On This Day: Your History

[ER]

February 12:

1994: Saw Dinomation at the museum, and one dinosaur spat at us. Try spitting on crowds in the ‘20s without a lawsuit.

1995: Wasn’t sure how big a deal to make of our carnal escapades of the day before, but when he was just business as usual, I finally burst out, “You’re really not going to mention anything about yesterday?” He said I should read this Joyce Carol Oates story called “How I Contemplated the World From the Detroit House of Correction and Began My Life Over Again” and as I read it I kept thinking why’s he want me to see this, and finally got to one point and thought….really? So, yeah, he knew it’d make me laugh everything off. He was wise beyond his years and had me figured out much better than I did myself.

1997: One last time I got off school for Ash Wednesday.

2000: My grandpa had one of his lungs removed. (2000 was a horrible year.)

2009: Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin turned 200, so I had a cupcake in their honor.

2008: On our long Europe trip we made it to my grandparents’ house in western Ireland, and my grandma stunned me when something she said implied she thought we were staying in different motel rooms, as we were unmarried. Not knocking the sentiment, just that her naiveté was something I wasn’t prepared for considering how long he and I had been together at that point.

2010: Unheard, I ordered Journal for Plague Lovers, by the Welsh band Manic Street Preachers, because of the title and cover.

2013: The Pope abdicated, something I was never told one could do.

2016: Happened across a documentary on cable about men restoring foreskins by taping weights on themselves and wearing them over the course of months, causing tissues to regenerate, and after sitting there staring at some of the things they were showing, I called my unflappable friend Edie and said, “You got to see this show I just found on TV. You’re not gonna believe what’s a thing now.” Hey, good for men for taking power over their bodies, but there were jaw-dropping visuals on that program, I’ll tell you….

2019: My godson told me about seeing a UFO, and at the time I had no idea what it could have been, but now I wonder if it was LED-lighted drones being used in practice for an event.

[ER]

February 13:

2007: Ice storm paralyzed the region and left us without power for three days.

2010: “Dear, _____, thanks so much for the early wedding present. Wish you were dead. Your friend, Evelyn.”

2016: Thought about buying a bunch of those devices I’d seen on TV the day before and giving them out at Christmas, but decided maybe gift cards would be more appreciated.

2017: My college friend Amy died of breast cancer.

2019: Went across town to pick up paintings from an artist with a mental condition that manifested in this person never leaving the house.

2021: Went with Tyler and some of his, uh, friends to the trendy new gay club in town, the derivatively-named Bird Cage, and had a crazy time when this man danced with me in a way that in some cultures probably means you have to get married afterward. Whoa.

2022: Found out schools were closing the next day because the local franchise was playing in the Super Bowl. Figure that logic out…

2023: Played the Smashing Pumpkins’ new double album online, and was taken to amazing depths of underwhelmedness.

[ER]

February 15:

1991: Minus-twenty outside, so school got called off.

1992: Went with my cousin Dana to a fortune teller in a predominantly gay neighborhood, and she told me I’d fall in love three times, and my first love would be strongest, my second love would last the shortest, and the third time it’d be best; that I won’t marry the man I love most but I will love the man I marry; that I will have two daughters; that I will always want what I can’t have; will have enough money to be happy and be happy because I will always have something to wish for that I don’t have.

1999: A wonderful day because my grandpa came and visited me in college.

2008: I drove across Ireland, west to east, to get to Dublin so that after five weeks away, we could go home.

2014: A local news anchor declared it the “snowiest, coldest, most extreme winter since the 1970s.”

2016: My husband and I halfassedly talked about taking ayahuasca, but I didn't think I had a good personality for a chemically-induced vision quest.

2018: Rough weather, 40 MPH winds, driving rain, spooky skies, and temps hit seventy-five. I also watched The Triumph of the Will for the first time, which I found a monumentally impressive film with absolutely disgusting subject matter.

2022: Watched Akira with my oldest. Zzzz.

2023: Hysterical news outlets, ever-prone to hyperbole, were dubbing a chemical spill associated with a train derailment in the east of our state “worse than Chernobyl.”

[ER]

February 16:

1991: Dinner with the my dad’s co-worker, whose wife was from Manila and I couldn’t figure out her name and felt embarrassed to keep asking, but it sounded like “Karzyne.”

1992: Decided to spend the day walking around in socks. Why? Why not.

1993: Turned in permission slips for a field trip to a Trappist monastery, where Thomas Merton was buried. You had to grab fun where you could in Catholic school.

1994: Ash Wednesday, went to a mall with a boy named Chris, and his sister Kim came along, and she shoplifted anything she could lay hands on in store after store, which I thought was scummy, then we sat on a wall behind the mall afterwards and she smoked, and later Chris said he was sorry for bringing her along because he could see she made me uncomfortable.

1995: My predatory former tutor Phil called and I told him the next day was my parents’ anniversary and life was strange, and he was Mr. Sensitive, inviting me to share my feelings, which, like a naive ijit, I did.

1996: Dueled MTG with my friend Rob and some of his friends, and played  my Exile in Guyville CD, and they kept picking on my music til I told them Liz Phair described herself as “a blowjob queen” after which the teenage boys went rapt with attention to her lyrics.

1998: Heard Gertrude’s Stein in concert.

2006: For the second time, almost a decade apart, I went onstage and recited my poem Do. It felt like being in a time warp.

2007: After four days without electricity following an ice storm, we got the power back on.

2008: In NYC.

2010: Officially became the snowiest February in area history, and half the month to go.

2016: Took Daikeagity to Big Bone Lick State Park. For years I honestly thought nothing of that name.

2017: My cousins’ son, Tyler, who was a senior in high school, said, “Funny, they know I’m gay but at least twenty girls at my school have said they want to have sex me with me.” I asked if he was forbidden fruit, or did they just like a challenge. He said, “Well, I just think I’m kinda hot…”

[ER]

February 17:

1991: On my parents’ anniversary, I stayed with a Jewish girl down the street named Rachel, and while I could take or leave her, her mom was this awesome Californian who was a vegetarian and part-time aerobics instructor who made collages for galleries in several countries.

1992: Had to go to school on President’s Day to make up for a snow day.

1993: Home alone, talked to Brian up in Michigan for two hours, which felt like a huge deal.

1999: Ash Wednesday and my Catholicism-infatuated Methodist-ish roommate wanted to get ashes, so I took her, and felt happy when it was a big thrill for her.

2000: Had to write an essay on whether Malthus was vindicated by the fate of the USSR.

2001: Tupac Shakur’s mom spoke nearby, and I’d have gone if I’d been able. In her youth she beat the US government in court, you know.

2003: Watched my cousin’s children, six, three, and eleven months, and everyone acted like I was going to lose my mind from stress, but it was fun.

2005: Was meeting Landon out after us being apart for several months during a rough patch, and Hugh in Austin told me he’d bet me this awesome 19th century volume of poems, authenticated as once having been gifted to Prince Albert, against a full-frontal nude picture of me (choke!) that “things” would happen between Landon and me that night. I said, “You really don’t want me back together with him, do you?” He said, “Nope, you should move down here.” If I had made the wager, I’d today own a great Victorian book.

2008: Home after our long overseas trip.

2016: My friend’s dad moved back after fifteen years in LA, which upset me so much I wondered if I could keep being friends with her, since I wanted to avoid him, and she wanted me to reconcile with him. She finally caught me off guard when she said forgiving other people was the basis of Christianity, and what could I say to that, really?

2017: My daughter and I got dressed up and quietly watched my college friend Amy’s funeral live online. Shocking that she was dead, even though she’d been sick for many months and had told us she would not survive her cancer.

2020: Creepy homeless guy who was fixated on my eleven year old came back to the food pantry where we volunteered, and I kept thinking how easy it would probably be to make a problematic homeless guy disappear, but he didn’t do anything.

2023: Took my daughters to see a play called Puffs, which was Harry Potter told from the perspective of Hufflepuffs.

[ER]

February 18:

1993: Minus-twenty-six with the wind chill factor.

1995: Spent the day writing in my diary about hanging with Brian and his college friends the night before, then all us going to a 24-hour diner in Kentucky, that had never been closed for even an hour since the ‘50s. To this day one of the best times I ever had.

1997: Had a substitute teacher named—100% serious---Brother Butt; went with my dad to see the Fahrenheit Players do Romeo and Juliet. My dad was sitting sprawled out like a teenage boy, so I asked why, and demonstrated his slumped posture, and my imitation actually made him laugh for a long time.

1999: Though I was far from home it weirded me out that my state was preparing to execute someone for the first time in almost fifty years. Talked to my grandpa about it, who was all in favor of deep-sixing people for a long list of crimes.

2001: I was again far away and my dad said my dog, Charlotte Sometimes, was increasingly sicker, and I asked him to please, please, please not shun her because she was more trouble. I hated being away from her, and there’d been so horribly much death in recent months.

2005: Saw Troilus and Cressida on stage: incomprehensible.

2006: To the art museum for (ha) Rembrandt’s 400th birthday party event, the Dutch masters rivaling the Impressionists and the PRB as my favorite artists.

2009: My friend Mandy had her daughter Lauren, and she was something like the seventh girl in a row with no boys among people I knew having babies.

2010: I was downtown at the Contemporary Arts Center seeing the Cedric Michael Cox’s Soul Within Structure showing, when I heard someone flew a small plane into a federal building in Austin, so called Hugh to see if he was all right, and he said he heard the plane hit and was watching the smoke even as he spoke to me.

2017: Went to see about buying a sixteen-month-old lab named Delilah, but she and my dog Chocolate wanted to murder each other, so we had to pass.

2021: Read three disappointing novels in three days: The Sparstholt Affair, Peregrin’s Rest, and The Doll Factory.

2022: I was having lunch with a very religious man who said to me, “You’re too great a prize not to be on the adversary’s wish list.” I spent the rest of the day pondering that.

2023: I told my college roommate, Jackie, I hadn’t had sex with my husband since he put our dog, Bojack, to sleep behind my back, and she accurately said: “Well, El, you always were psycho about betrayals.”

[ER]

February 19:

1994: Went shopping with my paternal grandma at an extraordinarily posh mall.

1995: Went shopping at another mall, now defunct, with Dana, who’d semi-swindled my Uncle Lark out of money. She bought me the book The Intelligence of Dogs.

1996: Realized I was one inch taller and five pounds heavier since I quit playing tennis every day. I was at peace with one of those things, take a guess which?

1999: Went with my friend Amy while she got king snakes tattooed around her ankle, a Doors reference.

2003: Went to yoga with Clare, and if you think you’re limber, take yoga with dancers. She said I should stretch my pelvic muscles more, and I said I don’t usually hear that before the third date.

2005: Saw Sleeping Beauty done with surrealistic puppets and backdrops out of some talentedly demented artist’s darkest imagination, one of the most beautiful things ever.

2006: Stayed up til five AM talking for eight hours with Hugh, in Austin, who was getting ready to be out of the country for an indefinite and possibly dangerous assignment he couldn’t tell me about. I loved him deeply, had for years, but in the sense of philia, ardent, almost selfless friendship, which was not entirely what he wanted me to feel. I think I have something of a polyandrous streak that manifests emotionally rather than physically.

2013: I had to ditch my plans to walk the eighty-four mile Hadrian’s Wall Trail across Britain that summer, because my boss privately advised me in strong terms against my going to the UK “for now.” It was like someone canceled Christmas.

2015: Got a fist-shaped bruise on my arm in Krav Maga courtesy of the Jew Bear’s sister, and wondered again why I was in that class.

2016: My dad took me and an intern at his art brokerage named Sunny, an international studies major, to meet German artist reps, and he told Sunny that despite what she may read, the unlabeled KGB runs modern Russia, something Sunny seemed disinclined to believe, poor girl.

2017 Heard Kodo, a Japanese drum ensemble.

2018: To the annual Israeli Film Festival with my uber-Jewess friend Edie, and saw Amor.

[ER]

February 20:

1996 Girl in class said we couldn’t have famines in America because we had supermarkets.

2003: Walked out onto a bridge downtown in what the morning news claimed was the thickest fog since 1977. Magical.

2006: Saw the excellent if somewhat pandering Good Night, And Good Luck, which made me dislike McCarthy all the more, not only for the reasons shown in the film, but for the fact that for a generation his stupid blundering kept the US pointed away from the truth that KGB penetration into our country was even more extensive than the demagogues in HUAC tried to say it was, for all the wrong reasons.

2007: Took my former teacher, the nun, out for mid-day pizza, and she said she’d given up novels for Lent. My cousin Celia wanted to come live with me and go to college here, and I flat-out told her she couldn’t live with me unless she quit smoking.

2008: Sitting out under a fuzzy orange blanket, Landon and I watched the lunar eclipse together.

2010: Signed our pre-nups. How romantic, eh?

2015: Nine inches of snow on the ground, six more forecast for overnight. Fear is never boring.

2017: In Krav Maga the instructor was Shev, a black Jew from Brooklyn. Finished Curtis Sittenfeld’s re-telling of Price and Prejudice set in the present, in my home city, which began close to perfect, and exploded before the end.

2018: Eighty-six degrees according to our backyard weather station. Meteorological variety is what you get where we live: fog, hail, heat waves, blizzards, tornadoes, floods, Satanic summertime humidity, and near-perfection in autumn, we roll through it all and still say hey, at least we're not in Cleveland.

2019: Lunched with an intern from Alabama who had won the Miss Sweet Potato beauty pageant. She talked about missing her family and “church family,” and said one of the things she was most determined about in life was remaining a virgin until marriage. I decided not to reveal to her that despite the religion I grew up in revering it above nearly all else, I never quite believed virginity technically existed, as how can an absence of something be a thing in itself? I thought of all the pleasant romps I had by the time I was her age and couldn’t decide if I respected her idealism or just pitied her, but I told her I admired her resolve, which I did.

2021: Had to go in for “assigned” medical tests, where an Air Force doctor at WP drew my blood three times. Needles don’t inordinately bother me, but three times, dude? Really?

2022: Dreamed the Pope kept calling me while I was driving, and I was getting annoyed at him.

[ER]

February 21:

1993: While under a tornado watch most of the day, I read Peter Straub’s If You Could See Me Now, describing it as “one oppressively dreary book.” So of course I loved it.

1995: I think this was the earliest instance of having a meeting with the people who would eventually become my employers across most of my life. Funny to look back at how friendly and good-natured it all seemed, no hint that one day it’d leave me with CNS damage and stains on my soul.

1997: Low seventies in what is usually our snowiest month.

2000: I took care of a cat belonging to a boy named Greg, who was having oral surgery, and for whatever reason, this cat psychoed-out and scratched the blood out of me.

2001: Had an out of nowhere argument with Lisa (one of my roommate’s high school friends who more or less became one of mine) because she was trying to tell me I should let her fix me up with this guy she knew, and when I declined, she went off on me about the fact that for nine months I had been in this “mourning state” her words. She and I were never all that warm to one another after that day.

2005: On the same day I happened to hear Hunter S. Thompson was dead, I did three-100 series ab-crunches and wound up with a wicked pulled muscle for my trouble: couldn’t even straighten up for a couple hours.

2007: My future husband and the foreman who worked for him got held at gunpoint by an Appalachian meth-head on an inner-city job site.

2009: Went to my cousin Allie’s wedding, and her dad was there, the man who used to beat up my Aunt Christie, took her children away, and much later sued me and tried to get the house my (and Allie’s) grandpa left me. I ignored him but I did have to smile in schadenfreude when this ice sculpture he was trying to shift snapped in his hands and all thirty pounds of it fell on his foot. I toasted the ice swan….

2013: With a major ice storm coming I went out with my friend who works for an LDS charity, and helped deliver supplies to elderly and shut-ins, and as I did I thought about my late maternal grandfather, who did volunteer work of that sort for over thirty years. He’s inspired me in ways I never let him know.

2014 Talked with my Aunt Christie about the Dalai Lama and President Obama meeting, and she simply couldn’t comprehend why I was not a fan of either man, both of whom she admired.

2015: Watched The Social Network with my dad’s second wife, Barbara, whom I liked and to whom I wish he’d stayed married rather than eventually chuck aside for another shot with my mom. Not long ago I asked my dad how he could justify a dishonorable act like that and still say he governed his life according to Stoical ethics, and he wouldn’t discuss it with me. He probably has forty points of IQ on me, but I still say he was wrong.

2017: My friend Clare asked if it’d bother me to raise a child from another race, and I reminded her I nearly did just that, my Chinese-born cousin Alba, after my Aunt Christie died in 2015. It was an odd question.

2019: Took the interns to a Tiffany glass exhibit downtown.

2022: Couldn’t sleep, so around 3:30 got up to take a bath, which freaked my husband out because he said that was a good way to drown.

2024: While I was writing this I found out the mom of my best friend growing up dropped dead, mid-sentence, talking to her friend at a table outside a café, enjoying the warm weather. She apparently collapsed so abruptly with no warning signs that for a second her friend thought she was kidding around. They think it was either a massive brain hemorrhage or a massive heart attack, but “massive” is the word her son kept repeating when he told me, right after he called his sister in Los Angeles. She used to always hit on my dad and now she's gone. Wow.

[ER]

February 22:

1995: Phil, my would-be molester tutor gave me his Master’s thesis to read, and ever the flatterer said, “I think you’re better able to understand it than my professor.”

1996 My friend Mandy wanted me to go see Rocky Horror, and said it was a “cherry friendly” showing, meaning they went easy on virgins, i.e. a first-time viewer. I said couldn’t, I was meeting my boyfriend’s father for the first time.

1997: Went with Brian to see Lost Highway, and passed a world-class cat show (hadn’t known that was a thing) held in the same arena where The Who concert stampede happened.

2008: My agent sold another of my stories, and I actually thought I might be going places in the lit’ry world.

2016: Helped clear up issues German clients had where I halfassedly worked with my dad, and after things were straightened out I had the impression they wanted to say, “You do realize how psycho we Germans can be when we go off the deep end, right?”

2017: My friend asked for prayers for his dying father, and I wrote that sometimes I thought I believed in prayers more solidly than in God, and wondered if prayers maybe generated their own action through psychic energy rather than spurred something higher to become involved.

2019: Went to see Hamilton, which grew on me, but not yet.

2020: Read about a Jesuit priest who’d spent forty-nine years at a local high school getting charged with the sexual abuse of students. Brian and Clare’s dad wrote me: "That mother f**ker. I knew him and so did my son." Within days an online petition was asking someone to kill the priest.

2022: Twosday two-twenty-two-twenty-two, aka: 2/22/22.

2023: Seventy-three out, and we were under our sixth high-wind advisory day that month, up to sixty MPH winds forecast.

[ER]

February 23:

1990: Four boys at school got suspended for stuffing paper towels down the bathroom sink and leaving the water on. They may have gotten away with it if it weren’t for those meddling kids they hadn’t bragged like dumbasses.

1994: I was testing a theory that I could get by on 800 calories a day if I hydrated and took vitamins. Eh, you live, you learn.

1999: Some guy I knew had a countdown on his PC that tallied the seconds til he was likely to die: 1,586,304,002…1,586,304,001…1,586,304,000…

2003: In a restaurant I got a glass of water that smelled like a wet dog, so I didn’t drink it.

2006: The President was up the road from my house, so the streets were shut down.

2014: For her thirty-ninth birthday we took my Aunt Sarah and her husband to see Evita onstage.

2016: Got my hand so stuck in a dishwasher while trying to get a spoon off the bottom that I had to send my three-year-old up for her dad to help me get it out, and he asked her to bring him a saw to cut my arm off, and til he told her he was joking, she actually started to.

2018 Worst local flooding in twenty-one years crested around noon.

2023: Read Alan Rickman’s diary, and thought he was basically a dick.

[ER]

February 24:

1990 My grandma told me how when she was little everyone ate lots before Ash Wednesday, and the saying was you gained three pounds by Fat Tuesday, and lost five pounds during Lent.

1991: The ground war began in Kuwait, and my grandpa predicted it’d last a week, the US would lose under a thousand soldiers, and Iraq a hundred times that.

1993: Field trip to the Trappist monastery got canceled.

1994: Because they wouldn’t let me check it out on a minor’s card, I stole James Joyce’s Dubliners from the library, and returned it when I was done.

1995: Invited my best friend’s younger brother to watch Tales from the Crypt and The X-Files and Unsolved Mysteries with me and he asked me if I’d ever had sex, and I answered no, which was the truth.

1996: My boyfriend took me to meet his dad, the beginning of an inexplicably enduring interaction that continues to this day.

2017: Went to a photography exhibit at the Weston Gallery, and as we drove home a ferocious lightning storm hit, and temperatures fell forty degrees in an hour as a cold front came through.

2018: The Red Cross was out in force as our river was at a 25-year flood stage, displacing thousands.

2020: On YouTube, I discovered the greatest Star Trek fan series ever made, Star Trek Continues.

2023: I sat in my car at mid-day and listened to Elvis and ate much of a melty half-gallon of cherry fudge-ripple ice cream, neither activity being particularly characteristic of me.

[ER]

February 25:

1988: Threw up next to my teacher’s desk in third grade, resulting in my only absence all year.

1990: I questioned why if cars lose rubber off tires every time they’re driven, roads aren’t coated with their residue. Still don’t know the answer.

1993: The “Storm of the Century” was coming, a foot of snow forecast, everything shut down, but we ended up getting seven inches, which can be perfectly satisfying.

1994: Saw Reality Bites with a boy named Chris, whom I didn’t particularly like, as I found boys my age comparatively boring.

1996: In my sad quest for a sibling figure, I invited my best friend’s fourteen year old brother over, as I did a lot, to hang out and watch Pinkie and the Brain, Goosebumps, The Simpsons, and tried to ignore the fact he didn’t want to be a brother figure, he had a crush on me and was rabidly jealous of my boyfriend.

2007: Turned off the Academy Awards after Ellen DeGeneres applauded the nominees as the most racially diverse in history, because I didn’t think race should have any bearing in the matter.

2008: My Irish cousin Celia, who couldn’t vote in the US, went to see Barack Obama speaking at the university a few blocks from where she was staying. It (ahem) had more of a rock concert vibe, to put it politely.

2010: Bought some books from the estate of writer John Fowles, and I’d later find what I think was one of his hairs.

2016: After my appointment with the roughest waxer at the salon, I all-but limped home.

2017: My four year old had a nightmare about the ground eating her. Told her the ground didn’t eat people, and she said, “Uh-huh, when you’re buried.” Whoa, Celtic DNA much?
 
2018: We were woken up after midnight by tornado warning sirens.

2022 Got Elden Ring on launch day. A masterpiece but almost no replay appeal.

[ER]

February 26:

1995: After staying overnight with my cousin at her college, I woke up to her being a jerk, so when she drove us to our grandma’s house Grandma asked if we were fighting, and I said no but she’s fighting with me, which Grandma found humorous.

1996 Saw Mary Reilly with my buddy Rob, and when I got back Brian teased me about how my “date night” was. Right….

1998: Home from Mardi Gras with a tiny black eye inflicted by some drag queen accidentally hitting me in the face while swirling beads.

2000: Drove home across a third of the country, and listened to an audiobook of Stephen King’s Blood and Smoke read by the author.

2005: Tilda, my neighbor, came home from a trip, and to thank me for taking care of her strange menagerie she dubbed her “life forms,” took me to hear a band with a singer who had a strange effect on me.

2006: A sudden stomach flu kept me from seeing NIN and going to a local Mardi Gras.

2010: Got horrifying news that changed my life, and still impacts it. One of a handful of moments that truly altered nearly everything.

2014: My almost three year old son discovered a talent for peeing off the back deck with amazing accuracy. I told him he couldn’t whiz on the ant hill below, but of course that became exactly what he wanted to do.

2018: Someone asked if I believed in the Mandela Effect and I said, “Of course not, though I‘ve had it happen.”

2019: Had a horrendous dream about a man mutilating his body with a cheese grater.

2020: Laughed to myself that Clare’s mom was in danger of being deported from Israel for “hate speech” while evangelizing there. Hey, she’s been rotten to me, let’s not forget.

2022: Explored inside the largest dead mall in the state, nearly a mile around inside.

2023: Discovered I was five handshakes separated from Adolf Hitler.

[ER]

February 27:

1993: Spent the day still shocked about the WTC bombing, because I loved those buildings.

1995: Principal took away my school driving privileges because on Friday I’d had enough and drove off.

1996: Took a picture of the scar on Brian’s hand where to my screaming disbelief he’d accidentally cut it open last spring, slashing through his fate line and altering his destiny, we often said.

1999: Extremely nice boy from college named Greg poured his heart out to me, feelings I knew he’d had since 1997, and he said, “Don’t you get it? Brian dumped you last month. Your guy back home dumped you. He’s done with you. Why can’t you accept that your feelings are stuck in time?” I didn’t get mad but it was something I didn’t want to hear because I felt sure we’d be back together.

2001 Hugh lost his s**t like I’d never seen in my life over the Taliban blowing up the ancient Buddha statues and said, “Mark my words, someday I’m going to kill Taliban for that.” Given some of his assignments next year, I’m pretty sure he did.

2005: Bought tickets for Green Day, then saw an elderly doctor’s rare books, including an 18th century Candide. In the midst of our conversation he said, “Would you excuse me? When you’re seventy you’re a prisoner of your bladder.”

2009: My Aunt Sarah, who was living with us and could legally work in the US, told me that my toddler-age cousin was getting made fun of in day care for being the only uncircumcised boy there. I told her 3/4ths of men on Earth weren’t either, so the Irish were in the majority, but it bothered her.

2010: Drove to Dayton with my dad and his second wife and his fourteen-year-old stepson to see California impressionist art, when news came that the sixth worst earthquake in history hit Chile.

2017: Had a $16.00 shot of cognac, and wasted $16.00.

2018: One of the interns kept aggressively hitting on my dad, and was let go, but Mom and I didn’t let him live that down.

2021: Found out I was going to be in hospital for a couple days of tests. So were a lot of people who were in Turkey when I was there.

2022: Told my daughter her drinking coffee weirded me out because thirteen-year-olds didn’t when I was her age, and she hassled me about still being in the 20th century.

2023: Tornado watch here, tornado warning just to our west. Midwestern living, I’ll tell you…