On This Day: Your History

[RCMerchant]

My history? I can't even remember what I did on what day last week!

[Rev. Powell]

My history? I can't even remember what I did on what day last week!

I'm in the same boat, bud. Usually I have little idea what season major events in my life occurred, much less what day.

[Alex]

9th January 2020.

I managed to get a copy of a book I'd been after since I was 14. It is called 'The Lost & The Damned', the companion book to 'Slaves To Darkness'. Copies of it have been available online, but for sums I wasn't willing to pay. They have a pride of place on my shelf.

9th January 2010.

I was preparing to leave to travel down to Halton on a promotion course. As much as I wanted this first promotion, the courses for it I felt less enthusiastic about. It would be an enjoyable course, although I came close to punching out one of my fellow students. He'd failed this course a couple of times already, and on the last day of it, he walked up to me and told me that I didn't deserve to pass it. No idea why, I'd sailed through the course with good marks and been positive about it throughout so I put it down to jealousy. Really the only thing that you could fail the course for was having a bad attitude.

[ER]

My history? I can't even remember what I did on what day last week!

I'm in the same boat, bud. Usually I have little idea what season major events in my life occurred, much less what day.

To be honest if it wasn't for referencing my diary I wouldn't be able to pull this off so precisely.

[RCMerchant]

HA! Got one! On Friday the 13th..no...ah fvck.  
I had one-but it was on Nov.13 in 1992. I suppose that won't work.

[ER]

January 10, 1994 I was absent from school, an uncommon event for me, since I had a bad flu that felt like my stomach was contracting as I laid in bed and pulled my knees to my chest because it hurt so much. As I did I thought about pain and why if there’s a benevolent God pain existed at all. It was a hard, fast flu and I felt better by evening and even did the homework Gina brought me, which included reading parts of The Diary of Anne Frank, or as some heavy metal-loving boy in my class insisted on calling it, Anne Frank: Diary of A Madman. I didn’t get the Ozzy reference then but still thought it was funny. The same boy got griped at by the teacher for saying, “I think Anne Frank’s book is so boring I wish the Nazis had found her sooner.” Last I heard he was working in Manila and married to a gorgeous local. Crap and cream rise, I’ll tell you….

[ER]

January 11, 2005 Still spending my leave among family in Ireland, I drove out into the Burrens with Orlando, with whom I was still hanging out. The Burrens is a spooky, beautiful, vast and bleak area in the west of Ireland, largely deserted since the famine, though once heavily populated and dotted with the foundations of many abandoned cottages. It really is a spectacularly striking landscape noted throughout the centuries as a site of unexplained disappearances, which continue to this day. Long steeped in supernatural lore, ghost stories, myths and legends, even my mom’s brother, my Uncle Pat, by no means a teller of frivolous tales, cautioned me against going out there alone. When I was little he used to leave me enchanted by telling me how odd things had often happened to him out there among those unearthly-looking hills, saying he once saw ball lightning skipping along a ridge.

Stories claim the Burrens lies at a doorway between our world and Tir na nOg, the realm of the fairy-folk who used to live openly in Eire before the coming of the Celts, and whether it does or not, one thing I can attest to is that when you are out there on those stony hills, often you will feel…something. It’s hard to explain what I mean by that, but the odds are good you’d feel it too, particularly at night. It can ring inside you like the sense of excitement that comes with taking a dare, and it’s also like you “hear” something, but not with your ears.

It’s a mysterious place, let me just sum it up that way.

So anyway, I was walking there on that none-too-warm day with Orlando, who had an old soul, and he got to talking about how some people were more elemental than others, and he said I was made of air, earth and fire, no water in me, which sounded funny but I got what he meant. He claimed it was good to be a mixture of multiple elements because if someone was just made of one then like as not the person became too extreme. Someone who was all earth became brittle like shale. Fire consumed itself til every bit of fuel was gone, then it went to bitter ashes. Air would just drift, and water flowed in tears and broken-heartedness. He said the key was all about balance.
 
That kind of talk made perfect sense out where it was windy and the air smelled like the ocean and tasted slightly salty, like it never did where I lived far inland in America. There is no place else on earth exactly like the bleak, haunted stretch of seacoast that is the Burrens, where I'd had all morning and into that afternoon to wander among memory-ghosts and feel them tugging at me.

[ER]

January 12, 2016 My father’s stepson reached out to me for help, desperate and doomed, facing expulsion from the university he’d dreamed of attending since elementary school. The situation was that some girl, recognizing him as a serious brianiac, got him good and smitten and persuaded him to do her schoolwork, then when he found out she was not only less than in love with him but was boasting of the ease with which she’d tricked him into the arrangement, what did the bruised-souled young fellow do? Why send everyone he could think of the “special pictures” she’d texted him….and did so on university computers. Well, I couldn’t save him, after pulling that stunt practically on the eve of #metoo he never had a chance, but the school was persuaded to take a little mercy on the broken-hearted fool even as it showed him the door, and in the end he didn’t get arrested and was able to step into a remarkably good job without finishing his degree, but it was an example of what often results when a male thinks with the smaller of his two heads.

[ER]

January 13, 1998, Because such things were still possible back in less guarded days, I went unannounced to my former high school for a visit half a year after graduation, and talk about a head trip, I was already totally a foreigner there. Weird vibes, weird reactions, even from the librarian, Mrs. Hazel, who’d always been so pleasant with me, and from the juniors I’d known (by then seniors); it was like they were seeing a ghost. Jeff, my academic advisor who, despite working for administration, had been a double agent and did many nice things for me in my time at the school, all but gasped when he saw me. Yes, Jeff, my charming semi-closeted homosexual scholastic mentor, who worked for an Archdiocese that pretended not to know about his orientation, was polite but “busy” and the feeling I got from him and everyone else was: “….YoU dO nOt BeLoNg HeRe aMoNg uS aNyMoRe….” So I left, I’ve never been back, and I’ve also never sent their money-grubbing alumni association a godforsaken penny.

[ER]

January 14, 2008 Because we were overseas for several weeks at least in part so my future husband could acquire items for the houses he restored, we ditched sightseeing in London for the day and went to a warehouse off Hackney Road, where we saw overpriced things that turned Landon’s head, like a Georgian marble vanity, but in the end he had to say he couldn’t make profits off them, the rule was don’t install in a house anything you couldn’t triple in price, and their offerings were just too high end.

The man and his wife who owned the unit were not gracious at all from that point on and griped about having to come out and open up. (This place was divided among vendors’ spaces and unknown to us this had been a day when it was not otherwise open for business.)

Landon at first tried to be obsequious, the way Americans are, sometimes to our detriment, and the couple stayed blunt, the way English are, sometimes to their credit, and I later found out Landon was thinking maybe we should offer to take them for a drink as thanks for coming out, which I would not have wanted to do since they were uncool to us and I had a feeling they would have let their stuff dry-rot before lowering it by a pound, so in the end he thanked them one more time and we walked away to them still huffing indignantly about how rude we were.

Ate that night at a café (pronounced “kaff”) off Wapping Gardens’ main drag, Midsomer Murders playing on the tele in this homey, calming little place run by a red-haired woman and her apparently Middle Eastern husband, both exceedingly cordial, and in general we met locals who unlike the vendors that afternoon were funny, kind people, and we had the best evening there of our trip to that point.

We got out so late we had to wait an extra hour on our ride, since we didn’t lease a car in London, and around 11:00 the city changed masks and got slightly spooky, the people out on the roads then were the sort you might expect to meet in urban places anywhere, several asking us for money, others striding along in threes and fours being loud, glaring over toward us, and I didn’t have any weapon on me, so I was glad when the ride finally came, the driver a rather solemn fellow who barely spoke English but who could tell us he’d been born in Iran.

We were both tired and knew we had to rise early to get down to Kent for more business appointments the next day, when we’d tackle the always-interesting challenge of driving on the left side of the road.

[ER]

January 15, 2017 Having gone to bed at only around one-fifteen, I would have happily slept on, but my daughter Daisy woke me up before dawn and we went to the six o’ clock mass, where my godson (whose name I can barely say) was an altar attendant. He did well and we were all proud of him wearing a white robe and looking like a little ghost in the pre-sunrise darkness of the parish church. Afterward his grandpa took us all to breakfast at a place called First Watch, where he showed us a bunch of old foreign money he’d picked up in his travels, and while it was spread out on the table the server came by and said the currency reminded her of paper food stamps from her childhood. I looked up paper food stamps and she was right, back in the day they looked similar. Joe left the server a twenty-buck tip, the best she could likely hope for working there, yet I thought how the amount was not going to change her life and that, sadly, serving probably just kept most people who did it poor. As we were leaving talk shifted to whether the Patriots would be going to the Super Bowl again, a record if they did, and I said the best Super Bowl Sunday of my life was in 2011, because when Daisy was two it began our tradition of watching the Puppy Bowl together, and everyone agreed the Puppy Bowl was indeed the better deal.

[Alex]

16th Jan 2018.

I bought a book for Ash that I had loved from my childhood (even though he wasn't yet born). It isn't the oldest book I can remember reading (that goes to a book called What Daddies Do), but I do feel some degree of nostalgia towards it regardless. I've only read the story to him once (Ash has an awful lot of books to go through, and right now he is only interested in ones with trains in them).

16th Jan 2007.

I called my boss at home at 03:15 in the morning and told him that I was unable to get into work as their was a Polar Bear sitting on top of my car. He somewhat sleepily mumbled a reply about he'd see me the next day. A minute later I got a call back saying "Hey wait a sec, you don't have a car!"

[ER]

January 16, 1989 When Mom drove me into school, 97X, the alternative FM station she liked to listen to (the same one playing in Tom Cruise’s car in Rainman) put on Lovecats by The Cure, a song I liked in an early manifestation of my eventual year-long mid-adolescent love affair with the group’s music. At school some boy named Greg Stoeffer threw up in gym after he got hit HARD in the stomach with a dodgeball. The janitor came and mopped his hurl away but it stank up the whole gym so much we had to quit playing, which suited me since I’d gotten smacked in the face by the ball when it ricocheted off the bleachers and caught me a good one. I was going to keep playing but I admit it hurt. I was cool with most sports and in general liked gym enough to minor in it in college, but after that incident dodgeball always left me leery.

[ER]

January 17, 1991 Ground operations in the Persian Gulf War began, dubbed Operation Desert Storm, which sounded strange since for months I’d heard it called Operation Desert Shield. (Or as boys at my school insisted on naming it, Operation Panty Shield.) A girl in one of my classes, Shelly, said Nostradamus predicted this conflict would lead to the end of the world: that was the zeitgeist of things at the war’s start, paranoia and rumor. I also heard back that day from a recruiter at a tennis academy, who used to work for Nick Bollettieri, and she offered me admission to the program for which she repped, saying my try-out in front of three teachers had been good enough to get in. “You’re talented but you’re rough, and we can mold you.” After talking to my parents I declined, though, and have never regretted not taking her up on the opportunity, but I remember she was snooty about my refusal and said, “Then you’re never going to go anywhere in tennis.” Funny enough I beat one of her program’s students in straight sets in the quarterfinals of a junior tournament a couple years later, and that same recruiter sat in the stands and expressionlessly watched me do it. It felt good.

[Alex]

January 17, 1991 Ground operations in the Persian Gulf War began, dubbed Operation Desert Storm, which sounded strange since for months I’d heard it called Operation Desert Shield. (Or as boys at my school insisted on naming it, Operation Panty Shield.) A girl in one of my classes, Shelly, said Nostradamus predicted this conflict would lead to the end of the world: that was the zeitgeist of things at the war’s start, paranoia and rumor. I also heard back that day from a recruiter at a tennis academy, who used to work for Nick Bollettieri, and she offered me admission to the program for which she repped, saying my try-out in front of three teachers had been good enough to get in. “You’re talented but you’re rough, and we can mold you.” After talking to my parents I declined, though, and have never regretted not taking her up on the opportunity, but I remember she was snooty about my refusal and said, “Then you’re never going to go anywhere in tennis.” Funny enough I beat one of her program’s students in straight sets in the quarterfinals of a junior tournament a couple years later, and that same recruiter sat in the stands and expressionlessly watched me do it. It felt good.

My older brother was there for Desert Storm, as was one of my friend's (Dave) brothers. Dave's brother was unfortunately killed when an A-10 shot up his vehicle, mistaking it for an Iraqi vehicle.