On This Day: Your History

[Alex]

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.

[ER]

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?

[ER]

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?

[Alex]

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.

[ER]

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.

[ER]

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.)

[ER]

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.

[ER]

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.

[ER]

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.

[indianasmith]

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.

[ER]

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.

[ER]

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.)

[Alex]

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.

[ER]

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.

[ER]

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.