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.

[ER]

September 28, 1994 As PIL's Rise played on 97X on the way to my school "Saint Fascist of Assbeating" I tried to talk to my mom, but she was like, "Everything's fine." By this time even self-centered teenaged me knew that wasn't true.

So I was not in an untroubled frame of mind walking into school, I was worried and frustrated, and there standing in my way at my locker was a belligerent girl named Andrea, who was rich and ugly and queen bee of her world and liked giving other people a hard time. With her were some of her sycophantic bought-and-paid-for friends whom everyone called "the b***h Posse." Andrea was blocking me on purpose and normally I'd just let her be that way but my frustrations about Mom created a Celtic moment, so I set my books down and walked over to her, seriously p**sed off.

The only physical confrontation I'd ever had was been with my cousin Mags when I was seven, but as I'd eventually also discover about sex, there are times when instinct takes over, and I felt a cold rage grab hold of me. I was two inches taller than Andrea and in much better shape, but she was a beefy girl who had at least twenty pounds on me. I was betting she was a bully, not a fighter, so I heard myself say, "How'd you like your nose broken?"

Andrea was not ready. She got this look like...somebody's challenging me?

It felt very good to be in her face after putting up with her bulls**t for years, so I shoved her hard and was surprised when she actually hit the floor. She got right up, but instead of coming at me she hurried away, crying, leaving me standing there with an unfulfilled desire to smash my fist into her face, which I have no doubt I was about to do.

Rapidly I came back down from my berserk state, hands trembling, and thought, well, that's it, after years of being one of the good kids, I'm in trouble now.

I walked in homeroom and didn't even put my stuff away because I figured I'd be going home for the day, and sure enough on the intercom, "Come to the office..."

I think the principal probably did a double take hearing my name associated with trouble when Andrea ran down crying like a whale. To me he was like, "With zero tolerance on school violence this year I could expel you for this."

Since a boy forty-five minutes south of us named Clay Shrout had shot his family and held his class at Ryle High School at gunpoint, school administration been strict about being on top of any violence, and I sat there thinking about getting sent to public school after they kicked me out, with less homework, a new reputation, no more daily chapel...and I realized it sounded pretty good, honestly.

In the end I wound up with two days of After School Assignment, which was supposed to begin the next afternoon but Jeff, my program advisor, protested that he needed me for the Archdiocesan AP evaluations, which proved to me I was valuable and the school would not have kicked me out over one incident no matter what the principal claimed.

The worst that arose was listening to a stressed-out Jeff emote that I had damaged my permanent record and endangered my chances of getting into the best college, the holy grail of his life. When I showed no remorse he guided me down the hall to see the counselor, who acted shocked out of all proportion and asked if everything was all right at home.

I remembered what Mom had told me an hour earlier and repeated it to her: "Everything's fine."

It was a comforting lie.

[ER]

September 29, 2001 Sometimes my dad's spirit of adventure shows where I got mine. I was home that day and he proposed we go out to the country and find a pocket knife he lost camping as a kid, so off we went.

What had been an open field in the 1960s was by the turn of the century a veritable jungle of undergrowth and small trees and it was hard to see the ground, let alone to move a metal detector., so we soon called it an adventure, gave up, and the knife will likely remain lost til some future someone finds it as an artifact.

Driving back we stopped at a Big Boy chain called Frisch's, and while we waited Dad told me in a matter of fact way that the US was about ten days away from invading Afghanistan.

I told him it was almost like some script was being written in a back room, and all the rest of us were being pulled along.

He just shrugged.

[ER]

September 30:

1986: My neighbor Michelle spent the night and we watched ABC's lineup, Who's the Boss, Growing Pains, and even Moonlighting. When I think of '80s TV, I remember that night.

1994: Because of shoving Andrea at school, my parents told me I had to stay home while they went to a classic rock laser show at the planetarium.

1995: For the first time I found out two people being furiously angry can transform into a torrid sexual encounter.

2006: On a nice fall night I invited people over for a bonfire in the woods, and Landon's Leningrad-born friend Andrei told stories about living in the USSR. Later he would prove a letch but at the time I still liked him.

2016: My cousin Celia asked if I would be her son Derrick's godmother. I did but have not set eyes on that child in years.

2020: Finished Ken Follett's "historical" novel The Evening and the Morning filled with modern people dressed in Medieval clothes, espousing 21st century ideals. (For better Medieval characters, read the great Zoe Oldenbourg.)

2021: My daughter and I watched John Iffort become the eleventh bishop of Covington, Kentucky.

2022: Had coconut shrimp at a Saigon-themed fusion bistro, figuring if I was going to eat something's one-time baby, I might as well make it a species that probably had no views on spending its afterlife in a spicy cream sauce; then saw Murder on the Orient Express on stage.

[ER]

October 1:

1989 My neighbor gave me $5.00 for cleaning her yard, and (blah) I put it in a church poor box.

1994: In my last great day on the tennis courts, I played three grueling matches and won in straight sets. Three weeks later it would all end.

1995: Asked a lawyer if I could get CO status and not have to go to Mass at school. He said no.

2000: 102 fever, coughing, bronchitis, and my employer told me to report-in anyway. The germs I spread are probably still circling the planet.

2003: Invited to share a freaky personal incident, I told of seeing Jerry Rubin just before his death. (He was in town promoting an energy drink called Go!)

2005: Writing my autobiography in poems, I stalled recounting my teens because I couldn't find a rhyme for "debauched."

2007: Went to a three-program lecture on Van Gough.

2008: Eight months pregnant I went to see Alanis Morissette. Came back tired and leaned against Landon while he read me a Michael Swanwick story.

2016: Owing to work, I had to miss hearing Doris Kearns Goodwin lecture downtown.

2020: Saw a double rainbow.

2022: Because it was his birthday, I called a boy I knew in college named Greg and told him: "I think I liked the person I was when I was around you more than I liked any aspect of myself at the time. I think you brought out good things in me."  He said me telling him that was probably the best present he'd get for his birthday. Guess his family were stingy with gifts, huh?

[ER]

October 2, 1995 I drove my friend Gina and me to a megamall (now abandoned) north of the city, where we roamed a while and played indoor miniature golf, and whenever boys would talk to us, Gina would kind of melt and flee, being a supernova of shyness. 

Normally I'd support her being the way she was, but that day after she retreated from yet another boy, I grabbed her arm and dragged her to a wall of mirrored tiles outside an elevator and told her to look at herself. She was beautiful. If the year before people had said skater Nancy Kerrigan looked like Snow White, Gina looked like Snow White's more beautiful sister. I told her she had great hair, perfect skin, a cute face, a nice body (she almost slapped me when I told her that, it embarrassed her so much) and told her she was fine to be however she chose to be, but she should also know about a million guys would leap at the chance to be in her life.

I told her all that and she squirmed and recoiled and blushed, but inside I also knew it was likely best she kept being bashful because I also intuited that she was the sort who'd get mixed up with exactly the wrong sort of guy. (Which is exactly what did happen when she finally got close to one a decade on, my dear friend who stayed a virgin for so long.)

[ER]

October 3, 1995 OJ Simpson, clearly bloodstained as Cromwell, was actually found not guilty on this day, and we were allowed to watch the verdict being read live. The jury had come back mere minutes after beginning deliberations, and when their quick return was announced at school, my teacher observed, "Now there's a jury that's been sequestered for a year wanting to go the hell home." I for one was shocked OJ walked on a double murder rap, but maybe even more shocked to hear our Eagle Scout teacher say "hell."

[Alex]

3rd October 2012.

We were having a week-long visit to Disneyland, the first of what would be many visits with Kristi's family. My favourite picture of all of our visits was taken this day. I am walking along holding my nephew's hand with the pair of us wearing mouse ears. The shot was taken from behind. I also surprised my sister-in-law by simply sitting on her when I couldn't find somewhere to sit down. The park was all decorated for Halloween and this would quickly come to be my favourite time to visit. I still have the shorts and tee-shirt I was wearing that day.

Then again, I have a lot of tee-shirts.

[ER]

October 4, 2022 I found out a man I knew named Cal died in Miami at the unlikely age of eighty-six. Cal would tell you stories if you bought him a bottle of something, and you were never sure whether he was exaggerating or lying outright, though it was a fact that at least some of his accounts were true, because he had ways of verifying them. Likely his stories were part of the great narrative tradition of what David Sedaris accurately terms "real-ish."

Cal had pictures of his younger self with various noteworthy people, like Ernest Hemingway, and Elmore Leonard, and John F. Kennedy, Burt Reynolds, and Miami mob boss Santo Trafficante, and had anecdotes about them and many others. The thing was Cal worked for the CIA (he really did) in an era when the Cold War kept things Wild West crazy, and claimed he came close to killing Castro in a hit involving potent heroin and a cute young boy Castro liked to take to a hideaway high in the Sierra del Rosario. ("I promised President Johnson Castro's cock," Cal told me, and I thought Cal, you should have said you promised LBJ Castro's Johnson.)

Another of his stories was about saving a female asset from KGB hitmen in Bogotá where the CIA hid her after she'd poisoned a Soviet general in Prague, and how he and the woman laid on the floor behind a statue in a church for a day and a half, barely moving, dying of thirst in 100-degree heat, til they could get out. Rather less glamorously he told me he wasn't able to pee the entire time and wound up with a bladder infection that required two weeks of antibiotics to cure.

He had stories about operations that would never fly today, like recruiting a Hungarian asset who agreed to put a teddy bear wired for sound in his home, and then after Cal learned the man betrayed him, switching it out for one wired with explosives.

He had stories of beating up crooked cops in Latin America, and putting venomous snakes in a truck belonging to a Panamanian police captain, and of paying prostitutes to let themselves be infected with "VD" so they'd pass it to "the bad guys," of storing explosives in the trunk of his Lincoln Continental for weeks til they were needed on a boat heading to Cuba, and of him having sex with "a KGB call girl" and not telling her til afterward he was onto her, and of eavesdropping on NASA big wigs to see who among them were selling the USSR secrets about our space program. (His answer: lots of them.)

He said: "It is completely bulls**t that people say we never went to the moon, because I know we did multiple times."

He had stories and stories and stories, saying the KGB tried six times to kill him, and of how well he got along with the Miami mob, who were at war with the FBI but in bed with the CIA out of a mutual hatred for Castro, who'd cost them a fortune by running them out of Havana. Cal was both a legend and a slightly humored old-timer that none of us ever quite caught in lies but sometimes suspected he was as deft a raconteur as his novelist friend Elmore Leonard: whom Cal hinted "may" have based books on stories Cal told him.

In any case Cal was an original, a fun old guy, and whatever else he was, one of the best storytellers I have ever known.

[ER]

October 5, 1995 Pope John Paul II was visiting the US, talk of which dominated that day's chapel in school, so in theology class I asked what was the difference in Soviet schools having pictures of Lenin all over, and us having pictures of the Pope in every classroom. Wasn't that just a matter of ideological differences in the same cult of personality? Without quite explaining what the difference was, the teacher, who to his credit encouraged free expression, strongly disagreed.

I went to a costume fitting after school to see if the frontier dress, circa 1840, I was supposed to wear was the right size so I could act as an interpreter at a big event on the city's riverfront called Tall Stacks, which saw dozens of historic steamboats come to the public landing amid a days-long festival that was held about twice a decade. It did fit and I would go on to have a good time milling through the event playing the role of a girl from past times resisting all efforts, both cordial and luridly salacious, to make me break character.

[ER]

October 6:

1990: When the director of downtown's Contemporary Arts Center was acquitted on obscenity charges in the Mapplethorpe case, some friends of my aunt's threw a party, where I got to help out.

1992: I asked my grandpa about his and my father's relationship issues, and he said, "If I had to raise your dad again I'd recognize he had his own path to walk, and not have tried to make him change roads." He also said he was proud of my dad, and I wondered if he'd ever told him so.

1994: Endured witnessing a presentation by the National Honor Society, which made me determined I would never accept any invitation they ever issued to me.

1997: Was in a group that night on the banks of the canal that inspired parts of IT, while a bottle of Southern Comfort got passed around, and I took a sip, which zoomed unpleasantly to my head and made me decline seconds. I am just not a drinker.

1999: At a distance my friends Lisa and Amy made fun of an overweight boy on our campus, and I walked away from them, leaving them to scamper after me asking what was the harm if he couldn't hear them? I later showed them the undertaker scene in Gilbert Grape and said, "That's what you two reminded me of."

2007: Landon and I saw an exhibit of Roman decorations at the Dayton Art Institute, and it was nice how it focused on both religious art and everyday items.

2017: I asked Clare's father, who claimed his battles with addiction involved confronting literal demons, if he ever felt his late son's presence, and after pausing a long moment, he rather sadly said no.

2018: I finished Democracy in America, which I began reading in 1997.

2020: After passing through a multitude of on-site health screenings, I took my family to a big aquarium south of the city, open again during Covid.

2021: Woke up to the happy news that a biopsy revealed my friend Mandy did not have cancer.