On This Day: Your History

[ER]

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.

[ER]

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.

[ER]

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.

[ER]

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.

[Alex]

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..."

[ER]

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.

[ER]

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.

[RCMerchant]

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! 

[ER]

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.

[ER]

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?

[ER]

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.

[ER]

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.

[Alex]

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.

[ER]

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.

[ER]

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.