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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.

(https://i.imgur.com/cKDpJp0.jpg)

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.