On This Day: Your History

[Alex]

24th September 2012.

I went to empty the bins, but it was raining incredibly heavily so I decided to stay warm and dry instead.

Wow, I guess that was a slow news day then.

[ER]

September 24, 1994 On morning two of the best three-day weekend of my teen years, I was worn out when I got up at Scott’s place, and had to push Dana away on the fold-out in order to climb over her, and she said, “Quit trying to cop a feel and go back to sleep, will you?” But I stayed up, and canceled my participation in a tennis tournament that morning, in no fit state on half a night’s bad sleep.

Dana finally got up and asked me to help her get her stuff from where she’d been living, so we met her friend Rick, who helped us haul it to his attic, which he didn’t officially own, it was shared storage space with the three other apartments in the building.

She told me she was going to rent a “bungalow” up the highway she saw was on the market, and to that end I went with her to a payphone at a Shell station and drank a Mountain Dew as she called her mom, my Aunt Jude, and while she rocked on the heels of her silver boots (which she wore because she said they’d get stolen in Rick’s attic) she conned AJ out of a deposit, then called her dad, my Uncle Lark, and conned him out of a bigger deposit, a pretty shameless move, hitting up both parents like that. They were divorced but they did talk to one another.

We went and got the money her dad had wired her, and out of the blue, showing her generous side, she put two hundred dollars in my hand and said it was good to have emergency funds. Then she took me home and dropped me off at an empty house that wasn’t supposed to be empty, and peeled away. My dog Charlotte Sometimes wagged like a propeller to see me, and I looked to find out if my parents left a note, which they didn’t, and checked to see if there were calls on the answering machine, which there weren’t.

It was slightly unnerving.

By nightfall I was really starting to wonder what was going on, if my parents had thought maybe I was spending that night with Dana too. I resisted nascent paranoia that wanted me to imagine them wrecked in a ditch somewhere. At eleven o’clock I made sure every door was locked and took Charlotte Sometimes up to my room and went to bed, facing my first night alone in my entire life.

I couldn’t have imagined what was coming on the morrow.

[ER]

September 25, 1994 The greatest Sunday of my life followed my spooky night all alone when my dad called right after I was awake and sounded upbeat and said he was surprised I was home already. When I told him I came back yesterday and had been home alone ever since, there was a pause and I could hear embarrassment in his voice when he said he was under the impression I was staying with Dana til today. (I knew it!) I said no, home alone like Macaulay Culkin since yesterday afternoon, but laughed and said it was all good.
 
He said he and Mom had been alone on his co-worker, Mr. Webb’s, houseboat since Friday morning and they were stopped at a little town near Markland Dam in western Kentucky, and wouldn’t be able to get back til that night.
 
It was like the light of divine inspiration fell upon me and I said cool, OK, I’ll be here, see you then, and got the heck off that phone, changed plans, and called Brian and said, “Come pick me up fast before my dad sends my grandma or my Aunt Christie over here!”

So he came right over and we had the best day, totally unplanned-out, and drove thirty miles over to the west side of town where we knew no one and no one knew us, and found this fall festival and rode almost everything, even a cage they closed you into and you rocked until you went over the top of the bars it hung from, and I ended up winning HIM this six foot stuffed python which he was trying to win for me, and we finally gave it to some kids who liked it, and we watched this guy take a blow torch and heat old soft drink bottles until he could twist them and tie them into bow ties and hearts and then when they were cool he filled them with colored water, put in a cork in the top and sold them. People were buying them as fast as he could make them. They also had a rummage sale going on, and this old man had a table of books, mostly paperbacks and nothing special, but he had some old magazines, and Brian saw a National Geographic from 1977 that was all about Celts in Europe, and got that for me.

There was also a copy of Wuthering Heights there and Bran said someday he was going to write a thesis about the Bronte sisters being “sexually repressed nympho virgins.” I told him good idea, I’m sure the feminist professors in his program would love that.

We went to Western Hills Shopping Center, which he called the beating heart of the West Side (“Where we East Enders fear to tread.”) and the West Side was actually different somehow. It was like East and West Berlin, not in terms of one being poor or restricted, but just very different in its atmosphere and culture.

Then Brian said, “I haven’t bought you anything yet.”

Well, the year before he had given me a pretty ring I felt a little bad about never wearing because it reminded me for so long of a sad goodbyes, but that day he took me into a jewelry store in the shopping center and bought me a bracelet, which he had engraved with a sentiment that….still means a lot to me.

We ended up going to a park that had a hill so high you could see three states from the top, and sat up there watching riverboats, and it was nice to be there with him so high above the ground that we looked down at hawks gliding below. I said I’d never forget that day and he said that made him glad.

And I’ve also never forgotten how sad I felt after all that happiness when the day got old and I knew I had to go back no matter how much yet again I wanted everything to go on and on. Brian said, “Come on, there’ll be more days. Maybe soon.”

But I wasn’t sure, and even now I’m not sure there ever quite was.

I think the gods smiled on us, though, because I got home twenty minutes before Mom and Dad did, and I didn’t tell them about my day, it wasn’t theirs, they didn’t need to know about three eventful days I knew even then represented the best weekend of my life.

[ER]

September 26, 1987 I went to the Columbus Zoo with my grandparents to see the bear habitat they just opened, and on the way up my grandpa told me that when he was a teenager volunteering at Union Terminal downtown during World War Two, he was told by an old woman there that in the 1890s there was a traveling showman who went from town to town with a wagon full of oddities he charged people to see, and one of the things he had was a live cobra. The woman told my grandpa that one day the cobra got loose and slithered into the underbrush in a west side neighborhood called Price Hill, and that though men went out that day with dogs and guns to find the cobra, they never located it, so for many years afterwards people were leery of going into the woods in that area, because no one was sure if the cobra might’ve somehow survived the winter and was still around. She said eventually people forgot about it but when she was a kid it was a huge deal.

Imagine if it had been a pregnant female….

[ER]

September 27, 1994 Grandpa got me from school and we pulled up his tomato plants from the garden and hung them in Grandma’s greenhouse to see if the last of them on the vine might ripen in there. He asked how Dana was getting on in her “bungalow” outside the college town, and I said she told me she loved having personal space. I said, “But I’m not sure she can afford it.”

To which Grandpa said, “Her mommy and daddy can.” Which showed me he was clued in to who was really funding Dana’s much heralded independence.

I had a funny thought I’d had before, that Grandpa had known Dana before me and had had days with her that I wasn’t around for, and I didn’t care if Dana said I was his favorite of all five of us, it was strange to be youngest and know others got to be with him before I existed.

I stayed for dinner; he made corncakes which he said were what you make on shovels when hunting in the snow.

Mom got me that evening and my mood went south because as much as I loved her, increasingly it was like she was just ….not there. Her personality was ‘in retreat,’ a school psychologist named Dr. Nora had told me, and I was aware that anymore I spent half my time either mad at her or trying to cheer her up, and it was getting harder to remember the mom she used to be. Where my Dad said she was “otherworldly,” I was starting to think that she had something wrong with her mental health.

When we got home it was just her and me and she didn’t say anything to me except, “Do your homework and eat something.” Then she went up and closed her bedroom door and I didn’t see her again that day.

So I did my homework and later brushed my teeth, knocked on her door and told her goodnight, and she didn’t say anything, so I went on to my room and called Brian and talked til I got sleepy, mostly telling him about how my mother had been behaving for a while, and he said to remember mental breakdowns were just another type of illness and I should talk to my dad about getting her help.
 
I asked if he thought she was losing track of reality, and he said, “I remember when you were in seventh grade and she picked you up after school she sure didn’t seem to understand the concept of time, and always left you standing there waiting every day.” (Which had been how he and I had met; even though he was a senior with a car, he’d stand with me so I didn’t have to wait alone.)

I asked if he’d talk to me til I fell asleep, which he did, and I woke up later in the night to a dead line, the phone still in my hand.

I looked down the hall and the light was on in my parents’ room, where my mom was alone.

I don’t know if I grasped it yet but the end was coming to life as it had always been.