On This Day: Your History

[ER]

September 2, 1994 Driving to see Forrest Gump together at the start of Labor Day weekend, in the car Brian asked me to tell him something profound, so I said someone someday would be the last human being to hear a Beethoven symphony.

"That's pretty good, Evelyn," he said, always calling me by my birth name, as his sister and father and nephew still do.

I was reading The Spoon River Anthology, so the topic of death was in my thoughts, and I asked if he ever heard that when they opened the casket of Pope John XXIII, somehow his body had flipped upside down, which was held to be physically impossible.

"It was said to be a sign he was in Hell," I added.

He thought it was my Irish genes which disposed me to talk about things like that, and along those lines recited a gloom-laden Sylvia Plath poem called Edge, which was composed days before she took her life.

I told him what a complainer I thought Plath was, blaming others instead of doing anything proactive, though the shoe filled with blood part of The Bell Jar was admittedly funny, and added, "Suicide is arguably the worst way to free up your social calendar."

He cracked a smile at that and said if he had to guess Plath didn't want to die, she probably figured she'd pass out and be found on the floor and it'd shake up her husband, Ted Hughes, and he'd quit having affairs with his students. Then he said, "But for the love of God, never say that in a class full of feminists with no sense of humor about their dead icons."

Forrest Gump was OK and we weren't out late.

[ER]

September 3:

1992: In the twilight I stood with my neighbor Mrs. Glenn and watched this spinning circle of about a hundred starlings fly around and around for close to fifteen minutes. Mrs. Glenn said she'd never seen anything like it and to this day I haven't either.

1993: Read about a quarter of Nightmares and Dreamscapes, didn't think it was Stephen King's best writing, and wondered to my sorrow if I was already outgrowing him.

2000: After months of dormancy and dysfunction rooted in grief, Dana dragged me to Riverfest, a big fireworks show, telling me, "You're alive, little cousin, so live!" To show off in front of her friends, when I got there she gave me this semi-lesbian-esque kiss which I didn't really appreciate, but she was drunk and liked drama, so whatever, she'd done that before, her milieu being all about shock value.

2004: Because we used to talk about everything, my fifteen year old Irish cousin Celia told me she'd had sex for the first time, doing it mostly out of curiosity, and wasn't impressed. When she said it was with another fifteen year old, I thought that was likely why she wasn't impressed.

2010: Possibly related to Hurricane Earl dissipating to our east, the wind that evening did a strange thing, changing direction rapidly, blowing my hair one way and then another, sometimes at once.

2020: I had an irritating episode of "how stupid can some people be" when a woman in a store argued with me that the Scottish flag was another form of Confederate flag, and when I tried to show her online that it wasn't, she said she didn't want to see my "fake news and misinformation."

[ER]

September 4, 1997 It may be an exaggeration to say that my college roommate, Jackie, saved my life, because I had a way out of homelessness if I wished, but she did show great kindness toward me and got me out of living in my car by asking me to share her apartment with her, needing a roommate as she did. It was especially trusting considering she'd only known me a few days, and I could have been a machete murderess. I was also fresh off walking the Hundred-Mile Wilderness on the AT (where I heard Princess Diana died) when she contacted me, so we hadn't seen each other across the last part of summer, yet it was me she thought of to offer the room based on only a few past interactions.

Thing was, I was a blank slate to her, and like others she assumed I was worse off than I was, and for a while I let her go on thinking that, only unraveling my past little by little as the first few weeks of the term went on, wondering as I did if she was going to get mad at me for not telling her everything up front and then casting me out again, since for the first year the lease on our place was in her name, not mine.

There are people who come into your life and leave it changed for the better by what they do for you, and few ever did as much for me as Jackie did in the late summer of 1997, giving me a place to live, instant friends through her own social circle, and even introducing me to her family, who invited me to their house for holidays. For over a quarter century she has been a loyal friend to me, all arising from some chance meetings which could have gone a million other ways than they did had she not been the open-hearted soul she was and is, and I'll always love her.

[ER]

September 5, 2001 I got invited to a Riverfest fireworks party at a loft downtown, and all day I didn't plan to go, but did at the last minute, and that was where I met the man I married. My first impression was that he was a well-dressed, charismatic sort who kept looking at me with a strange intensity from across the room while his date sitting on the arm of a sofa beside him tried to crucify me with a venomous gaze, fully aware he was focusing on me. He came over to talk and basically ignored his date for the rest of the night and has told me many times since that he felt drawn to me from the first second he saw me and that "there was no way I was going to resist coming over and meeting you." Few men have ever had a more protracted path to a relationship than he did with me over the next year because I was still very much in post-loss mode. I sometimes wonder if I had not gone to that party, would my life have been completely changed, different path through the years, different children, or are we fated to meet some people, and if I had not met Landon there, would it have happened somewhere else soon after? Ironically, we'd later figure out that every time I'd go visit my grandparents growing up, I'd drive past the street where he lived, and once we were at the same event at the college he attended, he just starting there, me visiting with my high school AP group.  Funny...

[ER]

September 6, 2007 After they had their first child, my proud hippie-nerd friends enthusiastically invited me over to watch their birth videos, which to be honest were of less interest to me than highlights of a paint-drying tournament. Additionally I'd find out the videos were not what you'd call "tastefully edited." Or "edited."  Or "tasteful." An hour and change later I possessed familiarity with my friend's anatomy I never wanted as she slow-mo'd her baby's wet blue-gray head emerging from her nether-region. I also felt aurally blasted after a Foley-like soundtrack of shrieks, grunts, and whimpers, and those were just the noises my friend made. OK, I knew this was a wondrous event, no arguments, but sometimes the beauty in such things lies in one's personal appreciation, and not all miracles are meant to be shared. (Hint: There's a reason obstetricians are paid big bucks, though how they bring themselves to go have lunch after a delivery mystifies me.)  Before leaving their apartment I thanked them for thinking enough of me to include me in celebrating the commemoration of what was probably the biggest, happiest event in their shared lives, and then went home and Googled "how to forget seeing your friend's lady parts."

[ER]

September 7, 2019 Talk about packing a lot into one day!

It began on the east coast, where Hurricane Dorian was making the weather unstable, and I woke up after barely any sleep for two days, tired but needing to DH a flight, having spent the last two days participating in an event called Spookfest, that is likely not what it sounds like. (Its motto is: "What happens at Spookfest probably shouldn't have.")

Couldn't sleep on the bumpy flight, got to my destination, which was my usual workplace on an Air Force base, slept three hours on my office sofa before driving sixty miles to get home, blaring offensively bad music to keep me awake, then my family and I all went to a concert venue by the river east of downtown to see The Empire Strikes Back on a giant screen, with the soundtrack performed live by the local pops orchestra.

Coming back my youngest thought it'd be funny to keep me awake by scream-singing "100 Bottles of Coke on the Wall," and we stopped at Wendy's very late and got unimpressively re-heated loaded fries for everyone, then I fell into bed, only to get up at 4:45 to take Daisy to the hellishly early Mass she liked going to so she could be with my godson and Clare and Clare's dad, with whom I'd made peace a few years before after staying angry at him for years and years. (For what I still think was a pretty damned good reason.)

I managed to stay awake for that but leaving to go back home I said to her, "Hey, Diz, you drive us and I'll sleep." She was strangely agreeable to the idea for a ten-year-old. Yeah, for the ideas I come up with I'm either a great mother or a terrible one, I don't know which.

[ER]

September 8, 1991 My parents took me to our local (and sadly long-defunct) planetarium which from my youngest days I loved visiting. At this presentation they showed the Tunguska blast on the domed ceiling overhead, and simulated a Texas meteor storm in the 1800s so bright you could read by its light. Then after the science segments they played tracks off Dark Side of the Moon, and did a laser show complete with a lunatic dancing inside someone's head: the scariest concept in rock and roll. To make the day even better, we stopped off at Graeter's for ice creams on the way home.

I grew up with a great mom and dad....

[ER]

September 9, 2001 Two days before everything changed I was at King's Island, up on a one-third replica of the Eiffel Tower, staring at the distant pavement and for some reason my thoughts passed back to 1993, when terrorists tried to topple the World Trade Centers, and I thought of the sheer horror of such a thing, of people falling to their deaths from so high in the air. That was on Sunday, and on Tuesday morning as I watched that terrible day unfold, I flashed back to thinking those thoughts, amplified at the time by being hundreds of feet off the ground, and I felt all the more overwhelmed.

[Alex]

9th September 2018.

I due to be working late when I got a panicked text message from Kristi. Our cat had brought home a mouse and she couldn't bring herself to remove it from the house. I had to put out a shout on facebook to ask if anyone could take it outside since I couldn't get home. One of the neighbours did eventually come to Kristi's rescue.

[ER]

September 10, 1999 I was at a college party waiting to drive my drunk friends home, walking the fine line that separated Good Samaritan from "one taken advantage of," when I noticed a hard-partying TKE frat boy staring with a lascivious cockiness, which I ignored at first but it got persistent until he approached me, and I thought, OK what's the least messy way to shoot this one down? But instead of hitting on me he swayed in that drunk rocking motion and cryptically said, "I remember now. You were my Jew."

And that was so puzzling I didn't know what to say. I was used to some among the cerulean folk of New England holding my Midwestern origins in undertones of condescension, but you were my Jew was new to my experience.

I asked, "Pardon?"

Only to have him sagely repeat: "Yeah, you were my Jew. I remember you now."

Two things registered. The first was that there was an unmistakable hint of sexual achievement in the TKE-ers boast along with the leer he was devoting to my breasts, the second was puzzlement that anyone would think I was Jewish. I wanted to blurt out, "Do I look Jewish?" but of course that would've implied Jews had a stereotypical appearance, which, ahem....but still I knew I did not look Jewish, so that puzzled me more than this inebriated stranger's apparent conviction that he'd had physical knowledge of me at some point in the past, which barring a scenario involving an erasure of my memory and extreme reorganization of my taste in men, he had not.

Without explanation though he laughed a hard drunk laugh and moved away toward his friends glancing back at me, and I thought, if I don't stop him and ask him what he thinks he's talking about, I will spend the rest of my life wondering about this, but already knowing I wasn't going to chase down a wasted frat boy to try to get coherent dialog from him, so I accepted a destiny of ignorance in the face of mystery, and still wonder about his remark and what it meant, and why he thought I was some Jewish girl unfortunate enough to have become a notch on his soiled bedpost.

[ER]

September 11, 2001 I'd been working a lot of late nights because of a time zone difference on our project and so was home asleep when Mom called and I heard her on the answering machine saying to get up, that something terrible was going on, a jet had flown into the World Trade Center and part of the building was crushed-in and burning.

When you wake up to a message like that surreality takes over, and I picked up the cordless phone I kept next to my bed and just asked, "What?"

She said, "Turn on the TV. Turn on any channel."

I did and all the channels I flipped through showed masses of smoke pouring from the most iconic skyscrapers in America, places I'd been, places I'd liked, places I planned to go back to sometime. I snapped awake.

I stayed on the phone with my mom while standing in the living room in an indigo robe I'd hastily put on, and watched in horror as the news broke about a jet hitting the Pentagon, and then another crashing into a field in Pennsylvania, and about first one tower collapsing, then a second, at which time the news anchor said: "Clearly America is under attack."

Remember when we used to think the new millennium would be the Age of Aquarius?

[Trevor]

September 11, 2001: the second worst day in my 56 years on this planet. 

[ER]

September 12:

1989: In fifth grade got out of class along with every US school kid for President Bush's anti-drug talk.

1995: Dad said instead of hiring a tutor he'd go over my calculus with me. He did higher math like it was child's play.

1999: Went to mass with Jackie and took a walk on a warm day. Got Bag of Bones, watched Agassi win the US Open, and found out Dana, pregnant with Tyler, was having labor pains.

2008: Had a nasal pore extrusion at a salon while watching Hurricane Ike hit Galveston, where anyone remaining faced "certain death."

2014: Surprised my godson by having lunch with him, and he asked if I was ever going to call him by name, so I did, but almost choked, like a dybbuk reciting the Talmud.

2017: The death throes of Hurricane Irma passed over us. No biggie.

2021: My twice-vaccinated father had a 102 fever and Covid-19.

2022: Got sued after years of not paying our water bill. Since we had a well I didn't see the point but ended up paying anyway.

[ER]

September 13, 1997 It was the day of Mother Theresa's funeral in Kolkata, and I couldn't help but wonder what a woman who spent her life helping the poor would have thought of such a lavish event. I probably would have let the coverage pass unwatched except the girl who'd herself shown a Mother Theresa-like sense of kindness in inviting me to share her two-bedroom flat with her, my roommate of two weeks, Jackie, had a fascination with Roman Catholicism, so we viewed the ceremony together, and she asked me questions about why certain rituals were done. The death of this humble superstar fed into Jackie seeing glamour in the Catholic Church, and she asked me all about my school and going to mass and confession, keeping Lent, and truly reacted like I was telling her about something otherworldly, mystical, beautiful, when to me it was mundane, something I never quite accepted as true, and frankly something against which I'd eventually rebelled. One day she would convert, something I'm not sure would have happened if it were not for the events of that morning.

[ER]

September 14, 1989 The Rolling Stones came to town and played Riverfront Stadium. My parents went, and thousands of people who didn't pay for a ticket lined downtown bridges to catch a free listen to the band making a stop on its Steel Wheels tour, and even though I wasn't into the Stones at all and knew little about them, my Mom brought me home a concert t-shirt which had a tongue made of metal wheels. I kept it til I was sixteen, then, to my present shame, threw it away because I was mad at her.