What happened in your lifetime that was really interesting? Or really boring, but also funny/scary/traumatic/thought provoking or life changing? Here’s your chance to share.
You can also tell stories about other people in your life. Let’s sit around the campfire and talk - what do you say?
I hate it when I’m trying to cross the street, and just waiting for a car to pass, and the car keeps slowing down. It’s one of my snookies.
I hate it when I’m trying to tell a story that’s intended to be amusing, and it’s interpreted as offensive. That’s one of my snookies.
I hate it when I make some sort of resolution to lose weight, clean my home, or accomplish some other physical task, and on the day I vow to do it, I get sick as dog poo and must do nothing but rest. It’s one of my snookies.
What, you might well ask, is a snooky? It’s a phrase that I’m trying to coin. By year end, I want it to be in common parlance. My GF’s kids and my family now use it.
Where did it come from?
When I was seven, we moved from Iowa to New York. We used Allied Van Lines as our moving company. As a free gift, they gave me and my sister little booklets. They contained games, jokes, and puzzles. I sort of remember Sherri Lewis being a big part of it. One page had a questionnaire, with such questions as:
What is your name?
Where do you go to school?
What is your favorite food?
What do you want to be when you grow up?
We had a lot of fun filling out the questions, until we got to this one:
What is your pet peeve?
We stared at each other for a few seconds, dumbfounded, until it dawned on us what we should answer: Snooky.
Appropriate, as Snooky peed in the house, bit people, and ate anything that wasn’t secured in high places. Our dog was, indeed, our snooky.
We always used to explore the creek at the end of the street when we were small children, but it had changed over the years. We didn’t go often because there was a lot of poison ivy around, which would mean (if you were to go down in summer, which was usually when we had the time) wearing long sleeves and tennis shoes in a season when you really wanted to be in shorts and a T-shirt and sandals.
That year on St. Patrick’s day, though, it was unusually hot for March and I was already in my grubby clothes as my biology class had taken a research field trip earlier that day. My brother was in grade school at the time and he had the members of his garage band over to visit. Everyone was bored and itching to get outside, so I was given charge of the pre-teens and we were told to be careful of poison ivy and not get lost.
The first change we noticed was that, once we got down the hill to the big fallen tree and the beginning of the water, the tree trunks nearby had been spray painted with pentagrams and such welcoming messages as “SATAN” and “666”. Undaunted, we continued on. People, it seemed, had found our secret spots. There was trash in the creek and there were even tents in the woods! (The weirdest of my brother’s friends–because you always have that one really weird friend–then took to spinning stories about the Great Hobo War and the history of the bum.)
The path widened, and the creek deepened. It was no longer safe to try getting across the creek by hopping from rock to rock; one false move and you’d slip and probably drown. We scaled another fallen tree to get up the hill because the bank right next to the creek was thinning to nothing. Soon we could see the backs of houses in the next neighborhood over from mine. Behind one, someone had discarded an iron bed. Another, a trampoline.
The forest “ended”, as far as we were concerned, where you hit the back of the nearby car dealership, and so we stopped there, peering into the big tunnel at the bottom of the hill leading up to the parking lot but not daring to enter.
To the right of us, everything was green, and the ground was covered with flowers. It was like nothing I had seen before. Stepping into that glade, I felt a hush come over the entire world. There, tucked right behind a busy highway, was a scene that should have come from a movie. No one had littered on the ground. And I swear, the sunlight through the trees sparkled. It was really something special.
Then two of my brother’s friends disappeared. We worried and wrung our hands but soon found out they had just tried to backtrack along the path. It seemed much shorter going home.
On March 12, 2006, I was working at my night job, delivering pizza. It was a warm night (for March in central Illinois, anyway), and there were thunderstorms all over the Midwest.
At about 7:30 I delivered a pizza to an apartment complex I had delivered to dozens of times. On leaving the building and heading back to my car, I looked out to the west and I could see a kind of purple-ish pink-ish haze at the bottom of the clouds (the sun had already gone down), and pretty-much nonstop lightning.
Back at the store, our delivery business was winding down for the night, so another driver and I were tasked with doing dishes and cleaning the kitchen. We started working. A few minutes later, I hear the boss screaming: “Everybody into the walk-in, NOW!” She came tearing into the kitchen followed by a few customers. We all went into the walk-in refrigerator and huddled there while our boss explained that the tornado sirens were going off. A few seconds later, the power went out. Deciding that standing in a dark refrigerator was not for me, I decided to take my chances in the open kitchen. My boss told me not to go anywhere near the front of the restaurant (where there were huge glass windows facing the parking lot), so instead I went to the back door. As I reached for the back door, it started rattling. I heard a high-pitched whistling noise coming from outside, and my ears started to pop. I decided that opening the back door wasn’t the best idea.
Two F2 tornados hit Springfield, Illinois that night. The first one cut across the southwest side of the city; by my assessment of the damage, the first one was passing about 500 feet from me just as I was reaching for the door - had I opened the door, I would have seen it. The second one started about six blocks northeast of where the first one had petered out; it cut through the south, southeast, and eastern parts of the city and petered out about 3/4 mile from my house.
When I was eight years old, we all used to play games in the evening like kick the can, hide and seek, and something called grey wolf that I don’t remember the rules to anymore. Tree climbing and bike riding took up large parts of my day. There was a field adjacent to our neighborhood that seemed enormous at the time, where the older boys played baseball, while we younger punks caught grasshoppers and made cages for them. My brother was nine and liked to launch his little rockets from that field. We put a grasshopper into the mini capsule inside once. It came back down and seemed to be fine. I wonder what that felt like, or if grasshoppers can feel scared?
I would grudgingly come into the house when my mother called my name at dusk. It was bath time. There would be mosquito bites on my arms and legs, with the ones on my ankles being the most itchy. My knees were usually scabbed; I was a tomboy and prefered playing with the boys instead of playing with the girls. The boys were more fun. I didn’t like to jump rope and hated dolls. Football and baseball were way more fun. Around 5th grade the boys started getting too much bigger and it wasn’t as fun anymore… I was smaller and not as strong. Boo.
Going back to when I was eight, I shared a room with my older sister, ten years my senior. One night after taking the dreaded bath (I always played with my Fisher Price houseboat in the tub), I remember lying in bed, wide awake. It was a soft summer night and the crickets were in full chirp. There was a light breeze coming through the window screen and I had never felt so full of energy. The big kids were still out and I could hear my older brother talking to his buddy. They were 16 - practically grown-ups! Before I knew it I was standing next to my sister’s bed, staring at the window. Hmm…
I carefully stepped onto her mattress and looked longingly out of the window. It smelled so alive out there, as if something exciting was going to happen at any minute.
The window screen popped out with surprising ease. Before I knew it I was sitting in the window frame with my legs dangling outside. Before I knew it I was standing on the front porch - it was only about a four foot drop. I jumped out of trees all day long when I was a kid, so my escape didn’t make much noise. There I was in my bare feet and Winnie the Pooh pajamas. They were yellow, and my favorites.
My sister was still sleeping in the bed that I had just used as a springboard for my escape. Now what? I’ll go get Michael, that’s what.
Michael was my very best friend and next door neighbor. He also shared a room with his older sister, but she wasn’t home. The suburb that we lived in was one of those places where the floor plan is the same from house to house. His window screen was really easy to pop out, too. We stood on his front porch together, deciding what to do. He was also in bare feet, wearing his red and blue race car pajamas.
We went to the field, of course. I remember just how the grass felt against my feet as we walked together. It was cool and very slightly moist, and felt softer than soft. Every once in a while I would step on a rock or a stick - ouch! I wished I had my dad’s flashlight. The stars were out and the moon as well, so we could see well enough to get around. We couldn’t see well enough to catch grasshoppers in the field, though we tried. We threw rocks at trees and chased each other. We tried to tell scary stories but didn’t really know any. We got hungry and wondered what grass tasted like. We pretended to be horses, but dropped that when we discovered that grass doesn’t taste nearly as good as it smells. I made a leaf nest for any poor little animal that didn’t have a home while Michael looked on the sidewalk for any stray dimes. We had found one the week before and bought gum with it. That was some big money - my allowance was ten cents.
He couldn’t see very well and the mosquitoes were hungry. It was time to go. Kids don’t waste time with backward glances or lingering around - when it was time to go we just left. I gave him a boost into his bedroom and shimmied back onto the window frame at my house. Brick provides pretty good traction when you’re pulling yourself up. The tricky part was getting back into the house without waking my sister. She would tell on me. I landed on her bed with a small bounce and rocketed into my bed. Whew. She didn’t wake up.
Uh oh. I never had replaced the screen on my way out and it was still leaning against the wall. I slithered out of bed and leaned it crookedly against the window frame. Close enough - you almost couldn’t tell. I slept with the covers over my ear because there were mosquitoes in the house now.
No one ever found out, thought Michael and I escaped several times during that summer of 1976. I stashed a little orange plastic chair near the decrepit bushes on the side of the house to make it easier to climb back into the house. Dad noticed it one day, which was a bad scene because it was nestled next to my eighteen year old brother’s pot he had decided to grow that summer on the neglected strip of soil between out house and the neighbor’s. That’s another story for another time.
I’m 41 now and one of the first things I do as soon as it’s warm enough is to walk on the grass in my bare feet and smell the outside. It’s best at night.
ETA - my oldest brother was 20 at the time, not 18.
I was on the first “commercial” western airline flight allowed onto the Kamchatka peninsula, Russia, after the cold war. I’ve been the first westerner to see certain areas closed to foreigners since the start of the cold war, and the first American a lot of Russian Siberians ever met. It’s all over-run by tourists/business people now, but I got to be the first representative of the US in some areas where you’d have been shot, a few years before.
Were they very curious about Americans? What questions did they ask you?
I was working in a design studio built above a garage in downtown Birmingham, MI. The bathroom was in the main house that hot afternoon, and I had about 3 used coffees in me. I trotted down the steps, across the gravel driveway and to the side door… moments away from relief. I felt a ‘plop’ on my left shoulder. I glanced down to see an alien being from the planet evil attempting to remove my brain.
I had to go home to change my underwear.
Russians aren’t shy about asking the prices of things. They wanted to know exactly how much I make, what I pay for rent, car etc. They thought Americans subsist on plastic and styrofoam, and the country folk felt it imperative to get real food into us because we were too skinny and malnourished, and God knows what we eat at home.
They weren’t that interested in politics. They know politics is a game played at higher levels. They know they have the education and skills needed to compete in the modern world, but don’t have the opportunity, and are always on the lookout to send their kids off to the west where they can use their education and skills where there is opportunity.
Russians need to know your character. It’s all about trust. They’ll look you in the eye and gauge your soul. They needed to know who to trust, on a deeper level than Americans need to, and I always felt my character was being judged much more so than Americans do.
I remember this one woman I met. She was the secretary. The woman was obviously smarter, and more educated than all the men she was working for. She ran the business, for all practical intents and purposes, but was the secretary who brought people coffee. I felt so bad for her because she was obviously the brains and would have her own company in the States. She was a knock-out, too.
This other older gentleman practically pleaded with me to get his son a job. He was a trained military pilot with tons of hours of experience and flight-time he knew would make him employable in the States, but what could I do? I don’t have those sorts of connections.
One summer when I was a little kid, my dad, mom, two older sisters and I were staying in a beach house on the Outer Banks of N.C. We had no TV or radio. We swam all day, built sandcastles, feasted on seafood, swung in the hammock, read and just relaxed. It was heavenly. Then one night my dad told us all to get in the car. He turned the key just enough to activate the radio, and fiddled with the tuning for a little while. Then he said, “You kids listen carefully, because this is history. This is important. It’s something you should always remember.”
And that’s how I heard President Nixon announce that he would be resigning the next day.
It was an afternoon so sultry that if you’d cast it as a chorus girl in “Guys and Dolls,” it would have stolen the show. She was the kind of dame that crawls into your dreams late at night and makes a pup tent out of your bed sheet. She strolled into my office without even knocking and said she needed a light for her cigarette.
“You don’t smoke,” I said, curling my lip into my best Elvis-on-meth sneer.
“How would a dumb moke like you know a thing like that?” she said in a voice that dripped with un-fulfilled promises.
“I read the rest of the book,” I said. My eyes were glued to the mounds of smooth, creamy flesh that bulged out of the top of her silk blouse like a freshly spanked baby’s bottom.
“Listen, I don’t know where your mind is, but my eyes are up here in New York City,” she said.
“Yeah,” I mumbled around my hardening tongue, “but the scenery’s pretty nice down around Baltimore, too. So tell me, Tits … er, Toots … what can I do for ya?”
“You can find my ex-husband for me,” she replied, bending over my desk to show me everything between Miami Beach and Daytona.
If you want to read the rest of the story, well, you’ll have to wait until I get it published. Or e-mail me.
The first time Mrs. Homie and I went to Disneyworld, we were in St. Louis attempting to make our connecting flight to Orlando. We had been told, when we left Springfield, that we would need to check in again at the mini-gate at St. Loius to get our boarding passes. We arrived at the gate and found a huge crowd of people gathered around. We took our place in line and waited our turn. The man before us was told that the flight was overbooked. He proceeded to raise hell, use obscenities, threaten the agent with the loss of her job, and a whole host of other invectives. When it was our turn, we were both exceptionally polite to the agent. We told her that, if worst came to worst, we would take a later flight, and since we weren’t going to walk to Orlando we would simply trust the airline to do the best they could, and we thanked her for her efforts. She told us to come back in half an hour and see if she was able to do anything for us.
So we went off to get some supper, sat down, ate our food, and then made our way back to the gate. We walked up to the agent and she smiled and handed us our boarding passes. We were excited to be on the flight, and we thanked her profusely and then sat down to wait. I took a peek at our tickets to see where we’d be sitting, and our seats were in First Class!
Just before the plane was sealed to pull away from the Jetway, the agent peeked her head into the plane and waved at us, grinning ear to ear.
…I’ll be in my bunk.
When I was eleven years old, my mom got a letter saying that I was a potential candidate to be in the Miss Florida Pre-Teen pageant. Some sort of mass mailing, no doubt, but Mom thought we should check it out. She took some pictures of me in the back yard and sent in the entry form. A few weeks later we got a letter saying I’d been chosen as one of the top fifty, and would be competing with the others on stage. (This was like nothing either of us had ever done before.)
So we got ready for my shot at the big time. First we had to buy some clothes. My gown was white lace with long sleeves and a red velvet sash and I did not care for it at all. Then we had to get some blue shorts and a white blouse so all the girls would be dressed sort of alike for our group song-and-dance number. (!!!) Last and worst, I needed to have some sort of athletic outfit, so Mom bought me a little tennis outfit consisting of a very short dress and frilly panties. :mad:
Next we had to come up with a talent. I didn’t have a plethora of talents to choose from, so it seemed obvious that I’d have to read one of the poems I’d written. I had my heart set on reading what I considered my magnum opus, an Edgar Allan Poe inspired thing titled, “The Rich Man’s Death”. My grandpa, who had recently been diagnosed with leukemia, thought that was an awful idea. I remember him snapping at my mom, “So they’ll all be singing and dancing, and then there’ll be that one little girl who talked about death!” However, I couldn’t come up with another poem I wanted to cop to in public, and somehow managed to get my way.
So me, Mom, and my grandfather traveled about a hundred miles to spend the weekend at the hotel where the pageant was being held. (My grandfather came so I’d have an escort on stage when I wore the long gown.) It seemed as if all the other contestants had a lot more experience than me, but I really hit it off with a couple of the other girls and we had a good time playing together at the pool.
The actual competition remains a blur to me (mercifully, I’m sure). It was a blur to me even at the time, because I had decided to compete without my glasses. I know there was an audience, but I never saw them. One of the judges caught me wearing my glasses offstage, and told me I should have kept them on, so I took that to mean I wasn’t going to win. I was cool with that.
So, ah, then…I didn’t win or become a famous poet or even learn how to tell a story with a point. I still have my trophy and rhinestone tiara somewhere.
