On This Day: Your History

[ER]

November 12:

1994: Gina and I looked forward for months to seeing Interview with the Vampire, but when my accident kept me homebound for a while, she loyally promised to wait for me.

1995: Played "questions" over the phone with my favorite psycho nerd and had to think about whether I would rather be a rat or a rabbit; rather have an extra arm or be three feet tall; rather lose my sense of taste or live the rest of my life in Arabia. I still like playing that game, so feel free at any time to ask me some hypothetical and I'll probably reply.

1996: Saw The English Patient with my dad; found it like Masterpiece Theater on a big screen.

2000: Got the idea that if ever I had a daughter I would name her Jaye. Like the time I crimped my hair, or threw super balls off a hot air balloon: bad idea.

2004: A pediatrician told my friend Mandy that children under seven could ask and answer questions but not hold conversations, which was an insane claim, I'd had many fine conversations with small children.

2006: Got tickets for Landon and me to tour the last remaining Frank Lloyd Wright prairie house in the state.

2007: In Louisville seeing a Frederick Hart sculpture exhibit, and hung out later at Pepper's Bar at the Hyatt, where I played pool against a man from Oklahoma City, lost, but had a fun time.

2023: Decided to update my will tomorrow.

[ER]

November 13, 1987 It was the first Friday the 13th I remember being aware of, and it sticks out in mind because my third-grade teacher told us about how some people were afraid of Fridays the 13th, and wasn't that just silly, she asked us, to which we all agreed it was. Maybe an hour after her telling us that we were walking to music class when we heard a massive, wet-sounding WHOMP echo through the school. We'd find out there had been a longstanding leak on the flat roof that caused water to accumulate above the ceiling and it finally soaked through some insulation, getting it heavy enough to crash through the overhead tiles in the hallway that lead past the office and cafeteria. Nobody got hurt but they sent everybody home that day---yes!---so the school could be inspected against future incidents, which as far as I was concerned meant it was a very lucky unlucky day. In fact Fridays the 13th have usually brought good fortune to me, and my youngest was even born on one in 2012.

[ER]

November 14:

1987: Got invited to a costume party, and went as the pop singer Tiffany, complete with orangey-red wig. Yes, I too was a fashion victim of the 1980s....

1990: In the midst of our second Indian summer that autumn, I was in a DARE play at school that night. (My line: "No, Bobby, people who smoke grass are losers!") My dad showed up an hour late, and explained a crowd of anti-Desert Shield protesters had temporarily blocked the federal building where he worked.

1996: Cardinal Bernardin, the local archbishop before he got promoted to Chicago, died, and they canceled classes and had a nearly two-hour memorial mass for him, which was excessive considering he left our area in 1983 and so was really before our time. That night I turned down a free Christmastime trip to Grenoble, France when, gee, all I'd have had to do in return was have sex there with someone from school I didn't even like that much.

2006: Landon and I heard Sandra Day O'Connor at a speaking event at Miami University.

2010: One of my maternal cousins was knocked unconscious by a car on one of those insane, twisty, hedge-lined roads they have over there, and when she was half-awake in the hospital she told everyone she watched her body lie sprawled on the pavement, but when she was once again fully lucid she couldn't remember saying that.

2013: Found white mold inside a freshly-opened jar of Nutella, so I "may" have gone outside and blown it up.

2019: Worked with a Kurdish man who'd gone to Oxford, who told me when he was a teenager, vigilantes in the Turkish military murdered six members of his extended family for displaying the flag of Kurdistan outside their home in southern Turkey.

[ER]

November 15, 1994 On this day I first met Phil, who would tutor me for several weeks after my accident, find a way to stay in touch with me afterward, and then go on to briefly be my teacher for the last quarter of twelfth grade, where he showed a tremendous degree of self-possession considering I was sitting there staring at him day after day and he surely knew I could have spoken up at any time about his sexual misconduct toward me.

I was in a bad mood when he showed up at my house that first night, and I threw darts over his head, and he ignored that and kept sitting on the sofa, which impressed me, since I'd have gotten up and moved. I was also arrogant toward him, not happy with life after all the medical trauma I'd been through since October 24th, and I actually said to him, "I'll pretend there's something you can teach me, so you'll still get paid."

But instead of school work we talked, and I finally went, "Wait, did they sneak you in as some kind of therapist?"

He was seriously that good, and after three weeks at home I was that starved for company.

I asked how old he was, and he said twenty-six, then told me about graduate school and wanting to get his Masters before he started teaching science full-time, and being a tutor fit his schedule and gave him income from a job within the education field.

I think he figured me out fast as a kid who'd let years of getting so much attention for being in advanced classes go way too much to her head, because in this complimenting thing he constantly did, he told me, "Not everybody can get a doctorate by age twenty-four like I'm sure you will."

Yeeeeah, I admit I actually ate flattery like that right up.

By the end of the first session I liked him, despite not wanting to. He was the sort of person who invited trust in a way that made me come to depend on him more than I expected to in months to come, beyond the time he was sent by school to tutor me, and I'll never be able to decide if that was something innate in him or a tool he'd developed to use as a predatory manipulator, especially considering what he would try to do to me one night when I was talking to him in his car.

People have said I should have turned him in, that being in education he might have been doing similar things to others, but that's hindsight, and there was no #MeToo back then, so try being in tenth grade and facing the fallout making an accusation like that would have brought with it. Besides, nothing happened, he just aggressively tried to make it happen. There's courage and responsibility, and then there's self-preservation in the face of humiliation, and I went the latter direction.

[ER]

Hey, claws, thanks for the original idea on this thread! I've enjoyed the excuse to re-read a lot of my diary because of it, and to stroll down memory lane, analyzing past times and thinking through them from hindsight. For a parahyperthymesiac like me, it's been a gift.

I decided at some point near the beginning, if the opportunity was there, and honestly I didn't think it would be, I figured I'd get discouraged by a mean comment or something, I'd look through an entire year and see what I did day by day. So today marks that one year. (Fireworks, streamers, I made it, yaaay....) Doing this look back kept me around this site when I would have taken a break, much as I enjoy being here, a long time ago, as I have across the years. I think I will print off what I reminisced on in this thread, bind it, and put it on my shelf, because it's been an undertaking.

So I wrap up on day 365, and probably not one I'd have gone out on if something else had leaped up as more important, because it's not a good memory.....

Can't give you karma but thanks again. It's been like time travel.

[ER]

January 12:

1989: My Dad drove thirty miles to get programs for his Mac SE; I went along and played a game called MacSurgeon.

1991: Anti-war protest outside my dad's work. He said people who predicted Saddam would be killed were wrong.

1994: In theology I said the story of the widow's mite was stupid, because if she gave away the last of her money, how would she feed her children?

1996: Brian was driving back from Florida, where he'd visited his sister and mom, and intended to do it in one long day but I pleaded til he said he'd stop for the night mid-way. I went and saw David Copperfield's magic show that evening.

1999: My boss was yelling at me to get back to the east coast, but a major winter storm was coming, so I stayed home and spent what turned out to be among the last days ever with the man I nearly married, and still loved very much.

2006: Saw Lord of the Dance, with my mom.

2018: Got unexpectedly positive feedback from my friend and her dad regarding something I wrote about their brother and son, that had felt like channeling rather than writing.

2023: Bad thunderstorm in the pre-dawn knocked down tree limbs and left it so dark outside the street lights stayed on past noon.

[ER]

January 13

1989: My 4th grade spelling bee team lost the diocesan finals to our archrival St. Paul's.

1993: Read Winter Dreams, by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

1997: Wrote my mom from my self-imposed state of estrangement from her and told her I was sorry for many things.

1999: High winds, ice, sleet, snow unleashed, shutting down the region.

2000: A kind priest I knew named Father Jim Willig announced he had a football-size tumor on his kidney, and a year to live.

2003: Saw The Pianist with Landon, who asked if I'd heard Pete Townsend got arrested for child porn. I didn't know who that was.

2004: Sick of the war's death toll, I ranted about President Bush on the clock, then got advised that as a government employee it had been an ill-advised thing to do.

2005: From Ireland talked to Hugh in Austin, and it emerged that I was at the top of his will, impressive considering I'd never slept with him.

2006: Landon and his crew were restoring a house, and I wanted to help, so this men-are-men type named Ron gave me a floor sander and asked if I thought I could handle it. I good-naturedly said, "Yes, I can, f**k you very much." He laughed way too hard about me saying that, but hey, I'll take a home run where I can get it.

2007: We got four inches of rain, and I stood under an umbrella with Landon on the Purple People Bridge above the river, watching the world go beautifully by.

2008: Went to church services at Saint Paul's Cathedral, London.

2010: On a lark I went for my second Qi Gong cleansing, which gave me an ASMR-ish buzz.

2011: Asked my Irish cousin what American accents sounded like, and she said, "Honey with splinters in it."

2017: My husband and I exchanged gag gifts, and mine to him was a burial plot. He froze and stared at me.

[ER]

January 16:

1991: Got two shots, a finger stick, and had a TB test. Mom was so sure the shots were going to make me hurl she made me ride home from the doctor holding a plastic trash bag.

1994: My Aunt Christie's forty-fourth birthday dinner got canceled because we got twenty-two inches of snow and an inch of ice.

1995: For Aunt Christie's forty-fifth birthday extended family went to her house in Wyoming, Ohio, where I asked my cousin if there was a name for this enjoyable little romantic session I'd been party to a few days earlier and she said, "That's still just making out, El." Oh. My dad faked his way through the get-together but was quiet driving us back, since his wife had just left him.

1996: Got invited after school to a B-Dubs to hang with college students several years older than me, where they got in a discussion about abortion, which I quietly listened to without contributing any opinion, then went home and asked my dad: "When you found out Mom was expecting two months after you got married, how much did you talk about aborting me?" He went, "Jesus, Evelyn, zero." For some reason his reaction made me laugh, and his news made me feel happy too.

1999: Aunt Christie turned forty-nine, and I went with Brian to her birthday party. It was the last time we ever went anywhere together.

2007: Home from working two straight days on-site in Dayton, went with Landon to Aunt Christie's birthday party and met her newborn granddaughter, Becca, my cousin Allie's baby.

2008: Did a high-speed run through the British Museum.

2009: Saw Andrew Wyeth and John Mortimer were reported dead, and took my Aunt Sarah to Barnes & Noble to look for a book for Aunt Christie's birthday, and also wound up snagging myself a copy of Ghost World marked 25% off. Sarah was living in the house with Landon and Daisy and me, and I'd started getting unwelcome vibes that something was going on between my thirty-three-year-old Naomi Watts-looking maternal aunt and him. I told myself maybe I was having post-partum paranoia, since I'd had a baby only nine weeks earlier, but the weird idea stuck around for a while.

2015: It would have been Aunt Christie's sixty-fifth birthday; instead it was her funeral out in the cold and snow. One of the birthday cards that came in the mail at her house was from her book club at the library, which showed a bunch of famous authors on the front and said: "Wittier than Wilde....Statelier than Shakespeare...More awesome than Austen...that's you, Christie!" Simply a horrible day.

[ER]

January 17:

1989: The mom of a girl in my class brought her two-week old son to school, making me pine for a sibling.

1994: High winds blew the snow on the ground and reduced visibility to yards. Big earthquake hit Los Angeles.

1995: School field trip to the cathedral, downtown.

1996: Had to wear a sweater the second half of the day at school because I had a slushy snowball fight outside at lunch, and the principal said my shirt was "inappropriately wet." He did have a point.

2003: Sat in Pompilio's restaurant in Newport, Kentucky, where a scene from Rainman got filmed, and had a depressing talk with Landon, telling him if he wanted to be in my life he had to grasp that I had a job that was going to take me away a lot, which had cost me someone once before.

2005: In Boston after flying back following two months among my mom's people.

2006: The sister of a guy I knew in college told me about her past life regressions while I was spending a hundred bucks at Yankee candles, sowing the seeds of buyer's remorse.

2007: My friend Hugh told me a mysterious smell "like ten skunks pooped battery acid in a hot summer trash can" caused downtown Austin to be evacuated, including his work.

2009: My buddy Mandy said a woman in her maternity group got killed in a car wreck at eight months pregnant, and to orient her toward the sunny side, I put forward the possibility that she'd been carrying the next Pol Pot.

2012: Played M-F-K with my husband, and the three were Harry Potter, Hermione, and Dobby.

2016: Gas was $1.39 a gallon.

2018: My A.S.I.L. Clare showed her mom a "story' I wrote about her late brother, and it made her mom so furious she trembled and couldn't speak. Not really the effect I would have hoped for.

2020: After being out of the country unexpectedly and abruptly, I got to see my family for the first time in two sometimes scary months.

2021: Worked briefly in Maryland during a very sketchy stretch of days among some truly extreme people who were completely untethered to political reality.

2023: Had to ask why we'd had a dead snake in a plastic baggie in our garage freezer for the past two years. Got no good reply.

[ER]

January 18:

1991: My best friend Gina confided she thought her mom was having another affair.

1992: My neighbor told me about sitting shiva for her great-grandpa, who died at ninety.

1994: Fifty below zero with the wind chill. One-quarter of the US was under snow emergencies.

1995: In reflection, I wrote of the day: "It's like the last of some sort of innocence died."

2005: Home after two months away, and my friend Clare ran up and full-body hugged me.

2006: I started going to a sign language group at the library, and learned many news words.

2008: We were in Paris on our long trip across Britain and France.

2009: My baby cousin Deirdre had a fever of 103, so my Aunt Sarah and I took her to the ER.

2018: Saw a coyote trying to leap up and eat seeds out of our lowest bird feeder.

2022: Finished reading the 17th century Englishman John Evelyn's diary.

2023: My daughter told me her (half-) cousin Madison claimed there were colonies of bigfoot living in Wayne National Forest, near her home, and she wanted to go look for them.

[ER]

January 20:

1989: In fourth grade we saw President Bush's inauguration.

1991: I put The Stone Roses "I Wanna Be Adored" on loop then sprinted on the treadmill for fifteen minutes, dead run, getting maybe my first music/exercise rush going.

1993: Saw President Clinton's inauguration in eighth grade; came home and my parents told me I wasn't eating enough.

1995: Fire alarms at school malfunctioned twice, sending us out in the freezing wet snow.

1998: Because I had to go back east, Brian said we were "in each other's pasts, just didn't know it yet" which was agony to hear, though we still more or less stuck it out another year.

2001: In my diary I prophetically wrote: "George W. Bush sworn in today. God-help-us-one-and-all!"

2006: Supposed to go with Landon to see The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, but stood him up to talk to the man I was close to in Austin, something I knew was questionable even as I did it. Hugh said, "Part of why so many men have liked you so much is because you're complicated and contradictory like that." Well...

2007: In my diary: "Two years left for Bush, and whoever comes next, please hurry!" In the Obama years I would find much irony re-reading that.

2008: To Père Lachaise, where I blew a kiss to Oscar Wilde, and was told by a groundkeeper that Jim Morrison wasn't in his grave, but he spoke faster than my brain could translate his French, so I missed a lot of his explanation.

2009: Worst Inauguration Ever!

2017: Saw a beautiful exhibit called Sea Legacy, by Paul Nicklen and Cristina Mittermeier.

2018: In spring-like mid-fifties temps, took a road trip to Kentucky.

2019: Had a lovely blood moon lunar eclipse.

2020: Visited Serpent Mound, where some LDS missionaries said it was made by the Nephites.

2023: Evaluated damage a 60 MPH windstorm the day before did to our yard.

[ER]

January 22:

1989: To my grandpa's Super Bowl party and watched the local team lose.

1997: I think that evening I saw Hale-Bopp comet for the first time.

2010: My Celtic berserker cousin Celia came to my house in total rage, just me and my fourteen-month-old daughter there, and I think it was close to being one of those "if it bleeds it leads" domestic incidents you see headlining the news.

2017: "Dear Diary, today I washed mud off a beagle's penis, and t'was not edifying work."

2018: I suggested to my oldest she give my youngest some of her clothes she'd outgrown, and from her reaction you'd think I asked her to give her the hair off her head or something.

2019: Finished writing a short work I entitled Nom Sum Qualis Eram. (Which means: I Am Not What I Was.)

2020: Diagnosed with "adrenal depletion" as a result of my time overseas, where I'd stayed in a hyper state for weeks, scared during much of it.

2021: Took a sleeping bag and slept on the floor of an empty apartment where many memorable times had passed in my teenage life. Alas, you truly can't go home again. (Something I was not expecting was how creepy it soon started becoming to go there, which I still can't explain.)

2022: My youngest came home from school reporting that Australia was having an epidemic of spiders falling from the sky.

[ER]

January 23:

1989: A portrait of my grandma that my grandpa gave her as a 40th anniversary gift was hung in their study next to a portrait of Grandma from their 20th anniversary.

1993: Sick all weekend with a bad cold.

1996: My dad was away, so I went to see my grandpa, who walked to the overlook with me in the rain, and we looked out at the flooding river half a mile wide and raging. Went back to the house and I saw the ashtray in the living room had cigarette butts with lipstick on them.

1997: Told my AP advisor I was not going to the prestigious university that had offered me admission for the class of 2001, and was unprepared to see him break down, sobbing about what a stain on him for a student he advised to do what I was talking about.

1999: Found out Dana was pregnant with Tyler.

2008: In Sussex, England, visited the supposed site of the Battle of Hastings.

2010: I officially got engaged....to someone with whom I had a baby and had been with for the best part of a decade, co-habiting for half of it. Still, how romantic, eh?

2014: Had an idea to market waterproof books you could read in the shower, but figured everyone who fell while reading them would sue, so....

2016: To a baby shower and put the name Mubert into a hat, as suggested by my spiritual advisor.

2020: Went with Edie to opening night of the Israeli film festival, and saw Unorthodox.

2021: Woke up disoriented in the apartment where I'd camped out the night before, a one-time place of happiness. It was just an echoing, empty space, though, since the memories were in me.

2022: After church went out to breakfast with my godson and Clare and her much-traveled dad, who was reluctantly leaving the next day for a business trip to Tokyo and Taipei.

2023: Read two Chelsea Handler books, and emerged not knowing how I felt about her: funny or awful.

[Alex]

23/01/2016.

My day started off fairly unusually. It isn't often a still half asleep woman has asked me to get out of bed and dance a jig for her. Despite the oddity of the situation, I did comply.

[Trevor]

23/01/2016.

My day started off fairly unusually. It isn't often a still half asleep woman has asked me to get out of bed and dance a jig for her. Despite the oddity of the situation, I did comply.

😆😆😊🐢