On This Day: Your History

[ER]

May 27, 1989 Went with my mom to get our hair styled, and felt very grown up. Out in the parking lot a young man of about twenty was playing acoustic guitar in front of a worse for wear late-‘70s car, with his guitar case open for donations most passersby didn’t seem inclined to provide him, but I put my only three dollars in, and my mom gave him a five, and she asked if he knew “Why Worry” by Dire Straits, her motto and sometimes theme song, which he picked out competently for her, so my mom clapped for him and I did too. He said: “Need gas to get to WKU in Bowling Green, where I got a cooking job, and I don’t mind playing to get there.” She gave him a ten on top of the five and told him she hoped he made it. As we walked away he began playing something else, a song I didn’t know, strumming hard on his guitar and belting out the lyrics in a deep downstate accent, less a twang than a whine, seeming if not happy with the state of his life, at least at peace, and I bet not a month has gone by this last third of a century but I’ve remembered that man and wondered about him.

[chefzombie]

on this day, at this hour even, 35 years ago, i got the call that my twin nieces were going to make it. the experimental drug to accelerate their lung development had worked. it would be 6 months before they went home, but they got there! 

[ER]

May 28, 1995 I wasn’t sure if three weeks of being “imprisoned” in my own home were getting to me but I was gradually beginning to see my dad’s point when he said he had only done it because he loved me and wanted what was best for me, and that I had been out of control. So that evening I abandoned my silent treatment of him and had a three-hour talk, and he never got mad no matter how emotional I got or what I said, just conversed in the same patient tone he’d used ever since he pulled me from my normal life.
 
I asked if there was an end point to this, and he said yes there was, so I asked if he’d mind sharing what it was then, and he said, “It’ll end when I feel like I can quit worrying about you so much. If you saw yourself from outside you’d get it. I made huge allowances because I know life hasn’t been easy the last eight months, so I tried letting you find your path back, but you found the wrong path, and I take some blame for that.”

I went, “What have I ever done to deserve this?”

To my chagrin he rattled off a list that began with my being taken from a church screaming and cursing at my aunt, to my mistreatment of my estranged mother, to my GPA taking a strong hit, to taking advantage of my other aunt while staying with her, to repeatedly hurting almost everyone who cared about me, and finally concluded by saying something that broke my heart: “This person you’ve become has taken away the daughter I always knew, and I miss her.”

I still told him I didn’t deserve this, and he said I’d needed a shock to bring me back to myself, and he hoped this did it. He said as far as he was concerned if I kept my grades good, didn’t break laws, do drugs or drink, I could more or less do whatever I wanted beyond that, and I thought, um, that’s not a bad deal, especially since I didn’t have any interest in getting high anyway.

While we talked the power suddenly went out at the start of a spectacularly vivid lightning storm that he and I stood outside and watched, awed past words. The news later said it was a rare 1% intensity electrical storm with pyrotechnics 99% of storms didn’t produce. All I knew was the sky lit up constantly with cascading lightning, including some streaks that burst outward into branches like Christmas trees, yet there was little thunder after the flashes, which was stranger still. The storm lasted two hours, and I never saw anything like it, no rain or hail or wind, only non-stop intersections of lightning across an indigo sky, like the world was ending in the sheer inhuman beauty of primordial nature.

[ER]

May 29:
1992: Last day of seventh grade, and Brian, who’d been working at my school, a senior headed for college, said goodbye to me. He held my hand a second and kind of did this thing where he ran his thumb across the back of it, and I almost choked up, sure I’d never see him again.
1995: At 11:25 AM my grandma died, but they didn’t tell me til after school. I tried to tell my dad and my aunt how sorry I was for them, but all I could do was cry. I held onto my dad and my Aunt Christie, and she cried too, my dad being the only one of us to keep his emotions together. I sobbed so hard that it felt like I was suffocating.
1996: Exactly a year after losing my grandma, Dana’s daughter McKenna was born, and they gave her my grandma’s first name for her middle name.
2007: In Hamilton, New Zealand, Landon and I visited one of the finest gardens in the world.
https://hamiltongardens.co.nz/collections/
2020 After the lockdown we were looking for just about anything entertainment-wise, and Clare talked me into having a professional bra fitting, so I stood in a booth while a woman did odd things to my uppercarriage to the point I inched closer to a cumulative lifetime lesbian experience.

[ER]

May 30, 2017 Never getting a heart transplant, Corrine died on this morning, leaving Daisy devastated at the loss of her new friend. Landon said she could come with him to Corrine’s funeral in California, and this seemed to console her. “It’d help me if you’d go,” was what he told her, giving her a role in supportively lifting him up, which I thought was admirable. I told Daisy we’d buy her a new dress for the service, and she could wear my grandma’s pearls, and she said thank you, and I don’t think she cried very much after that, but several times that day she did run to her father and hugged him saying, “This is so awful.” (I didn’t overly shield the children in life, but I did wonder if Landon letting our eight-year-old get close to a dying woman was the wisest thing to do.) In summing up Daisy’s reaction later that night when we were alone, Landon did say one thing that kind of made me laugh a little, which was: “Daisy’s a quarter Irish, and Irish are happiest when they’re sad.” I also knew one of the great obscene truths of loss was that somehow people almost always seemed to find a way to go on, no matter how much pain there was. For weeks Daisy would talk compulsively about Corrine, but now it’s been years since she’s mentioned her. (Keep breathing, girl, it’s all you can do.)

[ER]

May 31, 2017 Took Daisy out to a boutique for a black dress to wear in California, and she was not herself at all, being difficult and taking every chance to argue and treat me like I’d somehow wronged her. I tried not to let it hurt me and told myself I must not have been as bad as she was acting if I was letting her go to California to see off a woman her daddy had wanted to marry before he even knew I existed. I told Daisy how my aunt had wanted to bury my own grandma wearing the pearls I was letting her take to California, and it was something of a minor argument in the family before my grandpa spoke up and said no, he wanted the pearls to be passed down. I told her that the day, May 31st, also marked the twenty-second anniversary of my grandma’s funeral, and Daisy said, “Then maybe some dates are just cursed.”

Yeah, maybe.

She and her dad, who had never lost anyone before, would stay gone for two weeks.

[ER]

June 1, 2019 A week earlier I’d impulse-bought an obstetrical textbook from 1899 because it caught my eye, so went to pick it up (usually easier than having things delivered to our house), and when I came out there was a note left under my windshield wiper, and when I unfolded it I saw someone had hand-written: “God wanted me to tell you an angel is going to give you a hug, and it will all be OK.”

Went downtown that evening and heard Rob Lowe tell stories about his life he said he usually only told his friends.
 
The Bunbury Music Festival was also underway, and as we walked to the theater we could hear Fallout Boy playing onstage in a park down by the riverfront, and when we got out Stone Temple Pilots were jamming their classic ‘90s tunes. They were never a band I listened to very much but hearing them did take me back. I also liked the Wilde reference in the festival’s name. (I’ve been a Bunbury but, alas, I’ve never had one of my own.)

[ER]

June 2, 1998 In my semi-subconscious desire to reach out toward sibling figures, I was over the moon to finally meet my roommate’s oldest brother, Trey, who coming from Wyoming to visit his family, and about whom I’d heard many stories describing how awesome he was. Although I wondered how one person could be all the things Jackie gushingly claimed, in person I found he really was a master of life, self-confident yet down to earth, and he had done the most incredible stuff, like camping on the side of cliffs, and catching and micro-chipping rattlesnakes in Texas, and alligators in a Florida sinkhole, and tagging baby bald eagles, and setting controlled forest fires with flares on his job with the National Park Service. Jackie’s days-long recitation of the list of his achievements never seemed to stop. He was even advanced scuba-certified via some difficult Coast Guard civilian program, and had a pilot’s license for both planes and helicopters. Me, I got a sense of achievement when I mated my socks out of the dryer instead of throwing them chaotically into a drawer, and this man had tagged venomous snakes? How did one person do all that in under thirty years on the planet? I finally got to meet this uber-achiever, and he was everything Jackie said, making me wish her parents would adopt me so I could have a brother like that too. In time he and I would climb Mount Katahdin together and he would show me how if you walked in a figure eight you would jump the same deer you spooked earlier. He’s still pretty amazing at fifty-two, and this spring I was going to walk part of the Arizona Trail with him and his family, but it sort of fell through for now.

[RCMerchant]

^ Do you have a diary or something? I have no f**king clue what I did on any day at any time. Maybe one or two. Like a f**king holiday.

[ER]

^ Do you have a diary or something? I have no f**king clue what I did on any day at any time. Maybe one or two. Like a f**king holiday.

Yeah, since I was barely ten. It's between 7,000-8,000 pages. Plus I used to have a more precise memory but I had a series of micro-strokes in the past related to on-job exposure to toxins, and I don't test nearly as high in recall as I used to. I have a condition called parahyperthymesia that makes me extremely past focused, almost irresistibly so. Sometimes it makes me feel like I am hurrying through the present so it can become the past. It's really very odd. So....yeah, I am obsessed with the past. Lol

[RCMerchant]

...yeah. Ok!

[ER]

June 3, 1985 It was my last day of kindergarten, which because of snow days we’d had to make up, fell on a Monday, and I remember being worried I was going to fail for the year even though everyone told me that was a crazy worry, nobody ever failed kindergarten, and besides, my grades were good. (I took my teacher a rose as a parting gift, but I wondered if I should have made it two roses, in case I needed to bribe her.) Well, spoiler alert but I didn’t fail, and my Grandpa picked me up so I could go over to his house for the afternoon and swim and help him mow his grass. (i.e. drive his lawn tractor at about 1MPH while he walked beside it and made sure I didn’t steer into trees.) He asked if I wanted a present for being a kindergarten gradate, and I said yes, please, I wanted this cool thing I’d seen two of the boys in class playing with, something green and gross called Slime. So we stopped at Kay-Bee Toys, a can was a buck, I was a cheap play-date, and that was my present for finishing Catholic school kindergarten in the mid-Reagan years.

[ER]

June 4, 2017 From Los Angeles Daisy told me about Corrine’s funeral, and she said there weren’t many people there, just her cousin Veronica (“who is nice”) and her sister Tabby (“who is nice”) and her sister’s two sons, who didn’t even know Corrine, plus “some lady who knew her in school” and just a couple other people plus a funeral director lady in a purple suit. I asked if it was sad and she said a little but she didn’t cry there, nobody did, but she did later, and it wasn’t a long service. She said Corrine didn’t believe in God, so nobody prayed. I asked Daisy if she said a prayer for her and she said no because that would be rude if Corrine didn’t want people to pray. I said yeah, good manners. Then she said Clare’s mom Bethany (who’d hated me for years but loved my daughter, go figure) told her it was good to pray for people who have died because it sent them grace. Then Daisy said Corrine looked very alive lying there and she kept expecting her to get up again.

Funerals are so morbid.

[ER]

June 5:

1992: Dana quit smoking (for a month) and withdrawal made her a tennis hooligan in the stands watching me play, shouting: “f**k that b***h up, El! Wear her ovaries for earrings!” She got asked to leave, though I appreciated her sentiments even if laughing at them did mess up my serve all match.

1994: Went with Brian to Traders’ World, this magical hundred-acre flea market halfway to Dayton, met Ukrainians there, failed to find a recording of Dylan Thomas reciting poetry, and got sunburned, but I counted it a great day.

1995: Amid sizzling humidity, went to a Reds game with my grandpa, who told me that when he wanted to buy his house in 1965 he had to get lawyers to threaten to sue, because a clause from 1920 restricted the owner “in perpetuity” from selling it to anyone but a white Protestant.

1997: Did regression hypnosis that afternoon, and that evening played volleyball in a pouring rain shower that was followed by a rainbow when the sun came back out. Brian had a thing for wet hair and when I came home he stared at me a second like he was entranced.

2008: Less than a week before I was supposed to be godmother to Clare’s son, I almost backed out because I did not want to be in the same church as her father. I decided I could get through an important event that wasn’t about me, so I made a vow to myself I would put others’ needs first no matter what it took in me not to react to him.

2013: My cousin Alison was thinking of getting a tiny tattoo of a hummingbird, and I said, “Mark my words, I’ll never get one.” She said, “Yeah, like you said when you were fourteen mark your words you’d never lose your virginity in high school, never not go to grad school, never have a kid before you were thirty, never get married, never get a speeding ticket, and never quit waxing.” I said, “Hey, I’ve never had a speeding ticket!” She said triumphantly, “I knew you quit waxing!”

2017: I declined to give Rob fifteen-hundred dollars to launch his web-comic, Power Monkey, about a super-monkey in 1960s Tokyo who had a nuclear battery, thus depriving the world of reading about that marvel.

2020: Glad to be out after Covid, I took my girls on a summer drive and saw General Grant’s birthplace, and coal barges on the river, and got amazing smoothies at a little country creamy whip stand we’d never seen before and were never able to find again!

[ER]

June 6, 1991 I was allowed to have an end-of-school pool party and invite about fifteen girls, and Dana surprised me by coming too, even though she was turning seventeen and most of us had just finished sixth grade. She brought a giant clear-plastic beach ball with flashing lights inside, and the day was a blast, though someone did drop an open bag of chips in the water, and I had to run and cut the filter before they floated in. Dana was at the height of her short-lived Doors infatuation, and played us three of their albums and told us after seeing the Olivier Stone movie, she wondered if Val Kilmer was Jim Morrison reincarnated. I did the math and said that would’ve been impossible but Dana told me the existence of oversouls meant it could. To my delight, considering there were many cooler girls than myself attending, my party went well and most everybody stuck around past dark, leaving me very pleased.