Twenty years ago is a long time

My friend Aprille¹ did a 20-year post a while back, and when I read it, I thought it would be an inter­est­ing exer­cise for me to try. You see, my mem­ory is really bad. I don’t remem­ber things. Impor­tant things. This morn­ing I couldn’t remem­ber if a friend of ours had two kids, or one and she was preg­nant. (Two kids, it turns out, and I have actu­ally met them both…) I don’t remem­ber stuff from my child­hood. I don’t remem­ber stuff from the child­hood of my own kids.

It’s actu­ally awful.

So this meme involves writ­ing about what you were doing at dif­fer­ent time inter­vals in the past, with twenty years ago being the fur­thest out. It will be a good exer­cise for my brain.

20 years ago, I…

…was start­ing my senior year of high school, in Madrid. Fall of 1987. This was a really intense year. Until this year, I’d coasted through school as a nice kid, a nerd, an intro­vert, a com­puter guy, a gamer. I’d never both­ered with girls. I was the kid who used his free period to eat lunch with one teacher or another. I had been a Boy Scout. I had been my class vice-president. But senior year, that all changed. I like to think of it as the blos­som­ing year that cul­mi­nated in my fresh­man year in col­lege. I started going out, drink­ing, with a whole range of the high school cliques, I was com­fort­able with the head­bangers, the nerds, the prep­pies, the all-americans, even the natives a bit. I made up for all my girl-ignoring in one huge end-of-year acci­dent of love and lust and copi­ous diary entries and crushed friend­ships and drunken stu­pors (Hi Mom!). I lis­tened to Bob Mar­ley, I med­i­tated, I read the Bible (Old Tes­ta­ment, for class), I swore off drink­ing after a Really Scary Inci­dent (so far, so good). Essen­tially, I did a whole teenager’s worth of emo­tional grow­ing up in about nine months. It was awe­some. I don’t rec­om­mend it. But that first year of col­lege was as good as this year was bad.

15 years ago, I…

…had just grad­u­ated from col­lege. Fall of 1992. Inter­est­ingly, another really intense emo­tional time for me. I’d met a woman, we’ll call her Love Bunny (my col­lege friends know her by that name, coined by my good friend Oded), who lived in New York City, so nat­u­rally, with no plans out of col­lege, I’d moved to the city. She was already in a rela­tion­ship, and con­fused, and so was I, but I was so in love, and in the end, after lots of hope­less meet­ings and secret jour­neys to (of all places) the top of the World Trade Cen­ter, she decided that she was not in love with me. I remem­ber that par­tic­u­lar day inti­mately. We were in my sub­let apart­ment off of Christo­pher Street, and she was break­ing it off. I can laugh about it now, albeit a bit bit­terly, but at the time it was crush­ing. We’ve spo­ken once since that day, by email, a week after 9/11, when I had writ­ten to ask if she and her fam­ily were okay. They were.

10 years ago, I…

…had just got­ten mar­ried. Fall of 1997. We’d been in Iowa City for four months or so (well, she moved there a cou­ple of months before I did) and were mar­ried in the lit­tle chapel on the UIowa cam­pus. It was a lovely wed­ding (we did just cel­e­brate our tenth anniver­sary, you know). We were liv­ing in an apart­ment, though we’d have our first house within a year. I was work­ing a part-time job at the Uni­ver­sity, hav­ing just quit a web design job in Cedar Rapids. I was young and thin and had a lot more hair.

5 years ago, I…

…was help­ing my preg­nant wife through her first trimester. I guess it was actu­ally the sec­ond trimester by now. Fall 2002. This preg­nancy resulted in our first child in the Spring. We were also gear­ing up for my wife to begin inter­view­ing for jobs for the next Fall, as she was fin­ish­ing up her Ph.D. (yes, while being preg­nant). This time was actu­ally pretty peace­ful, as I remem­ber it. She was sick as a dog the first trimester, and we’d watched a lot of movies (using the then-fledgling Netflix).

2 years ago, I…

…was begin­ning my last year of work at Creighton Uni­ver­sity, in Omaha. Fall 2005. My wife was preg­nant again, with our sec­ond child. She was get­ting ready to inter­view again, too, this time for teach­ing posi­tions, so it was going to be more intense than the last pregnant-interview round. Our boy was doing great, but we were look­ing for­ward to leav­ing Omaha. The town just never sat well with us. The whole time we were there it just felt like a time of tran­si­tion. We never got settled.

1 year ago, I…

…was stay­ing home with my newish-born sec­ond son. My wife was in the first months of her new teach­ing posi­tion, and every­thing was pretty stress­ful. I wasn’t look­ing for work yet (and wouldn’t start look­ing for another six months), but money was a bit tight already, our older boy was hav­ing some tran­si­tion prob­lems (from school to school, from only-child to brother), and the house we’d bought over a whirl­wind week­end trip was prov­ing a dis­ap­point­ment (we have since accepted our fate, and adapted to the house).

So far this year, I’ve…

…not found work. That’s the biggest ele­phant in the room this year. I’m the clas­sic jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none, and that works really well in my exact job descrip­tion, but doesn’t trans­late to other jobs when my exact job descrip­tion is not avail­able. And it isn’t. We’ve really come around on the house though, with some improve­ments we made over the year, and our boys have set­tled in very nicely to our cur­rent life.

Yes­ter­day I…

…ran a whole slew of errands that needed doing, while Grandma stayed home with the kids (she was up to help out with Hal­loween): I got dog food, made a groom­ing appoint­ment, looked for a leaf com­post­ing bin (ended up hav­ing to order one online), opened a busi­ness account at the bank, bought some exte­rior white, satin house paint, and went to the gro­cery store. Then I worked on this site a bit in the after­noon, while the kids (and Grandma) played around me.

Today I…

…am work­ing from home again. Grandma has gone home, too, and the kids are back in school/daycare. I’m writ­ing this, and hope to roll out a new design for this site today, maybe Mon­day. We’re hav­ing break­fast food for din­ner tonight (always a favorite) and I’m look­ing for­ward to some qual­ity Sweetie/TiVo cud­dling time tonight.

Tomor­row, I’ll…

…do a bunch of yard work, and go to the Home­com­ing Parade. Noth­ing like a win­ning sea­son to bring out the fans. Last year’s Home­com­ing Parade was almost crim­i­nally small. We expect there to be much larger crowds this year, and the Gov­er­nor is the guest of honor (what do they call that in parades, again?). Our older boy is look­ing for­ward to the candy they throw from the floats, like he needs to top off his Hal­loween bucket.

Done. Okay, so that was pretty intense, and I’m sure it was crush­ingly bor­ing to read. It strikes me though ‚the the tim­ing is uncanny. Had I done this last year, or next year, those 20, 15, and 10 year mile­stones would have been incred­i­bly bor­ing. (Even more bor­ing than they already were, you ask?) As it is, they hit on the most intense expe­ri­ences I’ve had, pretty much. Love, loss, children.