On This Day: Your History

[ER]

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

[RCMerchant]

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

[indianasmith]

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

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

[RCMerchant]

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

[ER]

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

[Alex]

9th April 2020.

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

9th April 2017.

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

9th April 2010.

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

[ER]

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

[ER]

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

[Alex]

12th April 2016.

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

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

[ER]

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

[ER]

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

[ER]

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

[ER]

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

[ER]

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

[ER]

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