On This Day: Your History

[Alex]

16th October 2017.

After a long six months and a 14 hour flight, I got back home. I'd arrived in London earlier than expected, but British Airways let me switch to an earlier flight at no extra cost. It did mean travelling to Aberdeen rather than Inverness as I had originally planned, so Kristi and Karen had to turn around mid journey to come collect me. First order of business was plenty of kisses and hugs for Kristi.

When I got back to the house, it was time for a cold beer in a proper glass, and a meal ate using metal cutlery. It really is the little things in life... I'd always wanted to visit the Falkland Isles, but 6 months was a lot longer than I ever wanted to stay there for and I am content with the thought of not visiting it again.

[chefzombie]

1961-i was born!

[ER]

October 17:

1989: Watched coverage of an earthquake in San Francisco that hit during the World Series.

1992: My school lectured me about how I needed to quit playing tennis and concentrate on academics, so to spite them I won my next match 6-1, 6-0.

1995: Dana, the coolest person I knew, a master of life, told me she was accidentally pregnant, and I was more shocked than I probably should have been.

1998: Came back after ten weeks of working in the United Kingdom. Before I left my father helped allay my worries by telling me to remember, I was "a predator," something that out of context sounds absurd but which stayed in my head like a mantra during the assignment. The people I worked with told me I'd done well, so I felt proud, not grasping that at age nineteen my life was already usurped.

1999: While camping beside a river in Maine, I found a stone spear point half-buried in the ground. In ways I never could have foreseen, finding that point would go on to have great influence on my life.

2009: I saw a dead bee on the sidewalk that cold morning and felt sad to think it had crawled with its last strength, trying to reach the grass, and not making it. Such heartbreaking drama enacted in the dark.

2011: Dan Aykroyd was in town selling his crystal skull vodka and talking about his paranormal experiences, and someone brought us back a bottle, which we re-gifted at Christmas.

2016: My family stayed in a motel for the night following a carbon monoxide leak at our ninety-six-year-old house. Thank God for detectors!

2017: My five year old daughter Trinity and I drove to the library and there were police cars out front, and an officer advised me not to take her in yet because the coroner was about to bring out someone who had overdosed in the restroom.

2019: After nineteen years I opened a letter my almost father in law wrote in 2000, after I'd become estranged from him, telling me I needed to forgive the man who had caused his son's death. I said the best I managed was not thinking about that man, to which he said that wasn't enough, that I should forgive him for my own sake. I explained that all my grudges were for offenses against other people, not for things done to me, and he said then in my anger I was letting them be done to me too. I thought, well, I forgave you, didn't I? Shrug.

[ER]

October 18, 1995 I remember my dad was out of the city and I'd been alone for a few days when I drove up to the college town of Oxford, Ohio to be with Dana, who'd told me the day before that she was pregnant, concluding her news by adding, "Guess this settles the question of which of us is smartest, you or me."

"Only because you just said something that lame," I told her, knowing she was much smarter than I was, unintentional pregnancy or not.

I found her in her little rented house she liked to call a bungalow, lying crossways on her bed, wearing a sweatshirt and looking rumpled, and she just yelled "come in" and didn't get up to open the door, so I walked in and laid beside her, our legs dangling into space, each of us staring at the eggshell-colored ceiling.

"Eight years of rolling the dice and I finally got snake eyes," she said with a grim laugh, though after a moment she also said the more she actually considered it, the cooler she'd gotten with the idea of having a child. She told me, "I think I'll make a good MILF."

(I actually asked her what that meant.)

She said her dad, my Uncle Lark, was being sugary nice to her, her brother Jared was floored with embarrassment (bzzzz, wrong response, Jare!), and her mom, my ever-formidable Aunt Judith, had told her to stay away, she couldn't process the news yet, and hadn't talked to her since.

"Good," I said, "maybe you'll distract Aunt Jude from still being mad at me over the church thing." (I'd kind of melted down at her special intentions mass for my grandma earier in the year, but to defend the indefensible, I was under a lot of stress.)

I knew that below my determination to be supportive of her, my own reaction had been unexpected shock that cool Dana had taken a misstep, so I tried to make up for it and said, "It'll be fine, Dee, I'm sure everyone still thinks of you as a great student, great party girl, hotter than a Saturday night special in the hood, it's just we're all caught off guard."

The best thing the usually loquacious Dana could come up with to that was: "s**t happens."

"Your kid's not s**t," I said.

"No," she replied, "my kid will be the coolest."

In retrospect since the aforementioned kid grew up to be a world traveler who is currently living in Australia, I'd say everything turned out absolutely great, as more often than not such situations do.

[ER]

October 19, 1987 Star Trek the Next Generation had been advertised for months and the anticipation levels were celestially high, especially with my dad, who was a lifelong fan of the original series. But as life would have it, he had not been home for a month because of his job, one of the recurring agonies of my childhood, and had missed the first few episodes. As a surprise, I taped them for him on VHS, and beamed when he came home and I handed him the cassette. My mom had zero interest in Star Trek (why again did Dad marry her? Oh, yeah, she was fey-beautiful and he was completely in love....) so it was just Dad and me settling in that night to see "Encounter at Farpoint," and on other nights that week we saw all the rest of the episodes I'd taped while he was away. It was a huge deal, because I felt good for recording them for him, happy he was back, and I was interested in the show itself while we watched together, as we'd often do over the next seven years. Around season four we even invented a drinking game (with sodas) based on Jonathan Frakes' infamous Riker Maneuver, otherwise known as him swinging his leg over a chair. Even moreso than Doctor Who on PBS had been a couple years earlier, Star Trek the Next Generation was simply our shared thing.

[bob]

Today I got a huge check from the school districts workers compensation insurance for my injury last year because of a student.

I also learned how much a partial torn left meniscus is worth in a related note.

[ER]

October 20:

1990: The underdog Reds swept the World Series, and my grandpa was thrilled.

1991: That morning in mass I discovered the kneeler under me was squeaky, so I went full-on church-hooligan and squeaked it on purpose. I was on the path to heroin and bank robbery after a start like that.

1995: Went with my fella to see Strange Days, and as we came out it poured rain, so we waited in his car til it slacked off, Siamese Dream playing softly under the noise of the downpour, and it seemed nice to sit sheltered and safe with his arm around me.

2002: With Landon to a play called Power Blesses, about a woman granted the ability to live a minute in the life of anyone, with the catch that she lost two minutes of her life. Landon's friend played two parts, one a young teacher in the ghetto in 1980, who was taken over by the woman, who had one minute to talk her student out of a fatal shooting, the other a man dying of AIDS in 1997, who made peace with his estranged mother.

2016: Someone I know, not Jewish, was emailed by the mohel who several years before had de-foreskinated her son, informing her that he'd included their story in his manuscript about his whacky career as a mohel. "It's like All Creatures Great and Small, only filled with babies," he wrote the bewildered mom.

2019: Daisy wanted to try rock climbing, so I took her to a climbing gym, and she liked it so much she wanted the real thing. I told her about my roommate's brother's friend who died in a fall out west, but she was undeterred, so I told her we'd go on her eighteenth birthday. Hope she forgets by then...

2022: Finished IQ84, translated from the Japanese, one of the weirdest novels ever.

2023: Approached by a panhandler so high he could barely speak. Asked if he was hungry, he said no, and I said I wasn't going to give him drug money. He sat down on the sidewalk and appeared to go to sleep, chin against his chest, then slid over onto his side, so I called the police, thinking he might've been dying. They came and woke him up and he said he was only taking a nap, and they let him stumble off. All this at nine in the morning.

[Alex]

20th October 2021.

The government that our thank you for stepping in to help the health services deal with the pandemic would be a 0% pay rise. This would be the 13th consecutive annual below-inflation pay rise we'd experienced and more would follow. It wasn't the final step in me deciding the rank and responsibility I currently held was no longer worth it, but it was a step on the path.

20th October 2020.

I gave Kristi the first of what would turn out to be an annual tradition. A Yuletide diorama. This one had a hamster dressed as santa, a mouse as an elf along with Rudolph, a tree and some scattered presents. Nowadays I wait until the 1st of December to give her them.

20th October 2013.

A copy of Sharknado arrived at our door. The first one was a funny idea. Shame they took it too far.

20th October 2010.

A remake of The Crow was announced to be starring Mark Wahlberg. I am so grateful that casting idea went nowhere.

[ER]

October 21, 1994 While it was irritatingly embarrassing enough that at first we vowed to keep the incident to ourselves, my best friend Gina and I ended up telling everybody the funny story of us getting chucked out of a theater the day before when we sneaked in to see Pulp Fiction at age fifteen and sixteen. We went right after school, Gina driving, on the logic theaters were slow then and no one might notice us slipping in after buying a ticket for something PG, but Ringo and Honey Bunny had barely begun their plotting when we found a flashlight shining in our rapt faces and an usher on a power trip told us this wasn't the movie we'd bought a ticket to see and he doubted we were old enough for Pulp Fiction. I even offered the jerk a tenner to let us stay, but nope, out he marched us into the bright sun of late afternoon on a walk of shame, denying us the experience of watching the coolest movie of 1994.

Funny to look back on but unavoidably tainted now, as two days later I'd receive the injury that would almost kill me that Monday. Don't ignore pain, it's telling you something.

[ER]

October 22:

1995: To make a point my dad showed me what was in my federal files---at least the accessible ones---and if you've never seen your own, do a FOIA request and you might be shocked what the government knows about you.

1998: In a delayed stress reaction I confided in Brian what I'd done while working in England, and his response was as much anger that I'd agreed to do it as relief I was back.

2002: I was in DC during the height of the serial sniper madness, paranoia in the air like a contagion, and while I can't say I conducted myself any differently than all the other times I'd been there, it was impossible not to be aware that somewhere under the same sky, breathing the same air, was a killer who at any moment could open fire on you.

2007: Went to a lecture on Van Gogh's paintings, and then watched some clips my friend sent me of Marie Osmond fainting on Dancing with the Stars, which made me wonder if I looked half as graceful as she did the time I collapsed from heat stroke in 1999.

2010: As I shared with the friend who went with me, I honestly think the waxer at the salon that day might have been trying to molest me.

2011: Read in one of those pamphlets they give you at obstetrical appointments that our unborn daughter Trinity was then six inches long, about four ounces in weight, had probably discovered the joy of sucking her thumb, had nails, eyelashes, and REM cycle dreams as complex as any adult, which really dazzled me, thinking of my little baby dreaming inside me.

2021: Tried to be the first to tell my friend happy birthday just after midnight, but her father beat me to it by half a minute. How's that for a strange competition?

2022: Scorching hot Indian summer, and we went to a fall festival on a farm owned by one family since a land grant by George Washington. A bus brought in a group from the largest area mosque, and I watched in horror, almost on the verge of calling out a warning, as about forty of the faithful immediately formed lines upon exiting the bus and lowered to the ground to pray, planting their faces right where a herd of goats had been penned moments before, having liberally pooped all over the lush grass.

[Alex]

2002: I was in DC during the height of the serial sniper madness, paranoia in the air like a contagion, and while I can't say I conducted myself any differently than all the other times I'd been there, it was impossible not to be aware that somewhere under the same sky, breathing the same air, was a killer who at any moment could open fire on you.

Remind me some time to tell you a true story about that from my history.

[Alex]

22nd October 2017.

We had a delivery today. A rather large corner cabinet. The delivery men who looked like a pair of convicts doing community service told me it was't going to fit in my house. I had them bring it round the back door and in via the patio door. They then told me it wasn't going to fit in our living room, that it was too tall. I told them just to leave it to me and I'd have it up in no time.

I built it up, then put on my silly trousers just because I could.



22nd October 2013.

Rollo asked if I wanted to go clay pidgeon shooting. I said sure. He then asked if I wanted to bring Kristi. Kristi who is very expressive and likes to talk with her hands. Yeah, not happening.

[ER]

October 23, 1993: As I found myself often doing around that time, I went alone in the gloaming for a walk along a busy highway near an interstate, saw beautiful twilight colors in the sky, and thought how one of those nights I was going to get abducted and be found by the river, my parents' til-then only surviving child left as dead as Laura Palmer. But despite that I kept sneaking out and taking my strolls as I should never and would never have been allowed to do.

I don't know if I got something out of strange risks, a teenage girl alone at night along a busy highway, but looking back it was not wise to make the pattern of it I did.

People have strong reactions to me both ways, and my life has been an odd mixture of incredibly good luck, punctuated by occasions of dreadful misfortune, a condition sometimes known in Gaelic as cinniúint ádh measctha or "unfixed fate," the implication being that you're someone unseen forces, benign and otherwise, have decided they like to mess with. And it sure seems like it.

I mean I've lived a life that's included losses, brushes with death, injuries, enmities, and more than my share of justified fears, but I also inherited a house, I've been financially stable, I was born in a superpower, I've never had a cavity, I had three beautiful children, more than once I survived what I should not have, all while twice finding deep love, and more times than that being the object of love, something I somehow seem to inspire. I've even had songs, poems, and books dedicated to me, and before I was twenty-five had marriage proposed by three different men. How about that?

I've also had more than my share of people hate me with an equally intense passion. My late fiancé's mother certainly does. I've even had people want me dead: really most sincerely dead.

So there's been a mixed canon of experiences in my life but I still think I've done all right, and, if you notice, luck held and I made it through those unwise little walks of mine thirty Octobers ago, my cocky vanishing acts which tempted a dark fate that somehow held a seductive sense of romance to my preoccupied adolescent mind.

But I suppose something will get me one day, though, won't it?

[ER]

October 24, 1994 Almost met my maker on this day. I knew I had internal injuries after a freakish dive onto my racquet handle on the tennis court went wrong that weekend but I thought it was just bruising and didn't know how bad it was and should have spoken up about how much pain I was in and how much more agonizing that pain got as the hours went by that weekend, so that in keeping silent for so long a bad injury almost became a fatal one. For years I could not help but look on my life as divided into before and after this day, but with time I've become able to see it as just an event along the way and not feel the trauma. It was a terrible day, though, and in an irony, my dad was away working and out of immediate contact, just like he'd been years before when my baby brothers died, and once again it was just Mom and me, as it so often was. It was a close call, and I also count it as the start of rough times in my theretofore placid life. My grandma would die, my mom would leave, I behaved out of all character, or at least I was unlike the way I thought I was and others thought I was, ultimately culminating in me getting confined to the house for most of the next May to shock me into realizing how far I'd drifted, and it was like a seven-month long earthquake, all beginning that horrible day.

[ER]

October 25:

1992: After church we went to the symphony at Music Hall in downtown's Over-the-Rhine district, known for having the largest area of 19th century buildings in America, and the highest murder rate in the region.

1993: An international committee named my home town the most livable city in North America. Why exactly no one seemed sure, but the local government put the fact on signs for the rest of the '90s.

1995: My classmate Roger Morgan told our gym teacher he was not a real teacher, PE had nothing whatsoever to do with education, and he was no longer going to participate. There was something of a low-key intimidating psycho under Roger's genius-nerd exterior, like a dollop of Sheldon Cooper crossed with a dash of Patrick Bateman, and after staring at him a minute, the teacher said fine, leaving me wondering if I could pull that off in my math classes.

1996: My buddy Rob gave me a tape of Headbanger's Ball, and I pranked him by giving him back an identical tape with Charlie Rose on it, making him think he'd lost his precious concert. I thought he was going to hyperventilate.

2004: My Russian-born, US-raised friend Yakov shocked us all by announcing he had been accepted into a USMC officer's candidate course at Quantico, and intended to go to Iraq.

2006: At our Halloween party I dressed as a "black widow Flapper" circa 1922. Ever notice dressing up can be like cheating on yourself with your own spouse?

2019 Took Daikeagity—my children---to see The Wizard of Oz on stage.