On This Day: Your History

[bob]

Today I started my first day of full time teaching after substituting since I entered this field.

[RCMerchant]

Groovy! 

[ER]

September 15, 2020 I took Daisy along on a trip I had to make to Washington DC, which was still under siege from Covid, meaning we weren't able to go a lot of the places we otherwise would have, so I had to get inventive.

We walked around the National Mall, and at one non-descript spot I told her, "This is where in 1956 the CIA arrested a Soviet spy named Sergei Lyonov, who'd been posing as 'Sam Wallace' a playboy football recruiter for Texas A&M, a school to which he had no actual ties."

I explained the "KGB" (though technically going by a different name at the time) planted Lyonov, who was in his twenties, in northern Virginia sometime in 1955, and it wasn't long before he, as "Wallace" started making pals with local high school football players, seeming like a cool big brother type, claiming he'd played college ball for the Aggies, and filling their awe-struck heads with stories of his on-field glory. He was handy at getting the boys booze and introducing them to easy women, which made him popular, but like a lion that marks its target, his actual focus was on just one boy, a mediocre player whose parents Wallace had convinced he could get their son on with Texas A&M after graduation. In truth though Lyonov was just aiming for a connection with the father.

Maybe Lyonov overplayed his hand, maybe Cold War paranoia was just too much in people's minds at the time, but for whatever reason the father of the football player got suspicious and called the FBI, who, with uncharacteristic wisdom, called their betters at the CIA, who in turn arranged for "Wallace" to have a meeting with a supposed co-worker of the boy's father (really a CIA agent) allegedly in research and development in an aeronautics factory, a man whom Wallace was gradually led to believe was in need of financial help.

Wallace/Lyonov in effect said, "Hey, I can help you out, I know a friend in New York whose competing company would pay big for certain industrial documents you could get him...."

So it was the CIA nabbed Sergei Lyonov trying to hand over $5,000 to an agent posing as this industrial scientist. Yet when busted, Lyonov laughed and said, "Well it was a good run." Then he asked to see a representative of the Soviet ambassador, Gregori Zarubin, but was taken to a dentition site in Maryland instead.

Daisy asked, "What happened then?"

"He was held in great luxury in US custody for several months, til he was traded back to his own people, and the Soviets took charming young Sergei Lyonov home, interrogated him, then put a bullet behind his ear, figuring if he lived so well in US custody, he must have been cooperating."

I let that sink in and told her, "Spying is not a good life, Diz. Get in once and you're never safe."

Then we bought each other clay necklaces with little donkeys and elephants on them and called it a day.

[Alex]

15th September 2015.

The guildmeet we'd hosted at our house had finished and the last of our guests had went home the day before. Kristi hadn't felt any movement that day so we made an appointment at the hospital and went in for a scan. We'd passed the 6-month point and I'd stopped worrying quite as much feeling that we were fine, we were on the home stretch. When the doctor told us it was the worst news possible I couldn't grasp what he was saying for a minute or two. I'd let a friend go with Kristi to an ultrasound in my place so they could see the baby. Just the previous week I'd got to hear her heartbeat and it had been like a racehorse galloping along.

How could something that strong just stop?

I listened as they told us that we'd need to go home and come back on Wednesday. They'd give Kristi a pill and that would start things off and we'd have to then return on Friday for her to give birth.

As we left the hospital we were both still in denial. I said to Kristi that I knew neither of us felt like eating, but that we had to and I promised that if she had some food I'd eat too. I think we stopped at the Ca'dora. When we got home I phoned around the family, starting with my mum and Kristi's to give them the bad news. Lori hadn't answered her phone, but I managed to get ahold of Marc and he passed the bad news on, then I went across the street to where one of my bosses lived to let him know what had happened and request more time off work.

I do not recall what we did for the rest of that day, but that morning is seared into my memory.

[ER]

September 16, 1999 From a conversation with Dana the day after Tyler was born:

Me: "Now that you've got two children with him, maybe you should finally marry Darrell."

Dana: "Hey, did I give you advice about your relationship with your statutory rapist boyfriend in high school?"

Me: "Yeah, actually you did that constantly."

Dana: ".....well that's not how I remember it."

Funny.  It'd be another six years and three more children before they tied the knot.

[chefzombie]

Today I started my first day of full time teaching after substituting since I entered this field.

and that is the best news i've gotten for far too long! 

[Alex]

17th September 2017.

Was a rough night last night but eventually we both got at least some sleep. We woke up early this morning and went for a walk along the beach. It was just something I really felt a need to do. Whenever either of us felt the need to cry, we just stopped and held each other. Walked back down the beach watching the sun rise over Lossiemouth.

As we walked along the beach there was a low moaning sound as the wind blew over the sands. I've spent the vast majority of my life living beside the coast, but never before or since have I ever heard it make that mournful noise.

[ER]

September 17:

1980: Though I don't remember it, according to my baby book I got some sort of shot at the pediatrician's that left me with a burning fever for the next two days, and the injection site on my thigh swelled up like a hornet sting to the point my young parents called my grandma, who said to take me to the ER, where I stayed overnight.

1997: I paid $16.00 at a place to get two inches cut off the back of my hair but when I asked to keep the hair the stylist wouldn't let me, and asked what I wanted it for, and for lack of a better explanation, I said I needed the hair for rituals, that it was a Satanist thing. For some reason she acted weird toward me after that.

2016: The morning rain dissipated and the forecast afternoon rain did not appear, so my friend Gina and her two girls and her husband Martin met us downtown for our local Oktoberfest, the largest in the United States, and while there my goddaughter Courtney won an under-ten chicken dance. Fun day!

[ER]

September 18:

1985: After my mother delivered a cautionary tale about stranger-danger, I asked, "What if I just take the stranger's candy but don't go with him?"

1991: Our study hall teacher could never make it an hour without a smoke break, so we could count on five unsupervised minutes per class, and this day a smartass boy named Brad sang a merciless song about a pimple on a girl named Marcie's chin, so she hit him in the face.

1992: I was playing basketball with my dad when a police car stopped in front of our house and my dad demanded, "OK, what have you done now, Malevelyn?" Not the first time he'd combine 'malevolent' and my first name in that goofy way.

1993: Dana invited me up for the weekend at her college and said I could either sleep on the couch or in her double bed with her, then added, "That's my lucky orgasm bed, because I've had the best sex of my life in it." Couch it was!

1994: In health class they serially assigned us a robot baby to take home and babysit over the semester. It cried at random and you had to punch in codes to shut it up, and that weekend it was my turn, but while playing frisbee with my neighbor, Mark, I dropped the robot baby, causing it simulated death. It was the only F that I remember getting.

1995: Complained to Brian about my mom that night, and he asked, "If you knew she was going to die tomorrow, what would you say to her?" I went, "Brian, moot point, it is tomorrow over there, so she'd already be dead."

2002: Finished reading The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson, in which the Black Death wipes out Europe, and for the next seven-hundred years China and Islam are the last two global forces standing. It's a book you might like.

2017: I dreamed I was conversing with a well-dressed stalk of six-foot-tall celery, which told me, "I am celebrity celery, madam."

2021: While in a Target store with his mom, for no apparent reason but his weird sense of humor, my cousin-in-law Lindsey's preschool age son Sammy started yelling, "Help me! Call 911!" The police came, and it didn't help that he was adopted and looked nothing like Lindsey at all.

2022: Saw Hamilton onstage for the third time in as many years. Ah, yes, Founding Fathers rapping about deflowering Colonial girls in New York never gets old.

2023: Didn't sleep, lot on my mind, but looking outt he window I saw six deer on the lawn in the night.

[ER]

September 19, 2006 I have my limits when it comes to defying omens.

I was supposed to hear Joyce Carol Oates, once my favorite author, lecture at Wilmington College, but before I went to bed Gina told me she had a dream that a deer ran in front of my car and I wrecked in the darkness and died.

Then in the morning Mom called me at lunch to tell me she dreamed I drove my car off the road at night.

I said to her, "Is this a joke you guys have put together on me?"

She said she didn't know what I meant, so I told her about the other dream and she completely freaked out!

I was still processing all this when Dana called and mentioned seven-year-old Tyler woke up scared after dreaming that I was in a car wreck!!! 

Three dreams about me wrecking? I decided I'd catch Joyce Carol Oates another time.

[ER]

September 20:

1993: Got griped at by my principal because I---gasp!---cleaned up a broken locker mirror instead of having a custodian do it. Then I got griped at for having a mirror at all. The joys of Catholic school.

1996: Sure I was pro-Clinton, but I still went around telling people it was cruel to make fun of Bob Dole for falling off a stage.

2000: I think I may have coined the word "beautifuk."

2003: While visiting my twenty-six-year-old Aunt Sarah in Atlanta, she took me to this big club called The Gold Coast, which I did not like.

2016: With Landon to the Playhouse in the Park to see a stage performance of A Prayer for Owen Meany.

2019: My dog Chocolate died at age thirteen. I will always love her and I will always miss her.

2020: Someone asked me why I hated Mountain Dew so much, and I said, "Because it tastes like the '90s, while I'm stuck in the '20s."

2022: Took my home-schooled son on a field trip to the Toyota plant in Georgetown, Kentucky, then walked around in a 19th century Irish cemetery near Frankfort and did some wax and charcoal tombstone rubbings. I loved it, he was unimpressed.

2023: Wore raccoon eye makeup at breakfast to see what my kids would say.

[ER]

September 21, 2022 Because my father in law, believed terminally ill with a slow form of cancer, told me he didn't want to burden his wife with the task, and claimed his son was "never any good with death" (a thing I knew to be true, actually) he asked me if I would make his funeral arrangements.

I'm not that great with death and dying either, despite more familiarity with it than I'd ever have wished, but because he asked, I said I would, so I met with the relevant individual and went over what my father in law said he would like.

The funeral director was the kind of person who hid shyness behind formality, and he struck me as one better adjusted to spending time with men, perhaps because in his professional experience females presented tiresome displays of emotion when around him, but he was perfectly polite and I thanked him for all his help in fulfilling the requests I'd brought with me. It was not an enjoyable task, and if ever I sought confirmation that I would not be a good funeral director, that day I got it.

As I drove home alone I thought of how it's said funerals are for the living, but if my wishes were in any way to factor into what became of me one day, I'd rather not have one.

Seriously, I thought, throw me in a hole on our overlook, cover me with dirt and there I'd peacefully lie not wishing "couch more magnificent" because my God I did not want people staring down at me while I lay trapped in a box.

Truthfully I thought if I were dying I'd possibly do my best to go off somewhere and never be found, and decided as I drove home I'd rather have that than any funeral. What an unpleasant day that was....

[Alex]

21st September 2010.

I was tasked with supervising a couple of juniors while they emptied out residual fuel from a jet. We went out and put a FOD bin (a metal trash can) underneath while we opened up the bottom of the fuel tank with a small opening. Someone had to reach up and keep the opening well open and I'd been ordered to let the two juniors do it. The avtur dribbled out in a steady stream, but some of it would run down the guy's arms, so after the job was done they'd need to go home, get showered and changed into fresh clothes. Trouble was a couple of hours later we were still draining the tank and one of the juniors told me he was starting to get a burning sensation in his armpits. I said this was more than just residual (the bin was almost full), and I ordered him to stop doing the job and go have a shower immediately. I then went to let our sergeant (Albert) know what was happening. When I got back I found the same guy still draining fuel. One of the other corporals told me the lad had said he wanted to finish the job. Immediately I was p**sed off about him countermanding my order. I told him to stop and go get cleaned up right away and stop being stupid. After I kicked him out of the hanger I then had a word with the Cpl about interfering in my job and reminded him that we had a duty of care to our subordinates.

Even though I hadn't been in direct contact with the fuel, my clothes still stank of it, not to mention my skin. That stuff gets into your pores. It would take 3 days of washing before I would get rid of it, but at least it wasn't desiccated pig urine (used for clearing snow and ice from runways).

[ER]

September 22, 2017 Tyler texted me that unrelated to anything to do with him, the first and to that point only girl he'd had sex with slit her throat that day. Later he'd tell me he'd gotten incorrect news and "slit her throat" was more like "cut the side of her neck" but it was intentional and still a majorly messed-up act on her part, done in the midst of her getting hysterical while fighting with several female friends in a car who were trying to calm her down, and who drove her to a hospital while she was bleeding through the wad of tissues they gave her to hold against her gashed skin. She required a transfusion and was placed in a psychiatric unit, though recovered without brain damage, but she was a truly unbalanced girl for that and many reasons. (Including wanting to lose her virginity to a gay guy.)

[ER]

September 23, 1994 It was day one of the best three-day weekend of my teen years.

Dana picked me up that evening to spend the night with her, and when we got to her college town an hour away, we walked right into a party, and had to get past a wall of frat boys, whom Dana said were sketchy so don't make eye contact. It's funny now but The X-Files was such a big new thing that it was being watched right in the middle of this multi-apartment Dionysian revel.

A couple hours later we got into Dana's Nissan and drove down to see her friend Scott, whom I instantly liked, and after we settled into the blessed silence at his place, Dana said to him, "I been promising my cousin for years I'd get her stoned, and it seems like a good night."

I declined, though she and Scott definitely didn't, and I was soon feeling the ambient effects for the second time in a month, because Scott went from seeming a little funny to coming across as downright hilarious, and I thought, my gosh, Dee has actually gotten me stoned after all. (But in the same vein of logic some Catholic girls have long applied to matters sexual, I told myself it didn't count.)

Scott teased me about laughing so much, and I said sorry, I had a problem with laughing unintentionally at the wrong times, and he said, "Then I pray to God you never give a blowjob, hon." Which set me off laughing even harder.

I was figuring out that Scott was probably gay, but I didn't find out til later that there was more to that equation than gay alone. He microwaved us a frozen appetizer platter he stole from a Friday's where he worked as a server, and fixed us tropical punch, and left the bottle of rum on the table, and Dana got toasted and Scott was pretty giggly drunk too on top of the joint they'd split. He showed me he waxed his legs and even his arms, and I asked, "Are you like a cyclist or a swimmer or something?"

He laughed and Dana goes, "Tell her."

Turned out Scott was a drag performer! Wow, coming from my suburban world it was like meeting an eskimo, or a cowboy, or a Republican college professor, something you'd heard of but hadn't verified actually existed.

Scott told me about his ardent love for Mariah Carey and sang along to every song that came up on her CD, and showed me pictures of himself in drag, and he truly did make an attractive woman, not the campy sort, but realistic.

Dana announced we were sleeping there because she'd had a huge fight with her flatmates and I told her I thought that sucked because one of them had beautiful king snakes in a terrarium, and I'd looked forward to seeing them. She told me to buy myself one, and I said my mom wouldn't let me, to which Dana said, "Tell her Saint Patrick miracled it to your room."

Scott was asleep in minutes but Dana and I laid on the foldout bed in his living room for what must have been half an hour, talking. In this dreamy, sleepy, intoxicated tone she told me when I was eighteen and she was twenty-two she'd take me around the Caribbean and we'd get drinks bought for us by dark men and British ex-pats. She held up her hand and so palm-to palm we swore we would.

She fell asleep, I didn't yet, the pull-out mattress was too thin and in her sleep Dana kept rolling on me to the point I was going to sleep on the floor til I saw waterbugs scooting across it in the dark. (It wasn't a very nice place, tell the truth.) I did pass out, kind of, but it wasn't a sleep that was in danger of winning any awards.

And we never did cruise the Caribbean and get bought drinks by British ex-pats, and dark-skinned men.