On This Day: Your History

[ER]

March 20:
1989: Spent the night with my friend Tracy, and bought a new nightgown for the occasion. Her bedroom was an overdose of pink walls, carpet, furniture, sheets, that I secretly called "Pepto Dismal."
1992: I learned the Greek root word for agnostic meant "ignorant" and thought I'd finally know something Brian, who was then a senior sent by his school to work in the office of my school, didn't, so as I was leaving that afternoon I asked if he knew what agnostic literally meant, and he went, "Sure, 'ignorant'." Grrr.
1993: Though you can't spot me in the final version, I (along with about a hundred others) was an extra in a high school hallway scene of a Seth Green movie called Airborne, which had been filmed locally at Western Hills High School.
1996 To get an early start as a junior, my school made the group I was in take practice SATs all day: multiple tests in a row. My brain leaked.
2010 After years of cohabitation following semi-cohabitation, I got married on the vernal equinox carrying a bouquet of dandelions. I was secretly sad that the man I married was surely going to be a widower soon, and my daughter would never remember me.
2018: My six year old son's school called us after he bloodied the nose of the boy who'd punched his little sister. The school suspended my son, but I told him I was proud of him because in the face of anything you defend your family til either victory or death, no middle ground.

[ER]

March 21, 2008 It was Good Friday, and I participated in a local tradition dating back to 1861, wherein the faithful gather below a 19th century church built atop the tallest of the seven hills that surround our downtown, and climb the stairs to pray, or in my stubborn case, merely walk up them, albeit with participating family members. My mom was there, as was my Aunt Christie, veteran of decades of past climbs, and my four year old cousin Alba, who'd been adopted from China. It was a cold morning and the sun was emerging beautifully above the horizon, and from the hilltop miles of surrounding area lay visible, including the river, which was flooding yet again, swelling above its banks into two states. I was two years away from my personal Great Awakening, so I didn't join in praying but I did feel a connection with tradition there, the times I'd climbed those steps with my late grandma especially, and as far as rituals went, it was a beautiful one. It was also the case that Landon and I were still keeping my pregnancy secret for a little longer, and I remained euphoric. That night he and I saw The Spiderwick Chronicles with his cousin Vince and his wife Lindsey, who were bickering, but to Landon and me our baby was bringing nothing but joy.

[Alex]

21st March 2014.

I discovered that Kristi had never heard of Kate Bush so I spent a few hours playing her greatest hits for her. I didn't play her weirdest stuff. As a rough guide to her, I described Kate as being the Bjork of the 80s. This caused quite a few Bush fans to get all rilled up, but I stuck by my description regardless.

21st March 2018.

Ash fell asleep in my arms while I listened to some Ozzy. I considered this to be a good sign. I dressed Ash up in an outfit someone had knitted for him, which was a tuxedo. I also watched a fringe politician (Nigel "Rubber Goon Face" Farage) try to score political points by throwing dead fish into a river. Maybe if he'd thrown them in while they were alive they might have done some good, or maybe even donated them to hungry people to feed them. Still, maybe other fish ate at the dead ones and their lives were not taken in vain.

[ER]

March 22, 1992 I was staying the weekend with my grandparents, it was barely after midnight and I hadn't been in bed long when my grandpa knocked softly at the door and said if I wasn't asleep he and grandma wanted me to come see something. So I put on my robe and crossed the hall to my grandparents' room and Grandma pointed outside, where on the lawn was a herd of about eight beautiful whitetail does and their spotted fawns, grazing in the moonlight. Deer were not as numerous then as today and to my young eyes there was something magical in that unexpected sight. We stood in the darkness and watched them til they drifted into the shadows of the forest, and I vowed to myself to always remember that occasion.

[Alex]

22nd March 2011.

I got home after another short-notice deployment. I'd walked into work and been told to grab my to-go bag, and be gone. 47 hours of non-stop travelling, no sleep for the 63 hours, 1 cheeseburger, 1 pasty and 1 can of coke made up my entire food intake for the entire time and 1 fist fight. I was cranky and on edge by the time I got home. Hell, I was that way by the time I got to where we were going and found the person I was delivering the goods to was an arsehole. After dealing with him I went back to the cabin and made him unload the lorry on his own. Maybe the driver helped, but I certainly wasn't going to help out the ungrateful prick. I was amazed there wasn't a charge waiting for me by the time I got back. Maybe his own management knew what the guy was like and decided not to back him up, or maybe my management figured that someone would have had to really push me to get me to act that way. I desperately needed a shower, but I collapsed into my bed first and got cleaned up after I woke back up. I didn't mind the trip though. I meant I had played my (small) part in the downfall of Gaddafi and that we'd finally have a measure of revenge for Locharbie. I didn't care whether or not the guy they'd had in prison was a patsy or bore some degree of guilt, he was the one at the top that I held responsible.

[ER]

March 23, 1995 My dad was overseas talking to my mother about their dying marriage, and while I remained mad at her for leaving, I also desperately hoped she'd come home and everything would be all right again: denying to myself that things had not been all right for a long time. While Dad was away I was staying with my Aunt Christie in her Italianate Victorian home that sat in a neighborhood made up of 1800s houses with century-old oaks lining the quiet streets, and that chilly afternoon she and I walked to the local library, where her book club was discussing The English Patient. Coming back afterward my aunt said she was sure my mom missed me and loved me, and I said, "I love her too, that's why I didn't leave her." She then told me her own daughter, my cousin Allie, was "stolen away" from her in court by her wealthy first husband, who then alienated Allie and her older brother Adam from her, and Aunt Christie said she wouldn't wish the negative feelings her own daughter sometimes had for her on anyone else, and hoped I'd never turn on my mother as her daughter had turned on her. All in all the week or so I spent with my aunt was one of the happier events of the spring, but that day she had me feeling slapped by guilt.

[Alex]

23rd March 2015.

We had just spent the weekend in Edinburgh. It was a fun weekend, although I quickly learned my suspicions about googlemaps were entirely correct when it gave us the wrong directions. We had a hotel in Leith that was not the advertised 10-minute walk from the train station. Even walking at my top speed I couldn't have made it in that time. We had some good walks though and really enjoyed seeing Spamalot on stage, and Big Hero 6 in the cinema (I have a very vivid memory of some kid bursting out into tears when the brother died).

[ER]

What the hey, it's after midnight, so it's tomorrow.


March 24, 2020 Are ghosts real? I know when someone is "as much asleep as awake" the part of the brain that handles dreaming is still active, and despite my enthusiasm to leap at the one and only possible ghost sighting in our old house, I always get snagged on the fact my husband had been in just such a half-asleep state when he saw what he saw on our stairs. Or maybe I should say when he saw who he saw on our stairs.

It was during the pandemic lockdown, and Landon got out of bed in the night to go down and see why our dog Skipper was whining at the foot of the staircase---apparently for no discernible reason---and as he was coming back, "as asleep as awake," for about a split second he saw my late grandpa standing on the steps looking straight at him.

My grandpa had passed away thirteen months before I met Landon, but he knew what he looked like well enough to recognize him: six-four, strong-featured, handsome, sturdy of build, with a piercing gaze.

Landon said he felt a chill from head to toe, but didn't wake me up to tell me, though when he described it the next morning he told me something that made my heartbeat speed up, because he said my grandpa had been standing with a foot on one stair and one on the stair beneath it, and I remembered when Grandpa would stop and talk on those same stairs in the more than thirty-five years he lived in that house, that was exactly how he always seemed to pose.

I would spend hours that night and on a number of subsequent nights sitting on the landing hoping to see something, but to my disappointment didn't and I still haven't. Yes, the half-asleep mind is a fantasy-maker, but...what if?

[Alex]

Not my history, but...

24th March 1984.

The breakfast club met for detention.

[ER]

March 25:
1998 Thwacked my ankle on a bedpost getting up, and when Jackie asked about the resulting red mark, I told her in my sleep aliens had put a tiny metal cylinder under my skin. She said, "Ankles are not where aliens put things, El."
2006: Saw George Carlin on stage. He seemed....not himself.
2008: Went to an exhibit of John Singer Sargent and Winslow Homer watercolor paintings.
2010: We were in Rio on our honeymoon. It rained. Lots.
2017: Went to the wedding of my husband's foreman's foster son, and got the impression Landon and I were the only people there with a blood-alcohol content below .20.
2018: At breakfast in a restaurant, Clare's mother, Bethany, fired off her strangest-ever passive-aggressive jab at me: "A woman ought to be married in her early twenties, not in her thirties, so her husband gets her breasts in their prime." Even strangers one table over stared at her.
2020: Learned that Gerald, my next-door neighbor growing up, had died of coronavirus.

[ER]

March 26, 2021 South of us there'd been dangerous storms, and while we were unaffected, the gusts gave us a windy night that moaned through the treetops, making banshee sounds in our woods. I couldn't sleep, so I went downstairs to sit in the dark, and after a while my twelve-year-old came down too, so she and I listened to the wind for a while, then put on an old radio serial called Night Beat, about a Chicago crime reporter, and until we finally dozed off on the couch after the wind at last went meek, Daisy and I shared a fun little adventure amid noir tales of another era.

[ER]

March 27, 1995 I messed up kinda bad. While my dad was away in Ireland with my mom, I was still staying with my wonderful Aunt Christie, who told me she trusted me and wasn't going to "ride shotgun" on me while I was there. And what did I do in return? Stayed out for an entire weekend. Afterward I was exceedingly, guiltily, sorry, and after listening to her pour out her soul about how I abused her trust, I told her I'd never do it again, that I was sorry and I loved her with all my heart, then contritely tiptoed around her house the rest of the day. She and I had been planning to watch the Academy Awards and see how many categories Forrest Gump won, but I went to bed early worrying I had ruined our relationship. Thank goodness she forgave me for being so stupidly rude like that, when there really was no excuse whatsoever, and only one motivation.

[Alex]

28th March 2009.

I was preparing to leave the RAF at my 9-year point (shortly after this they offered me a promotion to convince me to stay), and as part of this, I'd decided just to sign up for every diversion I could. Today I went white water rafting.











I took a slight dislike to our river guide that day, although that was a very minor thing on what was otherwise a very enjoyable day. I'd encounter him again years later as it turned out he was a member of Kristi's church, although this was only so he could try and get close to the female missionaries. He creeped me out and while I'd tell Kristi that he could come round to the house I also put the condition on it that she had to have someone else in the house as well. While I had no proof of this, he struck me as the kind of guy who didn't understand the meaning of the word no. He moved out of the area around 4 years ago which was only a minor relief as he'd been willing to travel a couple of hundred miles and back to go see the missionaries when they moved location. However, this was all in the future. Managed not to fall out of the boat or be capsized.

[ER]

March 28:
1993: Did an all-girl school retreat called What Are You Doing For God's Sake, where they fed us only bread and cheese and nuts (rainbow sherbet on the last afternoon) but except for making us get up before dawn three days in a row, it wasn't bad. It was run by very old nuns and some married women who probably should have been nuns, and they tried to convince us how fulfilling it'd be if we became nuns as well. I was aware I was too ruled by wonton desires to thrive in celibate life, but enjoyed the retreat more than I admitted.
1996: Got yelled at because my practice SAT scores stopped showing improvement. My advisor, Jeff, told me he was sorry the dean treated me like that, and I told him I didn't care about the in-my-face yelling as much as he might've expected.
1999 My roommate, Jackie, expressed a desire to become Catholic, a process that involved six months of instructional classes, and asked if I would be her sponsor. Though professing to be an odd choice, I agreed.
2001: My friend Mitch, the "channel medium" gave me a copy of Seth Speaks; I found it banal.
2002: Dana's third child, Charles, was born. He's grown up to be a good-natured big-boned lad, who hasn't seemed to have found his path in life just yet.
2005: The man in Austin told me something I have often thought about, that I was like a river that went around a rock, while his ex-wife was like a rock stuck in a river. She was a stressed-out person.
2022: Went to a Hindu temple and unexpectedly found it one of the more powerful moments of my life, like the air held vibrating energy I've felt a only a few times, always theretofore at certain sites out in nature, like the burrens in Ireland, or some nights on the overlook in the woods beyond our house.

[ER]

March 29, 2005 Drove downtown to Saks Fifth Avenue on a sunny, pleasant day to look for U2's new line of clothing, Edun ("Nude" backward), and heard on the radio that we'd just broken the record for twenty-four hour rainfall total, that Johnny Cochran had died, and Jerry Falwell was in critical condition. (How my younger self would have been gauchely cheered by that.) I wasn't impressed with Edun, so I walked a few blocks to Ticket Master and set Landon and me up to see Conor Oberst in Cleveland on May 16th, then went to my Global Cooking class and made Cuban cuisine. I told someone there how when I was in college my cousin Magda invited me to go to still-illegal Cuba with her by using an Irish passport, and the idea of visiting a Communist country did appeal to me. What I left out was how going there would've been a bad idea because of my employment, and I didn't think risking termination and possibly prison in two nations made it the best idea ever floated my way.