Jury’s still out; I’ll let you know when it’s over.
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This is the wrong question; it should be: “What was the least bad day of your life?”
But then, I was born grumpy.
Carry on.
.
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Well, it was the best 4 and a half days, actually. About 3 months after my wife and I met she got back from a longish visit with her sister, who was living in England. I met her at the airport, we spent a token 20 min with her parents, then we went back to my place where we proceeded to shag relentlessly for four and a half days, drifting off to sleep a bit when necessary, getting out of bed to eat a bit once in a while, or have a coffee, or glass of wine, depending on the time of day, but otherwise just shagging in that wild hot passionate feverish way that new lovers (who have really clicked) do. After we were literally raw we were laughing about it and decided to have a 12 hour break to “heal” a bit, but an hour later, back at it. Best days ever. There’s never been enough time to even try to repeat it; jobs, kids, etc. have always intruded. We have to be happy with less ambitious sessions now. Sigh.
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Kid’s birth, not really. Wedding day, oh no too much stress. Graduation from college, sacred stiff.
I think the best day was after a very hard work out at the gym with my pal we treated each other to pizza and Mr. Pibb. I can, to this day, taste each bite and sip of the chow.
Maybe the simplest of pleasures make the greatest days.
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Not exactly sure if I can confine it to one specific day…but most of my best ones seem to have come through my travels with my husband.
Two great road trips in general: our month-long honeymoon through Spain and Portugal, and a driving trip we took up into New Brunswick and all the way to Prince Edward Island in Canada.
A great day from one of those: it began as a rainy, gray day on P.E.I., and we were supposed to be doing the outdoor stuff then. We tried seeing a park on the north side of the island, complete with its famously red-sanded beaches, but the weather was simply too bad. Driving across the long bridge back to the mainland, we debated about whether or not we ought to attempt going to our next outdoor destination that day. We had our then-two-year-old little guy in tow with us, and, though I had my reservations about how he’d react, I argued that we should at least attempt to go, else we’d be kicking ourselves for the rest of our lives that we’d missed it.
It was getting late, but we pulled into the parking lot and there was enough of a break in the stuff falling from the sky for us to head in to the Hopewell Cape – plus the tide was still out. We could do it!
We headed down the path and clomped down the stairs with a couple of hours to spare before the tide came back in. Four stories down and we were walking on the sea floor, the Hopewell Rocks beneath our feet and some “island” formations towering high, high above us. When the tide came in, it would all be under forty feet of water, with just some of the trees and a patch of grass peeking out of the water on some of the highest formations. Dan and I couldn’t stop smiling at each other on such a gray, gray day. We’d made it, our two-year-old romping amongst the smooth pebbled sea floor and constantly delighting in “Rocks! ROCKS!”
Family bliss. Something for all of us – together.
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The day I realized that I wasn’t craving cigarettes anymore.
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when i was thirteen, we moved to nigeria.
i remember getting off the plane and moving into the air — warm, thick, with a smell i did not recognize. you could feel the air. it had a presence quite different from the connecticut woods.
we got in a white english ford and drove three hours from lagos to ibadan, on a two-lane asphalt road with broad shoulders on either side of red dirt backed by forest. i could identify palm and banana trees, the rest a hulking green. there was not much traffic, the occasional giant lorrey.
but it was the air that i remember. and the cheese sandwich i ate. i had never eaten a cheese sandwich like it. someone had sent a lunch basket with the driver. a tea sandwich, mild cheese, grated, between two slices of lightly buttered bread, crusts removed.
in a car moving up a road that led i knew not where, eating that sandwich, feeling the air and watching the trees go by, i was being transported away from everything i had known till then more profoundly than the flight on the airplane from new york to london to lagos. my life was new.
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Wedding day.
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I took the ferry from Galway to Inishmore on a fall-down gorgeous autumn day. My friend and I rode a cart to Dun Aengus, climbed the hill and were utterly alone. The wind blows 30+mph most of the time up there, so I crawled to the cliff edge (the one in the upper pic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%BAn_Aengus) and hung over, looking into the North Sea. Felt like being home, but that was true of most of my experience in Ireland.
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There are a couple if I put them in categories. Different ones for my private self and my public self.
For my public self the panel session at Eschaton08 that I was on with our very own Athenae. I got to thank the people who helped me, acknowledging our community and celebrate our success. I got a standing ovation from the Atriots and lefty bloggers which is the highest honor I can imagine.
During the day I got to listen to my “invisible” friends in person, meet and talk to people I had only talked to online.
Private self and business self are different but I won’t go into them here.
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Assisting at the birth of my first grandchild. Nothing else can compare to that day.
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never happened cause keith is dead. just a pretty good day. spent with him.
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Thanksgiving in the compound, 2005.
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Without a doubt the best day of the part of my life that has already gone by was the day I met my wife. About two months later I knew I wanted to marry her, but it took two more years to achieve that, and 37 more to prove that my judgment was good.
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Tomorrow.
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…the day after my wedding. The days and weeks leading up to the wedding were a panic-fueled nightmare of mind-numbing logistical problems, since we lived a couple hundred miles away from her hometown on the Washington state coast, where the wedding was to take place. The wedding day itself is a jumbled blur, although photographic evidence suggests I smiled quite a bit…
The day of the wedding – and the night (we had an evening wedding) – was visited by a wild early spring coastal storm, but the next day was a wedding gift of its own – sunny and sparkling and surprisingly mild for the Pac NW coast in early April – and we were a young (OK, so ‘young-ish’…OK, so maybe ‘late 20-ish’) couple totally enthralled with each other and totally free of the stress of the last couple of months and facing the next 10 days that would be filled with nothing but just simply being with each other.
It was the first full day of the life together that we had agreed to live six months or so before, and the simple rawpower of that day, the sense of shared adventure and promise and love that seemed to stretch out before us as limitlessly as the ocean outside our window, made my knees shaky in that good sort of way like nothing else that I can think of ever did. Even now after 25 years, two kids, and whole volumes of memories later, that day is one of only two where I can clearly recall almost every event of the day…
[the other is May 18, 1980, the day Mt. St. Helens erupted, but it isn’t even in the running for “my best day”]
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1)Wedding 2)daughter born 3)Shot a 78 on the Old Course at St. Andrews.
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The day I got my blackbelt. This is not because I am competitive or self-centered or an atheltic narcissist – far from it. I love my husband and son more than I love a stitched-up piece of cloth. But I was born without a hip socket on the left side and that goddamn hip has been the bane of my fucking existence. My sister was the captain of every team that I benchwarmed for. Coaches and my parents regularly yelled at me for being lazy. They didn’t believe that it hurt like hell to run, because it was all supposed to have been fixed when I was 3 months old.
Back in 1966 the standard of care was the Spika Cast: you confined the infant in plaster from the balls of her feet to her armpits (with a convenient hole for diaper changes), and forced the baby’s femurheads into the soft bone of her pelvis tomake a socket form. It did form one, sort of – misshapen and shallow, but it basically works. Unfortunately it turns out all that pressure also killed both my femur heads, hence lots of pain but no visible injury. (It did this to a lot of kids, which is why the Spika Cast is no longer the standard of care.)
There’s nothing to do but wait until it gets so bad that I can’t stand it a second more. (Hip replacements last only about 20 years, and I’m 42, with multiple centenarians in the family.)
So getting my blackbelt was the most enormous achievement for me, and adding to my joy, our son earned his on the same day. And now my husband, J., has taken up tae kwon do with us.
We’re like the Incredibles – only slightly less so.
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You wouldn’t want to read anything that depraved at this time of day.
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This is probably pathetic, but my best days always seem to be the LAST day on any job I’ve ever had – seems they’ve all been doozies. 2nd best would be spending my 50th birthday in Paris (and traveling business class, no less)!
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Well, wedding day comes first, a) because, well, duh, Mr. Wonderful and all that and b) because we threw a damn fun reception. I could wax rhapsodic about that whole day (it was really, really beautiful), but I’ll spare you all that.
I will tell you about my second best day. Despite other days that were pretty wonderful, my brain keeps sending me back to a day when I was living in London. One of my friends was with me, and the day our second friend arrived, we took her on a quick walking tour of the sites nearest our flat. Walking through Kensington Gardens, then Hyde Park, then St. James’ Park, in front of Buckingham Palace, then Trafalgar Square, and finally Parliament Square. We ended the afternoon in a quick rain shower, so we ducked into the entrance to Westminster Abbey to wait it out. The sun was shining in brightly, there were half a dozen people in the entryway with us, most of them wearing damp wool, and the boys’ choir was rehearsing inside the Abbey and we could hear them beautifully.
I remember every sensation of that 15 minute chunk of time–the smell of the damp wool mixed with fresh rain, the chill of the stone around us tempered by the sun shining in at near sunset, the sound of the choir and how it echoed around us, and the fact that I was in LONDON.
Thanks for this exercise, A–it helps to remind me I’ve had a pretty happy life.
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Jury’s still out; I’ll let you know when it’s over.
This is the wrong question; it should be: “What was the least bad day of your life?”
But then, I was born grumpy.
Carry on.
.
Well, it was the best 4 and a half days, actually. About 3 months after my wife and I met she got back from a longish visit with her sister, who was living in England. I met her at the airport, we spent a token 20 min with her parents, then we went back to my place where we proceeded to shag relentlessly for four and a half days, drifting off to sleep a bit when necessary, getting out of bed to eat a bit once in a while, or have a coffee, or glass of wine, depending on the time of day, but otherwise just shagging in that wild hot passionate feverish way that new lovers (who have really clicked) do. After we were literally raw we were laughing about it and decided to have a 12 hour break to “heal” a bit, but an hour later, back at it. Best days ever. There’s never been enough time to even try to repeat it; jobs, kids, etc. have always intruded. We have to be happy with less ambitious sessions now. Sigh.
Kid’s birth, not really. Wedding day, oh no too much stress. Graduation from college, sacred stiff.
I think the best day was after a very hard work out at the gym with my pal we treated each other to pizza and Mr. Pibb. I can, to this day, taste each bite and sip of the chow.
Maybe the simplest of pleasures make the greatest days.
Not exactly sure if I can confine it to one specific day…but most of my best ones seem to have come through my travels with my husband.
Two great road trips in general: our month-long honeymoon through Spain and Portugal, and a driving trip we took up into New Brunswick and all the way to Prince Edward Island in Canada.
A great day from one of those: it began as a rainy, gray day on P.E.I., and we were supposed to be doing the outdoor stuff then. We tried seeing a park on the north side of the island, complete with its famously red-sanded beaches, but the weather was simply too bad. Driving across the long bridge back to the mainland, we debated about whether or not we ought to attempt going to our next outdoor destination that day. We had our then-two-year-old little guy in tow with us, and, though I had my reservations about how he’d react, I argued that we should at least attempt to go, else we’d be kicking ourselves for the rest of our lives that we’d missed it.
It was getting late, but we pulled into the parking lot and there was enough of a break in the stuff falling from the sky for us to head in to the Hopewell Cape – plus the tide was still out. We could do it!
We headed down the path and clomped down the stairs with a couple of hours to spare before the tide came back in. Four stories down and we were walking on the sea floor, the Hopewell Rocks beneath our feet and some “island” formations towering high, high above us. When the tide came in, it would all be under forty feet of water, with just some of the trees and a patch of grass peeking out of the water on some of the highest formations. Dan and I couldn’t stop smiling at each other on such a gray, gray day. We’d made it, our two-year-old romping amongst the smooth pebbled sea floor and constantly delighting in “Rocks! ROCKS!”
Family bliss. Something for all of us – together.
The day I realized that I wasn’t craving cigarettes anymore.
when i was thirteen, we moved to nigeria.
i remember getting off the plane and moving into the air — warm, thick, with a smell i did not recognize. you could feel the air. it had a presence quite different from the connecticut woods.
we got in a white english ford and drove three hours from lagos to ibadan, on a two-lane asphalt road with broad shoulders on either side of red dirt backed by forest. i could identify palm and banana trees, the rest a hulking green. there was not much traffic, the occasional giant lorrey.
but it was the air that i remember. and the cheese sandwich i ate. i had never eaten a cheese sandwich like it. someone had sent a lunch basket with the driver. a tea sandwich, mild cheese, grated, between two slices of lightly buttered bread, crusts removed.
in a car moving up a road that led i knew not where, eating that sandwich, feeling the air and watching the trees go by, i was being transported away from everything i had known till then more profoundly than the flight on the airplane from new york to london to lagos. my life was new.
Wedding day.
I took the ferry from Galway to Inishmore on a fall-down gorgeous autumn day. My friend and I rode a cart to Dun Aengus, climbed the hill and were utterly alone. The wind blows 30+mph most of the time up there, so I crawled to the cliff edge (the one in the upper pic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%BAn_Aengus) and hung over, looking into the North Sea. Felt like being home, but that was true of most of my experience in Ireland.
There are a couple if I put them in categories. Different ones for my private self and my public self.
For my public self the panel session at Eschaton08 that I was on with our very own Athenae. I got to thank the people who helped me, acknowledging our community and celebrate our success. I got a standing ovation from the Atriots and lefty bloggers which is the highest honor I can imagine.
During the day I got to listen to my “invisible” friends in person, meet and talk to people I had only talked to online.
Private self and business self are different but I won’t go into them here.
Assisting at the birth of my first grandchild. Nothing else can compare to that day.
never happened cause keith is dead. just a pretty good day. spent with him.
Thanksgiving in the compound, 2005.
Without a doubt the best day of the part of my life that has already gone by was the day I met my wife. About two months later I knew I wanted to marry her, but it took two more years to achieve that, and 37 more to prove that my judgment was good.
Tomorrow.
…the day after my wedding. The days and weeks leading up to the wedding were a panic-fueled nightmare of mind-numbing logistical problems, since we lived a couple hundred miles away from her hometown on the Washington state coast, where the wedding was to take place. The wedding day itself is a jumbled blur, although photographic evidence suggests I smiled quite a bit…
The day of the wedding – and the night (we had an evening wedding) – was visited by a wild early spring coastal storm, but the next day was a wedding gift of its own – sunny and sparkling and surprisingly mild for the Pac NW coast in early April – and we were a young (OK, so ‘young-ish’…OK, so maybe ‘late 20-ish’) couple totally enthralled with each other and totally free of the stress of the last couple of months and facing the next 10 days that would be filled with nothing but just simply being with each other.
It was the first full day of the life together that we had agreed to live six months or so before, and the simple rawpower of that day, the sense of shared adventure and promise and love that seemed to stretch out before us as limitlessly as the ocean outside our window, made my knees shaky in that good sort of way like nothing else that I can think of ever did. Even now after 25 years, two kids, and whole volumes of memories later, that day is one of only two where I can clearly recall almost every event of the day…
[the other is May 18, 1980, the day Mt. St. Helens erupted, but it isn’t even in the running for “my best day”]
1)Wedding 2)daughter born 3)Shot a 78 on the Old Course at St. Andrews.
The day I got my blackbelt. This is not because I am competitive or self-centered or an atheltic narcissist – far from it. I love my husband and son more than I love a stitched-up piece of cloth. But I was born without a hip socket on the left side and that goddamn hip has been the bane of my fucking existence. My sister was the captain of every team that I benchwarmed for. Coaches and my parents regularly yelled at me for being lazy. They didn’t believe that it hurt like hell to run, because it was all supposed to have been fixed when I was 3 months old.
Back in 1966 the standard of care was the Spika Cast: you confined the infant in plaster from the balls of her feet to her armpits (with a convenient hole for diaper changes), and forced the baby’s femurheads into the soft bone of her pelvis tomake a socket form. It did form one, sort of – misshapen and shallow, but it basically works. Unfortunately it turns out all that pressure also killed both my femur heads, hence lots of pain but no visible injury. (It did this to a lot of kids, which is why the Spika Cast is no longer the standard of care.)
There’s nothing to do but wait until it gets so bad that I can’t stand it a second more. (Hip replacements last only about 20 years, and I’m 42, with multiple centenarians in the family.)
So getting my blackbelt was the most enormous achievement for me, and adding to my joy, our son earned his on the same day. And now my husband, J., has taken up tae kwon do with us.
We’re like the Incredibles – only slightly less so.
You wouldn’t want to read anything that depraved at this time of day.
This is probably pathetic, but my best days always seem to be the LAST day on any job I’ve ever had – seems they’ve all been doozies. 2nd best would be spending my 50th birthday in Paris (and traveling business class, no less)!
Well, wedding day comes first, a) because, well, duh, Mr. Wonderful and all that and b) because we threw a damn fun reception. I could wax rhapsodic about that whole day (it was really, really beautiful), but I’ll spare you all that.
I will tell you about my second best day. Despite other days that were pretty wonderful, my brain keeps sending me back to a day when I was living in London. One of my friends was with me, and the day our second friend arrived, we took her on a quick walking tour of the sites nearest our flat. Walking through Kensington Gardens, then Hyde Park, then St. James’ Park, in front of Buckingham Palace, then Trafalgar Square, and finally Parliament Square. We ended the afternoon in a quick rain shower, so we ducked into the entrance to Westminster Abbey to wait it out. The sun was shining in brightly, there were half a dozen people in the entryway with us, most of them wearing damp wool, and the boys’ choir was rehearsing inside the Abbey and we could hear them beautifully.
I remember every sensation of that 15 minute chunk of time–the smell of the damp wool mixed with fresh rain, the chill of the stone around us tempered by the sun shining in at near sunset, the sound of the choir and how it echoed around us, and the fact that I was in LONDON.
Thanks for this exercise, A–it helps to remind me I’ve had a pretty happy life.