Play me a memory

Think Kit Day 5:

Talk to someone! Interview at least one other person about their favorite moments of the year. Share what you heard.

Oh, this has been fun. I got some wonderful responses from my friends Becca, Erin, and Jennifer, and my dad, John. Becca is a fellow attendee of the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival. Erin and I were tutors in the IUPUI University Writing Center. I got to know Jennifer through a writing group that slung critiques at the now-demolished Lockerbie Coffee House. Dad and I met when he found my gestational pod under a large mushroom in the Scandanavian forest.

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Becca (interviewed via text about her February birthday)

Birthday skeeball!!! :)

[I said I wasn't sure I knew this story.] I got to go to Chuck E Cheese and play skeeball on my birthday. :)

I am very, very good at skeeball... small children were eyeing my tickets with great envy. Also, I out-butched [my girlfriend] at the basketball-throwing game. :)


Erin

4th of July I was really sad, so I forced myself to attend a huge rooftop party where I barely knew anyone. There were panoramic views of the random firework displays popping off in every Chicago neighborhood. Our host made Downton Abbey-inspired cocktails called Lady Mary's Shame. Most everyone there was educated and elegant and queer and I got a lot of compliments on my dress. I think I saw every firework in the entire city that night.

Jennifer

I was working a typical Tuesday afternoon in September when I received a message on Facebook from a favorite professor of mine (alma mater, University of Missouri). She said she would love to meet with me for a glass of wine at a local wine bar to discuss a project. I agreed, happy just to see her, and, of course, curious about this project. That evening, she offered me the assistant curator position for her Poetry at the Point series. I have always been a writer, have always written and published and thrown myself through the paces of the sometimes dreadful practice, but in that moment I was elated. I remembered my intense involvement with the poetry scene of Indianapolis and it seemed as though every mistake I had made, every moment I had placed writing on the back burner for other more pressing or "worthwhile" pursuits just unraveled. I felt like I was being given a second chance to respond to a divine call in my life, to step back into shoes I thought I had most likely donated to Goodwill or someone else along the way. It was affirming and sacred and simply fabulous.

Dad

When I was a kid, I loved seeing the fall foliage on our family farm every year. I'd run with my dog, Pooch, cross the creek, and enter the lane. You had to climb over an old rail fence to get into the woods -- virtually every farm had a woods. I'd jump over logs, break sticks, and be on the lookout for squirrels -- that was about the wildest thing back there. Pooch wasn't a dog who fetched; he'd just look at you. I knew not to eat anything since it was poisonous, so I'd look at the toadstools and bust them up. This year, one of my best memories -- now that I'm a city boy -- was bagging up my last bag of leaves.

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Told ya he found me under a mushroom.