light the corners of my mind
In August 2017, when Connor was about to start first grade, he and I spent a few days in Dayton to visit my late grandparents and my BFF, Amy.
This past week, he and Aaron and I all spent a few days in Dayton to visit Amy. Of course, I took the opportunity to capture a then-and-now photo at JD’s Custard.
It was late Sunday afternoon when the Mustang pulled into our driveway. At first, I thought it was a contractor for a delivery company, but it turns out it was a young lady whose car had broken down.
Once she realized her car wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon, she knocked on our front door and politely let me know. Since the temperature wasn’t much above freezing, I invited her into our home to wait for her tow.
It probably came off cringey instead of empathetic, but I told her about the time the transmission on my first car started acting funny. I was a good half-hour from home, and this was long before cell phones, so I ended up using a nice retired couple’s home phone to call my aunt for advice on what to do.
As I was telling my story, I could tell it wasn’t really having the effect I’d been hoping for, so I stopped rambling, gave her some space by the dining room window where she could watch for the tow truck, and went into the other room to continue folding laundry.
My aunt’s advice to me, once I finally got through to her, had been to accept the quart of transmission fluid the nice couple had offered me, pour it in, then drive home by way of every BP station I could find, using the gas card my stepdad Tom had given me to get another quart of transmission fluid at every stop along the way. I did manage to get to within a mile or so of home before the transmission fluid top-up method stopped working, and I was forced to leave my car at a local (non-BP) gas station and just stick a For Sale sign on the windshield. Eventually, a young man and his dad bought it off of me for $50 with the intention of fixing it up for the demolition derby at the county fair. Since the transmission only ran in reverse at that point, and that’s how they roll at the demo derby, it was a win-win for everyone.
Anyway, I hope that the young lady whose car happened to give up the ghost in our driveway finally got to go smoke with her friends. She certainly deserved some chill time after the weird evening she had, sitting in some Gen-X lady’s dining room waiting for AAA.
I never did get around to writing a Year In Review last year.
I still collected all the data, still had things to say… just never managed to sit down and do it. For various reasons.
As I sat down to recap 2023, I felt (as I’d known I would) that I couldn’t summarize 2023 without at least acknowledging 2022. So, in lieu of a review, here are some screenshots from my 2022 roundup on Exist.io, where I aggregate all the things.
Same kid, same hat, same tree, nine years’ difference.
We’ve had this same kitchen trash can for years, but today is the first time that my regular repositioning bubbled up a memory of a similar situation from decades ago.
My Mom met Tom at church when I was about eleven years old. At the time, Mom was in her thirties and single; she and I lived with my Memaw, my Aunt Sammie, and my cousin Michael in a two-bedroom apartment.
Once Mom and Tom started dating, he invited us over to his place for dinner. The house he was renting was a half-hour’s drive from our apartment, and a full hour from where he worked at the time. Looking back now, it’s baffling to me how he came to rent a house in this one-horse town so far away from everything, when there had to be other housing options.
It was a cute little house — or it would have been, if he hadn’t put such a middle-aged bachelor pad spin on it. The focal point of the living room was the massive DIY entertainment center… and the recliner placed in the middle of the room, squarely in front of the television. All the shades were drawn, making the living room feel very much like a man-cave.
The piece de resistance was the wooden board Tom had nailed to the floor behind his chair, to keep it from sliding backward when he would flop down to watch TV.
This morning, almost 40 years later, it occurred to me that I could wedge something behind the kitchen trash can to space it far enough away from the wall to always open properly with the foot pedal… just like Tom’s two-by-four.