiting with my high school AP group.  Funny…

September 6, 2007 After they had their first child, my proud hippie-nerd friends enthusiastically invited me over to watch their birth videos, which to be honest were of less interest to me than highlights of a paint-drying tournament. Additionally I’d find out the videos were not what you’d call “tastefully edited.” Or “edited.”  Or “tasteful.” An hour and change later I possessed familiarity with my friend’s anatomy I never wanted as she slow-mo’d her baby’s wet blue-gray head emerging from her nether-region. I also felt aurally blasted after a Foley-like soundtrack of shrieks, grunts, and whimpers, and those were just the noises my friend made. OK, I knew this was a wondrous event, no arguments, but sometimes the beauty in such things lies in one’s personal appreciation, and not all miracles are meant to be shared. (Hint: There’s a reason obstetricians are paid big bucks, though how they bring themselves to go have lunch after a delivery mystifies me.)  Before leaving their apartment I thanked them for thinking enough of me to include me in celebrating the commemoration of what was probably the biggest, happiest event in their shared lives, and then went home and Googled “how to forget seeing your friend’s lady parts.”

September 7, 2019 Talk about packing a lot into one day!

It began on the east coast, where Hurricane Dorian was making the weather unstable, and I woke up after barely any sleep for two days, tired but needing to DH a flight, having spent the last two days participating in an event called Spookfest, that is likely not what it sounds like. (Its motto is: “What happens at Spookfest probably shouldn’t have.”)

Couldn’t sleep on the bumpy flight, got to my destination, which was my usual workplace on an Air Force base, slept three hours on my office sofa before driving sixty miles to get home, blaring offensively bad music to keep me awake, then my family and I all went to a concert venue by the river east of downtown to see The Empire Strikes Back on a giant screen, with the soundtrack performed live by the local pops orchestra.

Coming back my youngest thought it’d be funny to keep me awake by scream-singing “100 Bottles of Coke on the Wall,” and we stopped at Wendy’s very late and got unimpressively re-heated loaded fries for everyone, then I fell into bed, only to get up at 4:45 to take Daisy to the hellishly early Mass she liked going to so she could be with my godson and Clare and Clare’s dad, with whom I’d made peace a few years before after staying angry at him for years and years. (For what I still think was a pretty damned good reason.)

I managed to stay awake for that but leaving to go back home I said to her, “Hey, Diz, you drive us and I’ll sleep.” She was strangely agreeable to the idea for a ten-year-old. Yeah, for the ideas I come up with I’m either a great mother or a terrible one, I don’t know which.

September 8, 1991 My parents took me to our local (and sadly long-defunct) planetarium which from my youngest days I loved visiting. At this presentation they showed the Tunguska blast on the domed ceiling overhead, and simulated a Texas meteor storm in the 1800s so bright you could read by its light. Then after the science segments they played tracks off Dark Side of the Moon, and did a laser show complete with a lunatic dancing inside someone’s head: the scariest concept in rock and roll. To make the day even better, we stopped off at Graeter’s for ice creams on the way home.

I grew up with a great mom and dad….

September 9, 2001 Two days before everything changed I was at King’s Island, up on a one-third replica of the Eiffel Tower, staring at the distant pavement and for some reason my thoughts passed back to 1993, when terrorists tried to topple the World Trade Centers, and I thought of the sheer horror of such a thing, of people falling to their deaths from so high in the air. That was on Sunday, and on Tuesday morning as I watched that terrible day unfold, I flashed back to thinking those thoughts, amplified at the time by being hundreds of feet off the ground, and I felt all the more overwhelmed.

9th September 2018.

I due to be working late when I got a panicked text message from Kristi. Our cat had brought home a mouse and she couldn't bring herself to remove it from the house. I had to put out a shout on facebook to ask if anyone could take it outside since I couldn't get home. One of the neighbours did eventually come to Kristi's rescue.

September 10, 1999 I was at a college party waiting to drive my drunk friends home, walking the fine line that separated Good Samaritan from “one taken advantage of,” when I noticed a hard-partying TKE frat boy staring with a lascivious cockiness, which I ignored at first but it got persistent until he approached me, and I thought, OK what’s the least messy way to shoot this one down? But instead of hitting on me he swayed in that drunk rocking motion and cryptically said, "I remember now. You were my Jew."

And that was so puzzling I didn’t know what to say. I was used to some among the cerulean folk of New England holding my Midwestern origins in undertones of condescension, but you were my Jew was new to my experience.

I asked, "Pardon?"

Only to have him sagely repeat: "Yeah, you were my Jew. I remember you now."

Two things registered. The first was that there was an unmistakable hint of sexual achievement in the TKE-ers boast along with the leer he was devoting to my breasts, the second was puzzlement that anyone would think I was Jewish. I wanted to blurt out, “Do I look Jewish?” but of course that would’ve implied Jews had a stereotypical appearance, which, ahem….but still I knew I did not look Jewish, so that puzzled me more than this inebriated stranger's apparent conviction that he’d had physical knowledge of me at some point in the past, which barring a scenario involving an erasure of my memory and extreme reorganization of my taste in men, he had not.

Without explanation though he laughed a hard drunk laugh and moved away toward his friends glancing back at me, and I thought, if I don’t stop him and ask him what he thinks he’s talking about, I will spend the rest of my life wondering about this, but already knowing I wasn’t going to chase down a wasted frat boy to try to get coherent dialog from him, so I accepted a destiny of ignorance in the face of mystery, and still wonder about his remark and what it meant, and why he thought I was some Jewish girl unfortunate enough to have become a notch on his soiled bedpost.

September 11, 2001 I’d been working a lot of late nights because of a time zone difference on our project and so was home asleep when Mom called and I heard her on the answering machine saying to get up, that something terrible was going on, a jet had flown into the World Trade Center and part of the building was crushed-in and burning.

When you wake up to a message like that surreality takes over, and I picked up the cordless phone I kept next to my bed and just asked, “What?”

She said, “Turn on the TV. Turn on any channel.”

I did and all the channels I flipped through showed masses of smoke pouring from the most iconic skyscrapers in America, places I’d been, places I’d liked, places I planned to go back to sometime. I snapped awake.

I stayed on the phone with my mom while standing in the living room in an indigo robe I’d hastily put on, and watched in horror as the news broke about a jet hitting the Pentagon, and then another crashing into a field in Pennsylvania, and about first one tower collapsing, then a second, at which time the news anchor said: “Clearly America is under attack.”

Remember when we used to think the new millennium would be the Age of Aquarius?

September 11, 2001: the second worst day in my 56 years on this planet.  :bluesad: :bluesad:

September 12:

1989: In fifth grade got out of class along with every US school kid for President Bush’s anti-drug talk.

1995: Dad said instead of hiring a tutor he’d go over my calculus with me. He did higher math like it was child’s play.

1999: Went to mass with Jackie and took a walk on a warm day. Got Bag of Bones, watched Agassi win the US Open, and found out Dana, pregnant with Tyler, was having labor pains.

2008: Had a nasal pore extrusion at a salon while watching Hurricane Ike hit Galveston, where anyone remaining faced “certain death.”

2014: Surprised my godson by having lunch with him, and he asked if I was ever going to call him by name, so I did, but almost choked, like a dybbuk reciting the Talmud.

2017: The death throes of Hurricane Irma passed over us. No biggie.

2021: My twice-vaccinated father had a 102 fever and Covid-19.

2022: Got sued after years of not paying our water bill. Since we had a well I didn’t see the point but ended up paying anyway.

September 13, 1997 It was the day of Mother Theresa’s funeral in Kolkata, and I couldn’t help but wonder what a woman who spent her life helping the poor would have thought of such a lavish event. I probably would have let the coverage pass unwatched except the girl who’d herself shown a Mother Theresa-like sense of kindness in inviting me to share her two-bedroom flat with her, my roommate of two weeks, Jackie, had a fascination with Roman Catholicism, so we viewed the ceremony together, and she asked me questions about why certain rituals were done. The death of this humble superstar fed into Jackie seeing glamour in the Catholic Church, and she asked me all about my school and going to mass and confession, keeping Lent, and truly reacted like I was telling her about something otherworldly, mystical, beautiful, when to me it was mundane, something I never quite accepted as true, and frankly something against which I’d eventually rebelled. One day she would convert, something I’m not sure would have happened if it were not for the events of that morning.

September 14, 1989 The Rolling Stones came to town and played Riverfront Stadium. My parents went, and thousands of people who didn’t pay for a ticket lined downtown bridges to catch a free listen to the band making a stop on its Steel Wheels tour, and even though I wasn’t into the Stones at all and knew little about them, my Mom brought me home a concert t-shirt which had a tongue made of metal wheels. I kept it til I was sixteen, then, to my present shame, threw it away because I was mad at her.

Today I started my first day of full time teaching after substituting since I entered this field.

 :teddyr: :cheers: :cheers: :teddyr:

Groovy!  :thumbup:

September 15, 2020 I took Daisy along on a trip I had to make to Washington DC, which was still under siege from Covid, meaning we weren’t able to go a lot of the places we otherwise would have, so I had to get inventive.

We walked around the National Mall, and at one non-descript spot I told her, “This is where in 1956 the CIA arrested a Soviet spy named Sergei Lyonov, who’d been posing as ‘Sam Wallace’ a playboy football recruiter for Texas A&M, a school to which he had no actual ties.”

I explained the “KGB” (though technically going by a different name at the time) planted Lyonov, who was in his twenties, in northern Virginia sometime in 1955, and it wasn’t long before he, as “Wallace” started making pals with local high school football players, seeming like a cool big brother type, claiming he’d played college ball for the Aggies, and filling their awe-struck heads with stories of his on-field glory. He was handy at getting the boys booze and introducing them to easy women, which made him popular, but like a lion that marks its target, his actual focus was on just one boy, a mediocre player whose parents Wallace had convinced he could get their son on with Texas A&M after graduation. In truth though Lyonov was just aiming for a connection with the father.

Maybe Lyonov overplayed his hand, maybe Cold War paranoia was just too much in people’s minds at the time, but for whatever reason the father of the football player got suspicious and called the FBI, who, with uncharacteristic wisdom, called their betters at the CIA, who in turn arranged for “Wallace” to have a meeting with a supposed co-worker of the boy’s father (really a CIA agent) allegedly in research and development in an aeronautics factory, a man whom Wallace was gradually led to believe was in need of financial help.

Wallace/Lyonov in effect said, “Hey, I can help you out, I know a friend in New York whose competing company would pay big for certain industrial documents you could get him….”

So it was the CIA nabbed Sergei Lyonov trying to hand over $5,000 to an agent posing as this industrial scientist. Yet when busted, Lyonov laughed and said, “Well it was a good run.” Then he asked to see a representative of the Soviet ambassador, Gregori Zarubin, but was taken to a dentition site in Maryland instead.

Daisy asked, “What happened then?”

“He was held in great luxury in US custody for several months, til he was traded back to his own people, and the Soviets took charming young Sergei Lyonov home, interrogated him, then put a bullet behind his ear, figuring if he lived so well in US custody, he must have been cooperating.”

I let that sink in and told her, “Spying is not a good life, Diz. Get in once and you’re never safe.”

Then we bought each other clay necklaces with little donkeys and elephants on them and called it a day.

15th September 2015.

The guildmeet we'd hosted at our house had finished and the last of our guests had went home the day before. Kristi hadn't felt any movement that day so we made an appointment at the hospital and went in for a scan. We'd passed the 6-month point and I'd stopped worrying quite as much feeling that we were fine, we were on the home stretch. When the doctor told us it was the worst news possible I couldn't grasp what he was saying for a minute or two. I'd let a friend go with Kristi to an ultrasound in my place so they could see the baby. Just the previous week I'd got to hear her heartbeat and it had been like a racehorse galloping along.

How could something that strong just stop?

I listened as they told us that we'd need to go home and come back on Wednesday. They'd give Kristi a pill and that would start things off and we'd have to then return on Friday for her to give birth.

As we left the hospital we were both still in denial. I said to Kristi that I knew neither of us felt like eating, but that we had to and I promised that if she had some food I'd eat too. I think we stopped at the Ca'dora. When we got home I phoned around the family, starting with my mum and Kristi's to give them the bad news. Lori hadn't answered her phone, but I managed to get ahold of Marc and he passed the bad news on, then I went across the street to where one of my bosses lived to let him know what had happened and request more time off work.

I do not recall what we did for the rest of that day, but that morning is seared into my memory.

September 16, 1999 From a conversation with Dana the day after Tyler was born:

Me: “Now that you’ve got two children with him, maybe you should finally marry Darrell.”

Dana: “Hey, did I give you advice about your relationship with your statutory rapist boyfriend in high school?”

Me: “Yeah, actually you did that constantly.”

Dana: “…..well that’s not how I remember it.”

Funny.  It’d be another six years and three more children before they tied the knot.

 and that is the best news i've gotten for far too long!  :cheers:

17th September 2017.

Was a rough night last night but eventually we both got at least some sleep. We woke up early this morning and went for a walk along the beach. It was just something I really felt a need to do. Whenever either of us felt the need to cry, we just stopped and held each other. Walked back down the beach watching the sun rise over Lossiemouth.

As we walked along the beach there was a low moaning sound as the wind blew over the sands. I've spent the vast majority of my life living beside the coast, but never before or since have I ever heard it make that mournful noise.

September 17:

1980: Though I don’t remember it, according to my baby book I got some sort of shot at the pediatrician’s that left me with a burning fever for the next two days, and the injection site on my thigh swelled up like a hornet sting to the point my young parents called my grandma, who said to take me to the ER, where I stayed overnight.

1997: I paid $16.00 at a place to get two inches cut off the back of my hair but when I asked to keep the hair the stylist wouldn’t let me, and asked what I wanted it for, and for lack of a better explanation, I said I needed the hair for rituals, that it was a Satanist thing. For some reason she acted weird toward me after that.

2016: The morning rain dissipated and the forecast afternoon rain did not appear, so my friend Gina and her two girls and her husband Martin met us downtown for our local Oktoberfest, the largest in the United States, and while there my goddaughter Courtney won an under-ten chicken dance. Fun day!

September 18:

1985: After my mother delivered a cautionary tale about stranger-danger, I asked, “What if I just take the stranger’s candy but don’t go with him?”

1991: Our study hall teacher could never make it an hour without a smoke break, so we could count on five unsupervised minutes per class, and this day a smartass boy named Brad sang a merciless song about a pimple on a girl named Marcie’s chin, so she hit him in the face.

1992: I was playing basketball with my dad when a police car stopped in front of our house and my dad demanded, “OK, what have you done now, Malevelyn?” Not the first time he’d combine ‘malevolent’ and my first name in that goofy way.

1993: Dana invited me up for the weekend at her college and said I could either sleep on the couch or in her double bed with her, then added, “That’s my lucky orgasm bed, because I’ve had the best sex of my life in it.” Couch it was!

1994: In health class they serially assigned us a robot baby to take home and babysit over the semester. It cried at random and you had to punch in codes to shut it up, and that weekend it was my turn, but while playing frisbee with my neighbor, Mark, I dropped the robot baby, causing it simulated death. It was the only F that I remember getting.

1995: Complained to Brian about my mom that night, and he asked, “If you knew she was going to die tomorrow, what would you say to her?” I went, “Brian, moot point, it is tomorrow over there, so she’d already be dead.”

2002: Finished reading The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson, in which the Black Death wipes out Europe, and for the next seven-hundred years China and Islam are the last two global forces standing. It’s a book you might like.

2017: I dreamed I was conversing with a well-dressed stalk of six-foot-tall celery, which told me, “I am celebrity celery, madam.”

2021: While in a Target store with his mom, for no apparent reason but his weird sense of humor, my cousin-in-law Lindsey’s preschool age son Sammy started yelling, “Help me! Call 911!” The police came, and it didn’t help that he was adopted and looked nothing like Lindsey at all.

2022: Saw Hamilton onstage for the third time in as many years. Ah, yes, Founding Fathers rapping about deflowering Colonial girls in New York never gets old.

2023: Didn't sleep, lot on my mind, but looking outt he window I saw six deer on the lawn in the night.

September 19, 2006 I have my limits when it comes to defying omens.

I was supposed to hear Joyce Carol Oates, once my favorite author, lecture at Wilmington College, but before I went to bed Gina told me she had a dream that a deer ran in front of my car and I wrecked in the darkness and died.

Then in the morning Mom called me at lunch to tell me she dreamed I drove my car off the road at night.

I said to her, “Is this a joke you guys have put together on me?”

She said she didn’t know what I meant, so I told her about the other dream and she completely freaked out!

I was still processing all this when Dana called and mentioned seven-year-old Tyler woke up scared after dreaming that I was in a car wreck!!! 

Three dreams about me wrecking? I decided I’d catch Joyce Carol Oates another time.

September 20:

1993: Got griped at by my principal because I---gasp!---cleaned up a broken locker mirror instead of having a custodian do it. Then I got griped at for having a mirror at all. The joys of Catholic school.

1996: Sure I was pro-Clinton, but I still went around telling people it was cruel to make fun of Bob Dole for falling off a stage.

2000: I think I may have coined the word “beautifuk.”

2003: While visiting my twenty-six-year-old Aunt Sarah in Atlanta, she took me to this big club called The Gold Coast, which I did not like.

2016: With Landon to the Playhouse in the Park to see a stage performance of A Prayer for Owen Meany.

2019: My dog Chocolate died at age thirteen. I will always love her and I will always miss her.

2020: Someone asked me why I hated Mountain Dew so much, and I said, “Because it tastes like the ‘90s, while I’m stuck in the ‘20s.”

2022: Took my home-schooled son on a field trip to the Toyota plant in Georgetown, Kentucky, then walked around in a 19th century Irish cemetery near Frankfort and did some wax and charcoal tombstone rubbings. I loved it, he was unimpressed.

2023: Wore raccoon eye makeup at breakfast to see what my kids would say.

September 21, 2022 Because my father in law, believed terminally ill with a slow form of cancer, told me he didn’t want to burden his wife with the task, and claimed his son was “never any good with death” (a thing I knew to be true, actually) he asked me if I would make his funeral arrangements.

I’m not that great with death and dying either, despite more familiarity with it than I’d ever have wished, but because he asked, I said I would, so I met with the relevant individual and went over what my father in law said he would like.

The funeral director was the kind of person who hid shyness behind formality, and he struck me as one better adjusted to spending time with men, perhaps because in his professional experience females presented tiresome displays of emotion when around him, but he was perfectly polite and I thanked him for all his help in fulfilling the requests I’d brought with me. It was not an enjoyable task, and if ever I sought confirmation that I would not be a good funeral director, that day I got it.

As I drove home alone I thought of how it’s said funerals are for the living, but if my wishes were in any way to factor into what became of me one day, I’d rather not have one.

Seriously, I thought, throw me in a hole on our overlook, cover me with dirt and there I’d peacefully lie not wishing “couch more magnificent” because my God I did not want people staring down at me while I lay trapped in a box.

Truthfully I thought if I were dying I’d possibly do my best to go off somewhere and never be found, and decided as I drove home I’d rather have that than any funeral. What an unpleasant day that was….

21st September 2010.

I was tasked with supervising a couple of juniors while they emptied out residual fuel from a jet. We went out and put a FOD bin (a metal trash can) underneath while we opened up the bottom of the fuel tank with a small opening. Someone had to reach up and keep the opening well open and I'd been ordered to let the two juniors do it. The avtur dribbled out in a steady stream, but some of it would run down the guy's arms, so after the job was done they'd need to go home, get showered and changed into fresh clothes. Trouble was a couple of hours later we were still draining the tank and one of the juniors told me he was starting to get a burning sensation in his armpits. I said this was more than just residual (the bin was almost full), and I ordered him to stop doing the job and go have a shower immediately. I then went to let our sergeant (Albert) know what was happening. When I got back I found the same guy still draining fuel. One of the other corporals told me the lad had said he wanted to finish the job. Immediately I was p**sed off about him countermanding my order. I told him to stop and go get cleaned up right away and stop being stupid. After I kicked him out of the hanger I then had a word with the Cpl about interfering in my job and reminded him that we had a duty of care to our subordinates.

Even though I hadn't been in direct contact with the fuel, my clothes still stank of it, not to mention my skin. That stuff gets into your pores. It would take 3 days of washing before I would get rid of it, but at least it wasn't desiccated pig urine (used for clearing snow and ice from runways).

September 22, 2017 Tyler texted me that unrelated to anything to do with him, the first and to that point only girl he’d had sex with slit her throat that day. Later he’d tell me he’d gotten incorrect news and “slit her throat” was more like “cut the side of her neck” but it was intentional and still a majorly messed-up act on her part, done in the midst of her getting hysterical while fighting with several female friends in a car who were trying to calm her down, and who drove her to a hospital while she was bleeding through the wad of tissues they gave her to hold against her gashed skin. She required a transfusion and was placed in a psychiatric unit, though recovered without brain damage, but she was a truly unbalanced girl for that and many reasons. (Including wanting to lose her virginity to a gay guy.)

September 23, 1994 It was day one of the best three-day weekend of my teen years.

Dana picked me up that evening to spend the night with her, and when we got to her college town an hour away, we walked right into a party, and had to get past a wall of frat boys, whom Dana said were sketchy so don’t make eye contact. It’s funny now but The X-Files was such a big new thing that it was being watched right in the middle of this multi-apartment Dionysian revel.
 
A couple hours later we got into Dana’s Nissan and drove down to see her friend Scott, whom I instantly liked, and after we settled into the blessed silence at his place, Dana said to him, “I been promising my cousin for years I’d get her stoned, and it seems like a good night.”

I declined, though she and Scott definitely didn’t, and I was soon feeling the ambient effects for the second time in a month, because Scott went from seeming a little funny to coming across as downright hilarious, and I thought, my gosh, Dee has actually gotten me stoned after all. (But in the same vein of logic some Catholic girls have long applied to matters sexual, I told myself it didn’t count.)

Scott teased me about laughing so much, and I said sorry, I had a problem with laughing unintentionally at the wrong times, and he said, “Then I pray to God you never give a blowjob, hon.” Which set me off laughing even harder.

I was figuring out that Scott was probably gay, but I didn’t find out til later that there was more to that equation than gay alone. He microwaved us a frozen appetizer platter he stole from a Friday’s where he worked as a server, and fixed us tropical punch, and left the bottle of rum on the table, and Dana got toasted and Scott was pretty giggly drunk too on top of the joint they’d split. He showed me he waxed his legs and even his arms, and I asked, “Are you like a cyclist or a swimmer or something?”

He laughed and Dana goes, “Tell her.”

Turned out Scott was a drag performer! Wow, coming from my suburban world it was like meeting an eskimo, or a cowboy, or a Republican college professor, something you’d heard of but hadn’t verified actually existed.

Scott told me about his ardent love for Mariah Carey and sang along to every song that came up on her CD, and showed me pictures of himself in drag, and he truly did make an attractive woman, not the campy sort, but realistic.

Dana announced we were sleeping there because she’d had a huge fight with her flatmates and I told her I thought that sucked because one of them had beautiful king snakes in a terrarium, and I’d looked forward to seeing them. She told me to buy myself one, and I said my mom wouldn’t let me, to which Dana said, “Tell her Saint Patrick miracled it to your room.”

Scott was asleep in minutes but Dana and I laid on the foldout bed in his living room for what must have been half an hour, talking. In this dreamy, sleepy, intoxicated tone she told me when I was eighteen and she was twenty-two she’d take me around the Caribbean and we’d get drinks bought for us by dark men and British ex-pats. She held up her hand and so palm-to palm we swore we would.

She fell asleep, I didn’t yet, the pull-out mattress was too thin and in her sleep Dana kept rolling on me to the point I was going to sleep on the floor til I saw waterbugs scooting across it in the dark. (It wasn’t a very nice place, tell the truth.) I did pass out, kind of, but it wasn’t a sleep that was in danger of winning any awards.

And we never did cruise the Caribbean and get bought drinks by British ex-pats, and dark-skinned men.

24th September 2012.

I went to empty the bins, but it was raining incredibly heavily so I decided to stay warm and dry instead.

Wow, I guess that was a slow news day then.

September 24, 1994 On morning two of the best three-day weekend of my teen years, I was worn out when I got up at Scott’s place, and had to push Dana away on the fold-out in order to climb over her, and she said, “Quit trying to cop a feel and go back to sleep, will you?” But I stayed up, and canceled my participation in a tennis tournament that morning, in no fit state on half a night’s bad sleep.

Dana finally got up and asked me to help her get her stuff from where she’d been living, so we met her friend Rick, who helped us haul it to his attic, which he didn’t officially own, it was shared storage space with the three other apartments in the building.

She told me she was going to rent a “bungalow” up the highway she saw was on the market, and to that end I went with her to a payphone at a Shell station and drank a Mountain Dew as she called her mom, my Aunt Jude, and while she rocked on the heels of her silver boots (which she wore because she said they’d get stolen in Rick’s attic) she conned AJ out of a deposit, then called her dad, my Uncle Lark, and conned him out of a bigger deposit, a pretty shameless move, hitting up both parents like that. They were divorced but they did talk to one another.

We went and got the money her dad had wired her, and out of the blue, showing her generous side, she put two hundred dollars in my hand and said it was good to have emergency funds. Then she took me home and dropped me off at an empty house that wasn’t supposed to be empty, and peeled away. My dog Charlotte Sometimes wagged like a propeller to see me, and I looked to find out if my parents left a note, which they didn’t, and checked to see if there were calls on the answering machine, which there weren’t.

It was slightly unnerving.

By nightfall I was really starting to wonder what was going on, if my parents had thought maybe I was spending that night with Dana too. I resisted nascent paranoia that wanted me to imagine them wrecked in a ditch somewhere. At eleven o’clock I made sure every door was locked and took Charlotte Sometimes up to my room and went to bed, facing my first night alone in my entire life.

I couldn’t have imagined what was coming on the morrow.

September 25, 1994 The greatest Sunday of my life followed my spooky night all alone when my dad called right after I was awake and sounded upbeat and said he was surprised I was home already. When I told him I came back yesterday and had been home alone ever since, there was a pause and I could hear embarrassment in his voice when he said he was under the impression I was staying with Dana til today. (I knew it!) I said no, home alone like Macaulay Culkin since yesterday afternoon, but laughed and said it was all good.
 
He said he and Mom had been alone on his co-worker, Mr. Webb’s, houseboat since Friday morning and they were stopped at a little town near Markland Dam in western Kentucky, and wouldn’t be able to get back til that night.
 
It was like the light of divine inspiration fell upon me and I said cool, OK, I’ll be here, see you then, and got the heck off that phone, changed plans, and called Brian and said, “Come pick me up fast before my dad sends my grandma or my Aunt Christie over here!”

So he came right over and we had the best day, totally unplanned-out, and drove thirty miles over to the west side of town where we knew no one and no one knew us, and found this fall festival and rode almost everything, even a cage they closed you into and you rocked until you went over the top of the bars it hung from, and I ended up winning HIM this six foot stuffed python which he was trying to win for me, and we finally gave it to some kids who liked it, and we watched this guy take a blow torch and heat old soft drink bottles until he could twist them and tie them into bow ties and hearts and then when they were cool he filled them with colored water, put in a cork in the top and sold them. People were buying them as fast as he could make them. They also had a rummage sale going on, and this old man had a table of books, mostly paperbacks and nothing special, but he had some old magazines, and Brian saw a National Geographic from 1977 that was all about Celts in Europe, and got that for me.

There was also a copy of Wuthering Heights there and Bran said someday he was going to write a thesis about the Bronte sisters being “sexually repressed nympho virgins.” I told him good idea, I’m sure the feminist professors in his program would love that.

We went to Western Hills Shopping Center, which he called the beating heart of the West Side (“Where we East Enders fear to tread.”) and the West Side was actually different somehow. It was like East and West Berlin, not in terms of one being poor or restricted, but just very different in its atmosphere and culture.

Then Brian said, “I haven’t bought you anything yet.”

Well, the year before he had given me a pretty ring I felt a little bad about never wearing because it reminded me for so long of a sad goodbyes, but that day he took me into a jewelry store in the shopping center and bought me a bracelet, which he had engraved with a sentiment that….still means a lot to me.

We ended up going to a park that had a hill so high you could see three states from the top, and sat up there watching riverboats, and it was nice to be there with him so high above the ground that we looked down at hawks gliding below. I said I’d never forget that day and he said that made him glad.

And I’ve also never forgotten how sad I felt after all that happiness when the day got old and I knew I had to go back no matter how much yet again I wanted everything to go on and on. Brian said, “Come on, there’ll be more days. Maybe soon.”

But I wasn’t sure, and even now I’m not sure there ever quite was.

I think the gods smiled on us, though, because I got home twenty minutes before Mom and Dad did, and I didn’t tell them about my day, it wasn’t theirs, they didn’t need to know about three eventful days I knew even then represented the best weekend of my life.

September 26, 1987 I went to the Columbus Zoo with my grandparents to see the bear habitat they just opened, and on the way up my grandpa told me that when he was a teenager volunteering at Union Terminal downtown during World War Two, he was told by an old woman there that in the 1890s there was a traveling showman who went from town to town with a wagon full of oddities he charged people to see, and one of the things he had was a live cobra. The woman told my grandpa that one day the cobra got loose and slithered into the underbrush in a west side neighborhood called Price Hill, and that though men went out that day with dogs and guns to find the cobra, they never located it, so for many years afterwards people were leery of going into the woods in that area, because no one was sure if the cobra might’ve somehow survived the winter and was still around. She said eventually people forgot about it but when she was a kid it was a huge deal.

Imagine if it had been a pregnant female….

September 27, 1994 Grandpa got me from school and we pulled up his tomato plants from the garden and hung them in Grandma’s greenhouse to see if the last of them on the vine might ripen in there. He asked how Dana was getting on in her “bungalow” outside the college town, and I said she told me she loved having personal space. I said, “But I’m not sure she can afford it.”

To which Grandpa said, “Her mommy and daddy can.” Which showed me he was clued in to who was really funding Dana’s much heralded independence.

I had a funny thought I’d had before, that Grandpa had known Dana before me and had had days with her that I wasn’t around for, and I didn’t care if Dana said I was his favorite of all five of us, it was strange to be youngest and know others got to be with him before I existed.

I stayed for dinner; he made corncakes which he said were what you make on shovels when hunting in the snow.

Mom got me that evening and my mood went south because as much as I loved her, increasingly it was like she was just ….not there. Her personality was ‘in retreat,’ a school psychologist named Dr. Nora had told me, and I was aware that anymore I spent half my time either mad at her or trying to cheer her up, and it was getting harder to remember the mom she used to be. Where my Dad said she was “otherworldly,” I was starting to think that she had something wrong with her mental health.

When we got home it was just her and me and she didn’t say anything to me except, “Do your homework and eat something.” Then she went up and closed her bedroom door and I didn’t see her again that day.

So I did my homework and later brushed my teeth, knocked on her door and told her goodnight, and she didn’t say anything, so I went on to my room and called Brian and talked til I got sleepy, mostly telling him about how my mother had been behaving for a while, and he said to remember mental breakdowns were just another type of illness and I should talk to my dad about getting her help.
 
I asked if he thought she was losing track of reality, and he said, “I remember when you were in seventh grade and she picked you up after school she sure didn’t seem to understand the concept of time, and always left you standing there waiting every day.” (Which had been how he and I had met; even though he was a senior with a car, he’d stand with me so I didn’t have to wait alone.)

I asked if he’d talk to me til I fell asleep, which he did, and I woke up later in the night to a dead line, the phone still in my hand.

I looked down the hall and the light was on in my parents’ room, where my mom was alone.

I don’t know if I grasped it yet but the end was coming to life as it had always been.

September 28, 1994 As PIL’s Rise played on 97X on the way to my school “Saint Fascist of Assbeating” I tried to talk to my mom, but she was like, “Everything’s fine.” By this time even self-centered teenaged me knew that wasn’t true.

So I was not in an untroubled frame of mind walking into school, I was worried and frustrated, and there standing in my way at my locker was a belligerent girl named Andrea, who was rich and ugly and queen bee of her world and liked giving other people a hard time. With her were some of her sycophantic bought-and-paid-for friends whom everyone called “the b***h Posse.” Andrea was blocking me on purpose and normally I’d just let her be that way but my frustrations about Mom created a Celtic moment, so I set my books down and walked over to her, seriously p**sed off.

The only physical confrontation I’d ever had was been with my cousin Mags when I was seven, but as I’d eventually also discover about sex, there are times when instinct takes over, and I felt a cold rage grab hold of me. I was two inches taller than Andrea and in much better shape, but she was a beefy girl who had at least twenty pounds on me. I was betting she was a bully, not a fighter, so I heard myself say, “How’d you like your nose broken?”

Andrea was not ready. She got this look like…somebody’s challenging me?

It felt very good to be in her face after putting up with her bulls**t for years, so I shoved her hard and was surprised when she actually hit the floor. She got right up, but instead of coming at me she hurried away, crying, leaving me standing there with an unfulfilled desire to smash my fist into her face, which I have no doubt I was about to do.

Rapidly I came back down from my berserk state, hands trembling, and thought, well, that’s it, after years of being one of the good kids, I’m in trouble now.

I walked in homeroom and didn’t even put my stuff away because I figured I’d be going home for the day, and sure enough on the intercom, “Come to the office…”

I think the principal probably did a double take hearing my name associated with trouble when Andrea ran down crying like a whale. To me he was like, “With zero tolerance on school violence this year I could expel you for this.”

Since a boy forty-five minutes south of us named Clay Shrout had shot his family and held his class at Ryle High School at gunpoint, school administration been strict about being on top of any violence, and I sat there thinking about getting sent to public school after they kicked me out, with less homework, a new reputation, no more daily chapel…and I realized it sounded pretty good, honestly.

In the end I wound up with two days of After School Assignment, which was supposed to begin the next afternoon but Jeff, my program advisor, protested that he needed me for the Archdiocesan AP evaluations, which proved to me I was valuable and the school would not have kicked me out over one incident no matter what the principal claimed.

The worst that arose was listening to a stressed-out Jeff emote that I had damaged my permanent record and endangered my chances of getting into the best college, the holy grail of his life. When I showed no remorse he guided me down the hall to see the counselor, who acted shocked out of all proportion and asked if everything was all right at home.

I remembered what Mom had told me an hour earlier and repeated it to her: “Everything’s fine.”

It was a comforting lie.

September 29, 2001 Sometimes my dad’s spirit of adventure shows where I got mine. I was home that day and he proposed we go out to the country and find a pocket knife he lost camping as a kid, so off we went.

What had been an open field in the 1960s was by the turn of the century a veritable jungle of undergrowth and small trees and it was hard to see the ground, let alone to move a metal detector., so we soon called it an adventure, gave up, and the knife will likely remain lost til some future someone finds it as an artifact.

Driving back we stopped at a Big Boy chain called Frisch’s, and while we waited Dad told me in a matter of fact way that the US was about ten days away from invading Afghanistan.

I told him it was almost like some script was being written in a back room, and all the rest of us were being pulled along.

He just shrugged.

September 30:

1986: My neighbor Michelle spent the night and we watched ABC’s lineup, Who’s the Boss, Growing Pains, and even Moonlighting. When I think of ‘80s TV, I remember that night.

1994: Because of shoving Andrea at school, my parents told me I had to stay home while they went to a classic rock laser show at the planetarium.

1995: For the first time I found out two people being furiously angry can transform into a torrid sexual encounter.

2006: On a nice fall night I invited people over for a bonfire in the woods, and Landon’s Leningrad-born friend Andrei told stories about living in the USSR. Later he would prove a letch but at the time I still liked him.

2016: My cousin Celia asked if I would be her son Derrick’s godmother. I did but have not set eyes on that child in years.

2020: Finished Ken Follett’s “historical” novel The Evening and the Morning filled with modern people dressed in Medieval clothes, espousing 21st century ideals. (For better Medieval characters, read the great Zoe Oldenbourg.)

2021: My daughter and I watched John Iffort become the eleventh bishop of Covington, Kentucky.

2022: Had coconut shrimp at a Saigon-themed fusion bistro, figuring if I was going to eat something’s one-time baby, I might as well make it a species that probably had no views on spending its afterlife in a spicy cream sauce; then saw Murder on the Orient Express on stage.

October 1:

1989 My neighbor gave me $5.00 for cleaning her yard, and (blah) I put it in a church poor box.

1994: In my last great day on the tennis courts, I played three grueling matches and won in straight sets. Three weeks later it would all end.

1995: Asked a lawyer if I could get CO status and not have to go to Mass at school. He said no.

2000: 102 fever, coughing, bronchitis, and my employer told me to report-in anyway. The germs I spread are probably still circling the planet.

2003: Invited to share a freaky personal incident, I told of seeing Jerry Rubin just before his death. (He was in town promoting an energy drink called Go!)

2005: Writing my autobiography in poems, I stalled recounting my teens because I couldn’t find a rhyme for “debauched.”

2007: Went to a three-program lecture on Van Gough.

2008: Eight months pregnant I went to see Alanis Morissette. Came back tired and leaned against Landon while he read me a Michael Swanwick story.

2016: Owing to work, I had to miss hearing Doris Kearns Goodwin lecture downtown.

2020: Saw a double rainbow.

2022: Because it was his birthday, I called a boy I knew in college named Greg and told him: “I think I liked the person I was when I was around you more than I liked any aspect of myself at the time. I think you brought out good things in me.”  He said me telling him that was probably the best present he’d get for his birthday. Guess his family were stingy with gifts, huh?

October 2, 1995 I drove my friend Gina and me to a megamall (now abandoned) north of the city, where we roamed a while and played indoor miniature golf, and whenever boys would talk to us, Gina would kind of melt and flee, being a supernova of shyness. 

Normally I’d support her being the way she was, but that day after she retreated from yet another boy, I grabbed her arm and dragged her to a wall of mirrored tiles outside an elevator and told her to look at herself. She was beautiful. If the year before people had said skater Nancy Kerrigan looked like Snow White, Gina looked like Snow White’s more beautiful sister. I told her she had great hair, perfect skin, a cute face, a nice body (she almost slapped me when I told her that, it embarrassed her so much) and told her she was fine to be however she chose to be, but she should also know about a million guys would leap at the chance to be in her life.

I told her all that and she squirmed and recoiled and blushed, but inside I also knew it was likely best she kept being bashful because I also intuited that she was the sort who’d get mixed up with exactly the wrong sort of guy. (Which is exactly what did happen when she finally got close to one a decade on, my dear friend who stayed a virgin for so long.)

October 3, 1995 OJ Simpson, clearly bloodstained as Cromwell, was actually found not guilty on this day, and we were allowed to watch the verdict being read live. The jury had come back mere minutes after beginning deliberations, and when their quick return was announced at school, my teacher observed, “Now there’s a jury that’s been sequestered for a year wanting to go the hell home.” I for one was shocked OJ walked on a double murder rap, but maybe even more shocked to hear our Eagle Scout teacher say “hell.”

3rd October 2012.

We were having a week-long visit to Disneyland, the first of what would be many visits with Kristi's family. My favourite picture of all of our visits was taken this day. I am walking along holding my nephew's hand with the pair of us wearing mouse ears. The shot was taken from behind. I also surprised my sister-in-law by simply sitting on her when I couldn't find somewhere to sit down. The park was all decorated for Halloween and this would quickly come to be my favourite time to visit. I still have the shorts and tee-shirt I was wearing that day.

Then again, I have a lot of tee-shirts.

(https://i.imgur.com/WhQbORq.jpg)

(https://i.imgur.com/kUL1vX5.jpg)

October 4, 2022 I found out a man I knew named Cal died in Miami at the unlikely age of eighty-six. Cal would tell you stories if you bought him a bottle of something, and you were never sure whether he was exaggerating or lying outright, though it was a fact that at least some of his accounts were true, because he had ways of verifying them. Likely his stories were part of the great narrative tradition of what David Sedaris accurately terms “real-ish.”

Cal had pictures of his younger self with various noteworthy people, like Ernest Hemingway, and Elmore Leonard, and John F. Kennedy, Burt Reynolds, and Miami mob boss Santo Trafficante, and had anecdotes about them and many others. The thing was Cal worked for the CIA (he really did) in an era when the Cold War kept things Wild West crazy, and claimed he came close to killing Castro in a hit involving potent heroin and a cute young boy Castro liked to take to a hideaway high in the Sierra del Rosario. (“I promised President Johnson Castro’s cock,” Cal told me, and I thought Cal, you should have said you promised LBJ Castro’s Johnson.)

Another of his stories was about saving a female asset from KGB hitmen in Bogotá where the CIA hid her after she’d poisoned a Soviet general in Prague, and how he and the woman laid on the floor behind a statue in a church for a day and a half, barely moving, dying of thirst in 100-degree heat, til they could get out. Rather less glamorously he told me he wasn’t able to pee the entire time and wound up with a bladder infection that required two weeks of antibiotics to cure.

He had stories about operations that would never fly today, like recruiting a Hungarian asset who agreed to put a teddy bear wired for sound in his home, and then after Cal learned the man betrayed him, switching it out for one wired with explosives.

He had stories of beating up crooked cops in Latin America, and putting venomous snakes in a truck belonging to a Panamanian police captain, and of paying prostitutes to let themselves be infected with “VD” so they’d pass it to “the bad guys,” of storing explosives in the trunk of his Lincoln Continental for weeks til they were needed on a boat heading to Cuba, and of him having sex with “a KGB call girl” and not telling her til afterward he was onto her, and of eavesdropping on NASA big wigs to see who among them were selling the USSR secrets about our space program. (His answer: lots of them.)

He said: “It is completely bulls**t that people say we never went to the moon, because I know we did multiple times.”

He had stories and stories and stories, saying the KGB tried six times to kill him, and of how well he got along with the Miami mob, who were at war with the FBI but in bed with the CIA out of a mutual hatred for Castro, who’d cost them a fortune by running them out of Havana. Cal was both a legend and a slightly humored old-timer that none of us ever quite caught in lies but sometimes suspected he was as deft a raconteur as his novelist friend Elmore Leonard: whom Cal hinted “may” have based books on stories Cal told him.

In any case Cal was an original, a fun old guy, and whatever else he was, one of the best storytellers I have ever known.

October 5, 1995 Pope John Paul II was visiting the US, talk of which dominated that day’s chapel in school, so in theology class I asked what was the difference in Soviet schools having pictures of Lenin all over, and us having pictures of the Pope in every classroom. Wasn’t that just a matter of ideological differences in the same cult of personality? Without quite explaining what the difference was, the teacher, who to his credit encouraged free expression, strongly disagreed.

I went to a costume fitting after school to see if the frontier dress, circa 1840, I was supposed to wear was the right size so I could act as an interpreter at a big event on the city’s riverfront called Tall Stacks, which saw dozens of historic steamboats come to the public landing amid a days-long festival that was held about twice a decade. It did fit and I would go on to have a good time milling through the event playing the role of a girl from past times resisting all efforts, both cordial and luridly salacious, to make me break character.

October 6:

1990: When the director of downtown’s Contemporary Arts Center was acquitted on obscenity charges in the Mapplethorpe case, some friends of my aunt’s threw a party, where I got to help out.

1992: I asked my grandpa about his and my father’s relationship issues, and he said, “If I had to raise your dad again I’d recognize he had his own path to walk, and not have tried to make him change roads.” He also said he was proud of my dad, and I wondered if he’d ever told him so.

1994: Endured witnessing a presentation by the National Honor Society, which made me determined I would never accept any invitation they ever issued to me.

1997: Was in a group that night on the banks of the canal that inspired parts of IT, while a bottle of Southern Comfort got passed around, and I took a sip, which zoomed unpleasantly to my head and made me decline seconds. I am just not a drinker.

1999: At a distance my friends Lisa and Amy made fun of an overweight boy on our campus, and I walked away from them, leaving them to scamper after me asking what was the harm if he couldn’t hear them? I later showed them the undertaker scene in Gilbert Grape and said, “That’s what you two reminded me of.”

2007: Landon and I saw an exhibit of Roman decorations at the Dayton Art Institute, and it was nice how it focused on both religious art and everyday items.

2017: I asked Clare’s father, who claimed his battles with addiction involved confronting literal demons, if he ever felt his late son’s presence, and after pausing a long moment, he rather sadly said no.

2018: I finished Democracy in America, which I began reading in 1997.

2020: After passing through a multitude of on-site health screenings, I took my family to a big aquarium south of the city, open again during Covid.

2021: Woke up to the happy news that a biopsy revealed my friend Mandy did not have cancer.

October 7, 2004 In her Connacht lilt my grandmother used to say there were two beings always ready to listen to you day or night: God and the devil. I recalled her saying that late on this night when I decided there was no one else who would understand something I was going through, so I called the last person I’d have ever thought I’d reach out to, the closest thing to the devil I personally knew, but someone I felt I could trust all the same, and I took him completely by surprise as I poured the state of my life out to him with a searing degree of self-effacing candor. It was a humbling, self-shocking act, but I felt better afterward as I somehow knew I would. I used to think if there was a Hell he’d be the person I’d be there with, or else there was no irony in the afterlife, since some things were so terrible you could only think you deserved Hell for your role in them. Sometimes I still think that.

07 Oct 2019.

After rushing down to Ayrshire following the bad news the night before, I went to see my mum in hospital. She got moved out of the high dependency ward and onto a regular one, if only for a short while. Luckily the aneurism had been treated early enough. The doctors found something was leaking inside though and had to move her back in while they redirected the fluids to somewhere harmless. She was able to sit up in a chair and talk to us, although she wouldn't remember this the next day.

8th October 2013.

I had the house to myself for a few days. I'd bought tickets for myself and Kristi to go an see Danny Elfman perform his movie soundtracks live, but I couldn't get time off work to go attend. My little sister got my ticket instead. I made use of my free time when I wasn't as work with recording myself as having three choices:


I do not recall what I actually did those days. I do remember what happened tomorrow morning though very vividly.

October 8, 1989 My grandparents flew my cousin Jared and me to Sea World for a weekend trip. We left Friday evening and got back on Sunday. Jared was terrified of sharks, and I kept offering him various things if he’d stand with his face against the aquarium glass while the sharks swam past. He’d try then leap back, freaked out. In the hotel where we stayed a family from Amsterdam were in the room directly under us, and all had the same bright red cheeks, and never stopped grinning. When I went back to school the next day, Monday the 9th, and told about my weekend, a few kids there didn’t believe me, because they said who ever heard of going to Florida for two days?

On this day I am smoking a bowl and drinking Irish tea!
It will be history later on today!

October 9, 2006 My dad’s fiftieth birthday had been marked by a nice occasion, and I was home alone cleaning up afterward, feeling tired but happy, though maybe too much energy had been invested, because without warning something I’d said to him that evening---

“To the next fifty years!”

---came back to overwhelm me to the point I actually slid down the wall and sat down on the floor.

There almost certainly was not going to be another fifty years, and time had rushed past so fast.

I folded up on myself, glad no one saw me like that, feeling helpless in the knowledge that there was nothing I could do against the force of time, that it would take my father one day, take everyone I loved, take me as well, we fragile little beings who somehow seized joyous moments in the face of that certainty.

I sat there wondering if everyone had overpowering moments of realization like that, or if it was unique to me that it could hit me so strongly. I cried so hard that even the next day my head ached and my eyes stayed red, like symptoms of a hangover from weeping, and when I confessed all this to my friend in Austin, he whom I call “Hugh” because it’s an inside joke, he said my response was a realization of being caught in the horror of samsara, and that grasping the ephemeral nature of life was a sign of enlightenment.

“Then may I remain happy and ignorant,” I said back.

“Then I suggest you start a hobby of hard drinking.”

9th October 2013.

I was awoken at around 3 or 4 am by someone pressing our door bell and keeping their finger on it. I jumped up out of bed, stark bollock naked assuming that something like the house was on fire was happening and I didn't have time for clothes. When I got to the front door there was a young guy standing there who proceeded to tell me that he'd missed his last bus home, didn't have the money for a taxi and it was my job to sort out his problems for him.

The f**k it was.

I spent a few minutes arguing with him before just shutting the door in his face. He then proceeded to go around the house trying the various doors to see if I'd left anything unlocked. At this point I went outside and punched him out. I was so glad Kristi was away that night as I hate to think how she'd have reacted.

October 10, 2021 On this Sunday afternoon I unexpectedly found myself offered a very good employment opportunity in the Republic of Ireland, to begin after I left my then-current job. I don’t believe I considered it deeply but it was….flattering? My mom had been pushing us for some time to come over long-term and kept sending pictures of nice little houses for sale: not to me, but with more strategic deftness than I credited her with having, to Daisy, who absolutely wanted to go, and who could persuade her adoring dad to do almost anything, so two votes right there. It could have been sweet to live there for a time, be near Mom, let my children have the experience of another country, mudlark the Corrib, metal detect the hills, feel the power of the lonely burrens, but it would not have been the right decision, we didn’t go, and I haven’t regretted it.

October 11, 2016 Trying to come up with something fun for them to do while I was out that evening, my husband took our children, then aged seven, five, and four, to a presentation about UFOs at the library, then after that he showed them some alien abduction videos on YouTube, something I would have reallllly warned him against doing had I known, so that by the time I came home the children were freaked out to the point that seven-year-old Daisy left her bedroom light on all night and brought our dog Chocolate up to sleep with her; I stayed in with five-year-old Keagan til he nodded off; and four year old Trinity came to sleep in our bed.

Even with me in his room with him I had an almost impossible time of getting Keagan to relax, and he kept whimpering, “The UFOs are gonna get us! They watch people from the sky! They know how to open doors!”

Good job, Daddy!

When I finally did drag into bed after midnight, very annoyed with Landon for his questionable parenting skills, he actually said, “You have no idea how tempted I was to put on that rubber alien mask from Halloween and sneak into Keagan’s room.”

I stared at him in abject disbelief, thinking we did not possess enough money to pay for all the therapy bills that would have engendered…

October 12:

2002: Did a 20K bike ride for MS with the man I eventually married, and afterwards found myself making out (“just” making out) for the first time in two and a half years.

2005: Watched Ghost Hunters visit Mansfield Prison, where I’d once done a ghost tour and encountered absolutely nothing supernatural; despite their claims I doubt TAPS did either.

2006: My maternal grandparents visited, and I had long conversations with my grandfather, a humble, soft-spoken, well-read man who should have been a professor or writer, but invested his life in volunteer work. He was never rich but he was respected and loved.

2007: On a Great Lakes road trip, we were in Milwaukee, and save for the weird accents, “doncha know,” found the northern part of the Midwest’s German triangle much like where we lived in its southeast corner. (Saint Louis being the western portion.)

2015: My husband built our son Keagan a Viking longboat bed so awesome I kinda wanted one myself.

2016: Saw a baby elephant born on live TV (awwwww!) who within minutes tripped over his own ground-dragging member and rolled over a little hill.

2018: My mom, once apolitical, stood for hours to hear Donald Trump endorse an area congressman. She wanted me to come and bask in the glory, but I had no interest.

2022: After school I took my girls to Home Depot to see the Halloween stuff on display, and decided if I could I’d buy absolutely everything there.