Today Was Yesterday

Dear J-

Twenty five (has it been that long?) years ago, when I was writing a daily journal as part of my how-much-like-Henry-Reed can I make my life-project, I had convinced my parents that I was doing something that actually took time and, as the journal was sacredly unreadable, there was no way to check if what I was doing was really taking an hour each night.  Meanwhile I had the entries dialed in:  before I hit upon the idea of writing in the day’s Star Trek episode title (I can still tell you a plot summary if you give me a title, which is really not something to be proud of, in retrospect), I stumbled upon writing in the single line “Today was yesterday.”

Three words, and I got an hour to myself, puzzling over the thin blue notebook with thoughtful looks.  And unlike making predictions and suddenly growing a psychic sense (“Today is tomorrow”) it made sense, that summer of 1985:  without anything else to do, we ended up going to the store more often than not, where we’d drill on math in the mornings and then read library books behind the counter in the afternoons, calling for someone to run the register every so often (it was never a very busy summer).

Leave out the obvious travel yesterday (it’s a strange feeling of displacement to wake up in one bed and go to sleep in another) and I could write that again without lying:  these are comfortable days and when you can fall back into the routine after a week without blinking, that’s a sure sign something’s going right.  It’s hard to believe that it’s already the middle of August; this summer seemed like it would last forever, but counting off a day, a week at a time it goes quicker than ever.

Mike

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Sunny Days

Dear J-

Some days aren’t all that memorable — yesterday, for instance, I’m not sure that without looking back at pictures I’ll be able to say where we went for the first day of 2010, whereas I’d always be able to tell you that we went to Coronado on 1 Jan 2009 (instead of the Pacific side of the island, we walked on the bay side, which I thought was pretty incredible, but Coronado’s always an inspiring/aspiring place to visit). I was having a hard time this afternoon trying to remember where we went for lunch yesterday, as we tried three different restaurants before we found one open for the holiday. There’s nothing wrong with Torrey Pines; it may just be the combination of where and when.

Today with the omnipresent threat of work hanging over my head (I get the shaft late shift this weekend) we had an abbreviated day, bouncing to the park and back in time for a little lunch and a little fun; while in Balboa Park we ran into a greyhound group, where owners congregate with their gregarious, gangly dogs. As it turns out I’m nearly positive (there are only so many greyhounds in the neighborhood) that we ran into one of our neighbors there as a bonus — if you see people you know (or think you know) outside of the usual setting it sparks all kinds of odd feelings of deja vu.

It echoes my past, where I’d spend all summer moping around without being able to see the usual crew of kids (distance, time, and schedule mean as low a dose of the school chums as possible, exacerbated by a lack of motorized transport) and the one or two times I’d unexpectedly run across them would resonate in my mind for weeks afterwards. We went this time with the intent of making a strike on the Model Railroad museum and I end up thinking of that summer before junior high and running into Jennifer Franks at the B.Dalton; funny, the connections our minds make for us some days, right?

Mike