On This Day: Your History

[Alex]

17th April 2016.

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

[ER]

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

[ER]

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

[ER]

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

[ER]

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

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

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

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

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

[ER]

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

[Alex]

23rd April 2010.

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

[ER]

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

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

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

[ER]

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

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

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

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

[Alex]

24th April 2022.

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

[ER]

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

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

[ER]

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

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

“Yes.”

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

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

“Many things are funny.”

“You think odd things are funny.”

“Is that bad?”

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

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

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

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

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

[Alex]

26th April 1986.

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

[ER]

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

[Trevor]

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

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

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

Cry, my beloved country, cry. 😥😥😥