I Remember...

I have been so busy at work the last few months with end-of-the-year stuff that I have not had time to write down any stories.  I was laying in bed a few nights ago though thinking about the past and a lot of snippets of various happy, weird, scary, fun memories came to me in a rush.  Here are a few that I thought of…a bunch of short stories that I have been jotting down over the last few days instead of one long story.

I remember driving alone on a dark country road in Wisconsin in the late 80’s when suddenly the sky started shifting and doing weird things.  I thought my eyes were going bonkers so I pulled over.  Nobody was around for miles.  I got out and there were green and red and yellow lights filling the sky above me and shifting all around.  I seriously thought I was losing it.  I was completely in shock and unsteady so I sat down on the side of the road so that I would not fall over.  I decided it must be an acid-flashback so I closed my eyes, counted to ten and told myself to ‘come back’.  I opened them and it was still happening…the shape-shifting sky was just as trippy as could be.  Was the world ending I wondered?  Had I gone insane?  Then it finally hit me…maybe it’s the ‘Northern Lights’!  I had heard of them of course but had never seen them.  Yes!  That’s it!  I am not crazy I decided!  I went from being completely scared shitless to immense relief…and then awe.  The amazing dancing lights were beautiful and huge almost beyond belief.

I remember one time in about 1996 I was in bed with my girlfriend Angela Harrison at my house in Madison, WI.  It was late at night and we were sound asleep.  Suddenly we were awakened by red and blue flashing cop-lights blasting through my bedroom window.  We poked our heads up to look out the window above my bed and the cops were parked right behind Angela’s car out in the street in front of my house.  There were two cops shining powerful flashlights into Angie’s car.  “Holy sh*t.” I said in terror as I thought about the quarter-pound of marijuana in the trunk of her car that I had procured earlier that day for a friend.  I was ready to throw on some clothes and run out the back door, but Angela wanted to go see what the hell they cops were doing with her car.  I thought it was obvious, they were here to put me in jail, don’t go out there!  But she insisted so she got dressed and went outside while I slunk down under the covers and awaited my doom.  A couple minutes later the cops left and she came inside.  What?!  How did she do that??  She explained that the cops were chasing a guy and thought maybe he was hiding in her car.  They were not looking in her trunk for weed, just for some guy on the run.  Phew!

I remember in the late 90’s being backstage at a Radiator’s concert at an outdoor music festival in Colorado with my buddy Mitch Marshall.  I was drinking a manly beer and I looked over to see Mitch holding a light-reddish orangey drink.  “What the hell is that?” I asked.  “Well, I just pour some vodka over ice, add a bit of cranberry juice, and then just a littttle touch of orange juice.”  I raised my eyebrows and started to say:  “Do you even ___ _ ___?” but after only getting the first three words out we locked eyes.  He knew where I was going with this and we both simultaneously burst into laughter and doubled over trying to hang onto our drinks.  Wiping away the tears I looked up at him and managed to weakly croak out what I had been trying to say:  “Do you even have a dick?” and we both burst into laughter again.

I remember right around the same time frame going to a music festival in the heart of Wisconsin called ‘Cornstock’.  It was mostly local bands, including the ‘Bol Weavils’ which was the band of our friend Jeff Gauss.  We had partied all night and as the sun came up it started getting unbearably hot in me and my girlfriend Mugsy’s tent.  I gave up on the idea of getting any sleep and as I crawled out I looked up to see Mitch’s wife Carrie Marshall crawling out of her tent too.  We both stumbled over to the hood of my car and laid down with our backs on the windshield.  We did not say anything for awhile until I asked her:  “Do you ever see little squiggly things on your eyeballs if you de-focus and let them appear?”  “Yes!” she said, “I’m looking at some right now!”  “Me too!”  It was perfect conversation fodder for two hung-over derelicts, and to this day whenever I see those little alien-like creatures on my eyeballs I think of Carrie.

I remember in the late 80’s me and my girlfriend Lona and our roommate Claudia Tribbiani and my best friend Mark Smith used to go on late-night cycle-blasts.  Bored of the party, we would get on our motorcycles and cruise up and down the River Road by the U of M campus in Minneapolis along the Mississippi River.  Usually with Claudia on the back of mine and Lona on the back of Mark’s, we would go just as FAST as we possibly could up and down that curvy road with absolutely no fear or inclination of danger.  So crazy-stupid.  One time I was going around a right-hand curve so fast that I could not stay in my lane and ended up going around the left side of an on-coming car.  Another time we were going so fast around a curve that my back wheel started bouncing sideways.  Somehow we made the turn and kept it upright…but looking back, it is amazing that we never got arrested and are all still alive.

I remember in the early 70’s when I was about 6 or 7 years old sitting with my best friend Craig Fellows in my tree-fort in the front yard of my house in Schenectady, NY.  Craig’s dad worked for a plexiglass factory and Craig and I had just installed windows in the fort with scraps that his dad had given us.  Craig’s older brother Mark was walking down the street and we started yelling down to him, bragging that our fort was rock-proof now because we had unbreakable plexiglass windows.  Of course Mark immediately gathered a pile of golf-ball sized rocks and started hurling them up at us.  I was a little worried, but I trusted Craig’s promise that we were perfectly safe as the rocks bounced off the fort.  Suddenly Craig let out the loudest blood-curdling scream I have ever heard in my life before or since then.  There was a golf-ball sized hole between the ceiling and a wall and somehow one of those rocks had fit perfectly through the hole and found Craig’s head.  Blood was everywhere as Craig continued to scream and Mark ran away.  My mom came out to help, but Craig had to go get stitches.

I remember the summer of 1983…I dubbed it the ‘Summer Of Love’ because we spent all of our days over at pretty Heather Owen’s house down the street (see the 7/13/12 blog entry entitled “Those Mysterious Little Creatures”).  In addition to all the ‘sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll’ over there, we used to do stupid stuff like jump off the roof of Heather’s two-story house into her pool.  It was kind of hard because the part of the roof facing the pool was slanted down so you had to run downwards and then try and jump up and out when you reached the edge of the roof.  You had to jump far too in order to clear the grass in the yard 30 feet below, then the wooden deck surrounding the pool, and then into the water.  So we decided to haul up a large plywood board to give us a runway leading down to the jumping-off part.  We wore tennis shoes to make it easier to run, but after a couple jumps the board got wet from our feet.  I was on about my 2^nd or 3^rd jump that day when I started to run and my feet slipped on the board as I got to the edge.  It threw me off-balance and I tried to abort the jump, but I was right on the edge of the roof now with my arms wind-milling as I was trying to keep from going over the edge.  My momentum was too great though and I realized that I was going to go over the edge one way or another, so from a forward-leaning standing position on the edge of the roof and without the benefit of any pre-run I jumped out as far as I could hoping to make the water.  I didn’t.  I made it right to the edge of the water though and as my legs buckled from hitting the deck I rolled into the water trying to transfer as much of my weight forward into the water and off my feet.  As I surfaced and floated in the water I quickly realized that I was alive and nothing was broken, but my feet were numb and sore for quite awhile.

I remember this morning my 3-year old son Jack crawled into bed to snuggle with me, like the way we start most days.  As we were laying there talking about superheroes he started playing with a birthmark/mole thing on my upper arm.  He giggled and said:  “Dad, is this your nipple?”  He knows it’s not, but he just wanted to be funny so I went along with it and indignantly said:  “Noooo that’s not my nipple!  I don’t know where you keep your nipples, but mine are over here.”  He was totally cracking up as only a little boy can and while laughing continued on:  “No daddy, this is your nipple!  That’s not a birthmark!  You have a nipple on your arm!  This is your nipple!”  It was so damn funny…for some reason it is hilarious to hear a 3-year old say “nipple”.

I remember being in a bar in St. Louis Park, MN in the year 2005 with  my now-wife Nadia and the rest of the guys and girls from our work’s coed softball team.  This was after a game, and before Nadia and I were even dating.  We were all downing pitchers of beer lamenting our most recent loss (I do not think we ever won, seriously).  Suddenly a couple walked into the bar with a little baby and me and Nadia were both ooing and ahhing over it.  I was 39 and Nadia was 32 and our biological clocks were ticking if either one of us were ever going have kids.  Looking at the baby I said:  “I want one.”  She laughed and said:  “Me too.”  But then quickly added:  “But not with you!”  Ten years and two kids later, I got the last laugh.