Living in the Past

From Charles, via Artichoke, via ???.

I went to old journals to see exactly what was happening on this same day, in the past 20 years:

20 Years Ago Today: I am a third year medical student doing a clerkship in Pocatello, Idaho. There are a lot of Mormons everywhere. I deliver a baby for the first time. It's part of what makes me want to go in to Family Medicine.

15 Years Ago Today: "On NPR this AM — a cowboy poet reading — 'Love's a big word, and covers a lot of territory.'" Dean and I have been together 4 years, and living together for 4 months. I'm doing locum tenens work at Group Health, Burien, and writing my first poems. On this day I send off these poems to magazines: "Saint Genet," "Kafka's Grave," "Ravenna at Dusk," "Fetus Papyraceous," "First Crash Cesarean." Some of them actually get published.

10 Years Ago Today: Dean and I are in Hawaii. I have a scruffy beard. "Spent all morning lying back in a lounge chair, watching and listening to the ocean, reading in Louise Gluck's Proofs and Theories. . . . later we walked along a beach of black volcanic rock mixed with white coral shell." The highlight of the trip: going to Waikiloa, a very Fantasy-Island-like mega resort, full of pavilions and outdoor art. Heaven on earth.

5 Years Ago Today: "Wednesday early afternoon, SBC Broadway. Another bright sunny day; it has been an amazing fall. Having a latte and a piece of Verde Primo pizza from Pagliacci. I worked the morning at High Point, and Dean is doing his Wednesday shift at WSMH. And today is our anniversary! Number 14. I didn't even think of it this morning, when we kissed good bye. But while I was at work, writing 12-6-00 on each lab slip or chart I was signing, I remembered."

We were both embarrassed to have forgotten, but more than made up for it with some hot & heavy.
. . .
"Poetry group last night was good. Told them about the Columbia City reading. Read a funny rejection from Iowa Review, that used the WCW "This is just to say" poem as a rejection, saying the poems weren't cold enough, or bold enough, or whatever . . . funny."

1 Year Ago Today: "Sunday night we we went out to dinner at Il Fornaio upstairs for our anniversary. By coincidence we had gotten to Pacific Place in time to see it "snow." It's a new thing they are doing there. At 6PM on the dot, some secret snow machine starts up, and music plays, and these artificial flakes fall from the highest level, like you see on a theater set. It's lovely, but fake."
. . .
"Received a copy of Bloom that I ordered the other day online. . . I really enjoyed DA Powell's interview and poems. Especially the one with the naughty Santa images in it. Where he says something like "I left you toll house cookies, you left me with bloody shorts . . ." and then goes into a list of HIV/AIDS symptoms he has had. Funny and sad and disturbing and uplifting all at once. Lovely."

Today: we'll see . . . I am off work, hoping to get some new writing done, and we have dinner tonight at Mona's on Latona. It's been 19 years now, Dean and I are "older than we once were, and younger than we'll be. But that's not unusual."