On This Day: Your History

[ER]

December 29, 1988 This was the first entry I ever wrote in a diary that’s since grown by nearly 8,000 pages:

Thursday December 29, 1988 Went to the mall petted Lab. puppy and held genea pig. Did algebra in workbook. Mom's curling iron might be broken. Saw Wonderworks show Magic Box by CS Lewis. Had to get things out from under my bed. Mom said. Get to sleep in living room tonight with tree lights on.

[ER]

December 30, 2011 I had a nice talk with Barbara, my dad’s second wife, whom I actually really liked. She was telling me that growing up she’d go some summers to her mom’s cousin’s farm in the Bitterroot Valley of Montana, where they raised Palominos. I asked if Palominos were skittish like thoroughbreds and she said no they were as sweet as kittens. Later a Charlie Brown New Year’s special I’d never seen before was on, and while our baby son slept we were watching that with our three-year-old, but afterwards I turned on a recorded Big Bang Theory just as Sheldon let THE most massive fart, and my daughter suddenly burst out laughing like I had never heard her laugh before, she just rolled. My husband watched her with this disbelieving amused expression and said he very proud of her for comprehending fart humor at such a tender age.

[Alex]

31st December 2017.

I don't recall the details of why this happened, but Kristi challenged me to write the bible of The Hoff.

It started something like this... "Oh yeh in the beginning there was the name, and the name was Michael Knight and where Michael Knight went there was good, for he was a lone crusader against injustice. And he looked on his work and he saw the first series of Knight Rider was good.

And yea there was those who doubted the Hoff when he brought amongst us the Knight Rider. And he did bring unto the unbelievers Bay Watch. And there was much rejoicing for in Bay Watch there was much slow motion and much bounciness.

Woe to ye who worships at the false 80's TV alter for those who held Airwolf, Animan, Street Wolf or Bring 'Em Back Alive were doomed to eternal damnation, for their hearts were empty and held not the Hoff first!"

Following this, she swore an oath never to issue me another challenge.

[ER]

December 31, 2020 On the last day of the plague year, my family and I went to a mall-sized grocery store, and because I’d picked up a taste for it in Turkey, I got some ayran, salty, drinkable yogurt which Turkic herders and warriors used to almost live on. We stopped by Rapid Fire Pizza and while there saw a winter storm warning on the TV screen, so we headed home under dark clouds and cold dead-calm air, and I made it seem like we were fleeing from an approaching beast in snowstorm form, making Trinnie, my youngest, look behind us and squeal with delight.

I sent out a story I wrote in 1996, and heard a nice reply about it from the once and future published author to whom it was sent. I also sent out emails to people home and abroad wishing them well in 2021, and thanking them for the contributions they’d made to my life in 2020.

The children did not make it to midnight, but I did, keeping an eye on the ticker at the bottom of the screen telling of ice coming to encase us all, and talking to my mom as 2020 the Dismal and Dreadful passed off to be quarantined in the fabled Archipelago of Last Years. (The fate of all years, as revealed in the 1970s metaphysical documentary Rudolph’s Shiny New Year.)

After Mom got off the phone with me to start her morning over there, I ended up talking to my godson’s mother til the wee hours as we traipsed down memory lane through some of our many misadventures, like the time she was pregnant in 2007 and we took a sonogram picture of six unborn kittens, and convinced her husband they were having sextuplets. I’d worried she might’ve been mad with me because I was briefly back to giving her dad s**t, as I’m afraid I do from time to time, just too much baggage there sometimes, but I guess she didn’t know or was used to it because she was her normal chipper Éclair self.

I was awake until almost dawn, and watched the dark sky go phantom gray with morning, thinking good thoughts and having hopes for 2021, which did turn out to be a decent year in the Ellieverse.

[ER]

January 1, 1997 It wasn’t just hindsight, that day in my diary I actually wrote that I had an apprehensive feeling about the coming year, and I wasn’t wrong, 1997 would go on to be tough.

That morning Joe, Brian and Clare’s father, wouldn’t stop profusely thanking me for apparently saving his life after a bad prescription drug interaction on the thirtieth of December left him unconscious on his floor, where I found him. He said he’d never be out of my debt but I told him all I did was called 911 and followed the dispatcher’s instructions, as anybody would have. (It was annoying to try to dislike someone who was gushing thanks and praise at me.)

I talked Brian into leaving Joe alone for the first time in two days, and going over to hang out that night with my friend Mandy, and driving over I warned him her place often smelled like marijuana and dog poop, and Brian went, “Fitting for those times you want a dual whiff of the dark side.”

Maybe it was all the tension of the past few days but him saying that made me laugh.

What an unpredictable year it would be.

[ER]

January 2, 2022 Decided to see how long I could go without cussing in 2022, and the answer was one day plus fourteen hours and twenty-five minutes. It rained constantly all morning, like March, and the skies were dense with a heavy silver coloring. When the rain suddenly stopped, we went outside, and since I had a new phone, I let my son repeatedly shoot my old one with a .20 gauge. If there’s an afterlife for cellular technology, it’s going to take a serious miracle to see that thing pieced back together come Judgment Day. Showed off hitting targets with my tennis serves, and wasn’t nearly as good at it as I used to be….hence the sudden end of my “no cussing” experiment. Played a couple duels of Magic the Gathering with my daughter, then got out my Dishonored Tarot cards to show her, inspiring her to remind me that all forms of divination were a mortal sin. I reminded her in return that damnation was a bargain deal, since God can only damn you once, and she high-fived me. I do love passing on useful life hacks to my offspring.

The cards then went on to tell her she would make good grades, not fight with her siblings, do her chores, drive safely when she got a car, be polite to her mother, and avoid boys til at least college.

(It was worth a try.)

[ER]

January 3, 2005 Still in Ireland as I had been since the month before, I called home and told my friend Mark happy twenty-third birthday, and he razzed me about having been detained overnight by police in Dublin on New Year’s over something stooopid.

It was also my maternal cousin Donna’s nineteenth birthday and she was into body sculpting/bodybuilding, and basically looked like a Bowflex model. At her flat north of the Liffey, she was telling me about this guy we both knew named Orlando, with whom I’d been hanging out over there, and she said, “Be careful of that one, El, he basically used to be a rent boy and still may have some private clients.”

I was like, “Whhhhat?!” This dude did not ding my gaydar at all.

I went to a club with Donna and her muscle-laden boyfriend that night for her birthday and aside from locals the place had Germans, Poles, English, a Nigerian woman, only one American that I knew of, me, but it was like the UN in there. Orlando came in and sat down by me as I was tipsily telling everyone that if I ran a club I’d have lockers for women to put their purses in, and while what Donna had told me about Orlando galloped across my brain, the first thing Orlando said to me was:

“Did you know James Joyce used to fook an aristocratic Englishwoman in a flat just down the lane?”

Uh, no, I hadn’t.

He said, “Yeah, the crazy fooking lady claimed the son she had a year later was ‘spiritually’ Joyce’s child, though biologically her husband’s, and every year on the child’s birthday, James Joyce sent the kid over a present.”

Orlando had a head full of all kinds of weird information, a trait I liked in a person.

[Alex]

3rd January 2006.

Got back today, although I didn't get home until after dark. I had only been away four days, but Bev seemed sullen and resentful. I couldn't tell if this was because I'd been away because I'd only phoned her once during that time or for some other reason (much later I would find out the reason. Her time of the month was late). When I was unpacking she saw that I'd picked up some protection, something she wasn't happy about(?), but I figured we'd been having unprotected sex a lot, and although I hadn't asked her she did not seem to be on the pill. Me getting these would later on (about 6 weeks or so) be the source of an argument. Much to my pleasant surprise, she had actually did some housework while I was away instead of just sitting playing warcraft until she fell asleep at her computer. I had already decided not to give her my new mobile phone number as I wasn't sure how things were going to go and I'd seen how she'd treated her other ex's, just starting fights with them for no other reason than to be the centre of attention. The phone would live at work and I didn't let any of my friends know I had it in case any of them let slip. This would turn out to be a good decision. The kids seemed happy to see me back and told me what they'd bought with the money I'd given them for christmas.

It was becoming increasingly clear that breaking my rule of not getting involved with someone I was trying to help had been a huge mistake. I had started to consider if splitting up with Bev would be the right option, although in that case I'd still have her living with me.

3rd January 1997.

Decided not to go back to the course today and called in sick. It seemed incredibly stupid to go back for one day before the weekend. Eric wasn't happy about me taking the extra day, but he couldn't really do anything. Besides I was on track to be the first student to actually complete the course which would look good on him. Or at least not as bad as having a course running for however many years without anyone completing it was. I had a crate of beer that I steadily worked my way through while Stewart and Elizabeth watched kids shows. Played a bit of Civ 2 and wrote up more stuff for the Werewolf: The Apocalypse game I was running. This seemed like a better use of my time than the alternative.

I wonder if anyone else completed the course after I left?

[ER]

January 4, 2005 That night in Dublin we went to hear a hot cinnamon-haired fiddler named Naomi Niles play at the Ogre’s Pit, and I had more to drink than my body strictly approved of, since I didn’t drink often. The aforementioned Orlando, who seemed immune to the effects of alcohol and who could knock the stuff back and be pinpoint-sober, said he’d hold my hair for me if I yakked, and I said I wasn’t going to yak, and didn’t, but by night’s end I wasn’t feeling as great as I had at the start. Most people get a 1:1 feel good/feel bad ratio with alcohol, but I have always seemed to tip toward a 1:3 “feel bad” mix when I’ve tippled.

While I was sitting there in the Ogre’s Pit feeling questionable, Orlando said, “Doing this is like magic when you’re feeling wasted.” Then he lifted my shirt up in the back and began to kiss down my spine.

I had two men professing love for me back home and there I was letting a possible Irish whore kiss down my back. My life definitely resided in strange territory.

I also remember Orlando’s weird story for that night---he told me one each time we hung out together---was about his Irish mother moving to Canada as a teenager on her own, to take up living with an old man who agreed to support her there, and how he, Orlando, grew up in maritime Canada til they finally returned to Ireland in his late boyhood. He said after the old man dumped his mother they were so poor they lived in one room and his mother would work on a farm beside migrants laboring during potato harvests. He said, “That was how we lived. That and my mother’s discreet prostitution.”

He’d just told me this sad tale of his origins, but all I could think of was how if my cousin Donna was right about Orlando’s past it meant he’d been a second-generation sex worker.

[ER]

January 5, 2000 Woke up at my cousin Dana’s house after hardly any sleep to a call from my employers ordering me in for “at least” seven straight on-site days of no outside contact working in a windowless building on a project in Virginia I reallllly did not want to be part of, and I had ninety minutes to get to the flight, which was sixty miles away. Angry and half-asleep I stepped on Dana’s “2000” glasses with the two inside zeros being eyeholes, and Godzilla’d them underfoot, then fled into the icy pre-dawn grayness before she woke up and found out, so I didn’t get to tell anyone there goodbye, even baby Tyler. The news as I drove up was about a big train wreck in Norway that invited speculation that it was caused by a late-occurring Y2K software malfunction. It was also a flight with lots of turbulence, and all the wobbly way I wondered if Y2K had caused the train wreck, might it also affect airplanes? There were times I despised my employers for all they put me through.

[ER]

January 6, 2009 Got into a yelling match with my literary agent in which I told him, “Rothman, you really are an anal-retentive Jew.” I was able to say this with more or less a clean conscience because he had just referred to himself that way----“I’m an anal-retentive Jew"----so I was just agreeing. We had been fighting because he told me I had to finish a manuscript and I reminded him I had an eight-week-old baby, to which he said, “Then it’s the perfect time to write, since you have nothing else to do with your time off.” Childless fella, obviously. Looking back I should have thanked the sun, moon, and stars I had practically sleepwalked into having an agent, when now I know how hard it can be to get representation at all. I didn’t recognize sheer beginner’s luck when I had it. (Of course considering how things turned out…)

There were as of that morning two weeks left in the Bush Presidency, and as much as I felt he’d betrayed us, I was also dreading the coming Obama administration, which I thought was going to be so disastrous that 2008 had been the first time in my life I did not vote for a Democrat. (Not just at the Presidential level, at any level.) Ultimately though I disagreed with much that Obama did in his eight years in office, he was the best President of the century when it came to his dealings with federal agencies, because unlike Bush, with his stubborn tunnel vision, or Trump, with his incompetent meddling (Trump used to tell people with forty years’ experience in the field, “Listen while I teach you something.”) he was respectfully laisse-faire.

[ER]

January 7, 2006 I took six-year-old Tyler and his almost four-year-old little brother CD to see PBS’ Dragon Tales done live on stage, downtown. I was still buzzing from the decision I’d made that morning that I was not going to renew the lease on the apartment I’d lived in since coming back from Ireland the year before, and was going to move into the house my grandfather left me, and which was finally mine to occupy after a long court battle. Once that decision was made I knew it was the right one and felt at peace, so I invited my friend Gina, who was back after a year in Merida, Mexico, to dwell in the house with me, which she eventually did through the year til she got engaged and moved on. The boys and I got ice creams coming back, since nothing cries out for ice cream like a cold January night. Driving home I had something cool happen when my headlights reflected off what I assume was low-lying mist of some kind, creating for just a moment a facsimile of a ghost floating above the deserted, dark road, in the instant before I drove straight through it.

[Alex]

9th January 2014.

I was working out of 15 sqn while our own building was being renovated. I received several boxes of paperwork from Afghanistan, which by itself was not unusual. However, when I opened the first box I found a combat smock shoved in on top of all the paperwork. Removing it I discovered it had a flight sergeants rank tab on top. When I opened up the next box, everyone else turned around to stare when I declared "There is a pair of shreddies (underpants) in this one!"

The other boxes contained other items of clothing and I chuckled at the thought of some poor flight sergeant running around naked, trying to find his clothes. I worked out how long it would have taken the paperwork to arrive back in the UK, found out what flight sergeants had been out there around that time and by the end of the day, had worked out who the clothes belonged to. I then sent him a note saying "We have your clothes. If you ever want to see them again then bring a box of non-sequentially numbered doughnuts to the 15 sqn docs office."

I knew the flight sergeant fairly well having done some courses alongside him. He was a really nice guy. It came as a total shock to me a couple of years later when I found out he had very suddenly died from cancer. He'd beaten it previously, but apparently, it had returned much more aggressively. For the life of me, I cannot remember what his name was although I remember what he looked like,

Regardless of that, this still rates in my top three oddest days in work.

[ER]

January 8, 1995 The ice storm that’d crippled our city for a day was just slush and puddles, so my Aunt Christie came over, upset, and had a depressing talk with my dad about my cousin Allie being in a stupor from abusing drugs again after, well, not quite getting clean, but at least laying off them for a while. Already upset by that news, I would go on to tear-up that night after seeing a story on TV about a Girl Scout leader who succumbed to cancer after trying to finish her year with her troop, and she had all these crafts planned and had collected tennis balls to make fetch toys to donate to an animal shelter. I found it a heartbreaking story. Such a bleak day, that one.

[ER]

January 9, 1996 In the aftermath of what some said was the deepest one-day snowfall in area history---it was up to my middle thighs---we were off school, and so I spent the night with my friend Gina, and the next day, for probably the last time, we did something we used to do for a goof when we were maybe ten to thirteen, we slid in together under her bed so we were sandwiched between the floor and the box springs in a space that felt very shadowy and private, and we talked furtively about secret things. After that I donned my one-piece snowsuit, though I’d mostly outgrown it, and stayed outside for the afternoon. It wasn’t all that cold and the snow was perfect for sledding, sending us downhill at I bet thirty miles an hour. Someone even made a bonfire that melted a huge pond in the drifts. Just as it was probably the last time I slid under Gina’s bed with her, I think that was the last time I “played in the snow” in quite the same way I always had all my life. Something happens at some point and going out in the cold like that that loses a good deal of its appeal, but that day it was still as fun as it ever was, and when I finally came in red-faced and half-frozen, Gina and I curled up on the sofa with her little brother and watched what Gina thought was a hellishly disturbing move called Heavenly Creatures, by a director I’d never heard of til then, Peter Jackson. It was the sort of day I don’t think I would ever have again, like a final visit with my fading childhood, and I wouldn’t mind going back to that day, if such things were possible.