National Day of Listening

[drwex]

Today is the national day of listening. I have had a couple people respond to my initial request for stories. I'd love to hear more.

If it'll help, I'll ask you questions. Leave a note here if you'd like a prompt.

And if you're so moved, consider sitting with someone you know and have them tell you one of their stories.

Comments

[catya.livejournal.com]

sure :)

[drwex]

Sure which?

[dreams-of-wings.livejournal.com]

I could use a prompt. :)

[cutieperson]

me too.

[drwex]

I enjoyed sitting with you and your mom - I think it was the first time I met her - and hearing her tell about you as a child. Can you tell me a story about yourself and your mom? Maybe something about how you two got to have this relationship as adults, which seems pretty good from this distance.

[cutieperson]

i'm not really sure that my mom and i "got to have this relationship as adults"; i think we've had it at least since i was a teen, if not sooner.
my mom took my sisters elsewhere for the night for my 16th birthday present, as what i wanted was to have a party without the kids around. she was also the type of person to give me her room when i had an out of town boyfriend visiting, as she had a queen size bed and mine was only a twin and thus not comfortable for two.
it wasn't that she was encouraging outrageous behavior with either of those things, just that she innately trusted me to be my own person and figure out what was best for myself, if that makes sense?

[drwex]

It does. Thank you for sharing that. It's interesting in that most of the adult women I know tell stories of some kind of fighting (even if it's the most gentle sort) between themselves and their mothers and then later learning to re-relate as adults.

[drwex]

I remember once we went out to dinner and talked a bit about dance in your life. I'd love to hear a story about you and dance - maybe something you saw that moved you? Or something you did that's really stuck with you?

[quietann.livejournal.com]

prompt please?

[drwex]

Mmm, tell me about the first time you ever rode a horse? Was that what started you on this path or was it something else?

[cereselle.livejournal.com]

I'd like a prompt. I'm tired of all the major stories I usually tell. :)

[drwex]

Hmm, I'm not even sure what the major stories are. And since we haven't seen each other in quite a while I guess mostly I'd just like to know what's up with you? What's your story today?

[mangosteen]

Okay. I'll take a prompt.

[drwex]

I'm reluctant to encourage you to write something else because I'm so eagerly awaiting your stories from B school. But let's see... tell me about the first time you were sitting in one of those classes and realized "Yeah, there's really something going on here!"

[hammercock.livejournal.com]

I'll take a prompt. :)

[drwex]

Hmm, I know a few of your stories. How about a household story from before Kimberly moved away?

[hammercock.livejournal.com]

Let's see...well, you may know that Kimberly loves to make a big deal over Christmas, with a big tree and a big formal dinner on Xmas Eve and lots of presents. You may or may not know of a little old Mac app called "Jared, the Butcher of Song (http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Jared-Smith)," which has a Christmas version featuring a guy singing, "Feliiiiiiiz....navidad...in [insert country here]," in truly wretched fashion. Turns out that this song drives JB nuts, which of course means that we have to keep singing it expressly to annoy him. :) Our favorite part is when it sings, "Feliiiiiiz...navidad...in Cuba!" and Santiago and I shout back, "CUBA!!!"

For a couple of years, then, Kimberly would come to our bedroom door at oh-god-thirty in the morning and wake us up by singing, "Feliiiiiiz...navidad...in Cuba!" and we would signal back that we were awake by responding, "CUBA!!!" Except for the Xmas of 2005, when we yelled back, "WE'RE ENGAGED!!!" because Santiago had asked me to marry him before we went to sleep in the wee hours of Xmas Day. :) And then there was much squeeing.

JB still hates it when we sing that song. :)

[drwex]

That's AWESOME! Thank you for sharing that.

[meadmaker.livejournal.com]

Could you come up with a prompt for me?

Otherwise, I'll try to come up with something on my own, but I'd prefer to make it something that I know you're interested in.

[drwex]

Hmm, I'd be interested in the story of how you two got together - I don't think I've ever heard that one. But really anything you'd like to tell would be fun.

How I got together with <lj user="tigira">

[meadmaker.livejournal.com]

I had known tigira for a while, having met her at Mabon of 2002. At that point I was in an exclusive marriage with effloresense, so we didn't think about dating immediately. However, I did start flirting with tigira on the night that I met her - someone else attending that night remarked that I kissed hands well. Well, since tigira is also a playtron of renaissance faires, I gave her a proper hand kiss, complete with kneeling on one knee. As I recall, I tried my best to kiss her hand without propositioning her, but I've heard contradictory opinions on what means what, so I may have propositioned her by mistake. Still, we were both happy to find someone else who enjoyed renaissance faires, so we decided to attend the New York Renaissance Faire together that year.

Around May of 2003, effloresense and I opened our relationship to outside dating, and in June there was a weekend where effloresense was out of town to see her boyfriend, and tigira came over to help me and my landlords with some house demolition (after a house fire that February). That Saturday I invited her over for a dinner (of pasta salad with sun-dried tomatoes and an appetizer of strawberries, actually, which is what triggered her first full-blown allergic reaction). I asked her if she'd like to go on a date, and we agreed on the next weekend.

The following Saturday, we went on a date to Tú Y Yo in Somerville. After a wonderful dinner, we went walking along the Mystic River as it borders Route 16, and talked about what our relationship might be. After mosquitoes drove us away from the water and back to tigira's car, we spent an hour making out while parked on the side of the road next to the Mystic River park.

A couple of months later on, we still went down to the NY Ren Faire together. On our way back, tigira called her sister and was chatting for a while. We can't remember anymore whether or not her sister knew that I was married at the time, but I do recall that her sister gave me the message that I better be good to tigira, because otherwise tigira would kick my butt. (You do know that she has a black belt in Tae Kwon Do, right?)

I like to think that I've been pretty good to tigira throughout our relationship.

Re: How I got together with <lj user="tigira">

[drwex]

Thank you for sharing your story. I think I'd heard bits of it before (particularly the strawberries bit!) but it's really nice to get the whole thing.

Bonus Story: "I thought you saw me." (Part I)

[meadmaker.livejournal.com]

That last response rambled a lot, so I thought that I'd give you a bonus story that's a little more coherent.

The weekend that I turned seventeen, I went on a trip to a speech and debate to a town about an hour and a half south of my high school. For various reasons, I had a horrible time there, and so I was looking forward to getting home.

When I got back to the high school, I was a little bit surprised to find that my car wasn't where I had left it. Now, my car was a 1981 Toyota Tercel. It was brown. I think that officially, the color was "rust." But, it was brown. Shit brown. It was at least ten years old by the time that I started driving, but that was fine for getting me where I needed to go.

This car also weighed about as much as a paperweight. So, periodically the guys on my Cross Country team would decide it was fun to pick this car up from where I parked it, and move it around for me. So, I wasn't too taken aback by the fact that my car wasn't where I had left it. I walked around the parking lot to find it. When that failed, I asked a friend of mine to drive me around to the other parking areas abutting the school, which also failed.

At this point I was getting ready to call the police to report a theft, but my friend pointed out that my family had keys to the car and may have taken it. Though I didn't believe that would happen (who would choose to drive around a ten-year-old shit-brown Toyota Tercel?), I went ahead and called home before the police. I was told that they knew about the car, and that I should just get a ride home. When I did, I found out what had happened while I was away.

I've mentioned that this was the weekend of my seventeenth birthday, so obviously at the time I was a whiny teenager. I like to think that I whined a bit less than most, but such is the nature of the beast. One of the things that I would whine about periodically was the fact that this Toyota Tercel had no radio. So, my mother decided that a radio would be a good birthday present.

She took it to a nearby mall so that she could have it at hand for getting a radio that would be sure to work. And, that she did. Triumphant, my mother set about her return voyage. Alas, it was the voyage of the damned. As my mother was on her way, she was tooling along one of the roads bordering the mall (about equivalent to Mass Ave in northern Camberville) at about 35 to 40 MPH.

Now, let's change perspective. Instead of looking at life from the perspective of my mother, let's be a granny in a Cadillac. We know that we're a granny, because our granddaughter is in the car with us, and we're on the way to the mall to get her a haircut. We're about to head into the parking lot of the mall, but first we stop at a stop sign because we have to cross this semi-major road. We look to the left; nothing is coming. We look to the right - look, there's a shit-brown Toyota Tercel coming at us, tooling along at 40 MPH. Should we wait for traffic to clear? Nah; let's just go for it.

And go she did. She pulled out into my mother, and her front passenger side corner hit my mother's front driver's side corner. The cars then bounced, and the rear corners also hit. My mother was honestly pretty lucky to be alive at this point.

They climb out of their cars, and the first thing granny says is, and I quote, "I thought you saw me." (Keep in mind that granny had a stop sign) the next thing granny suggests is that they drive a block or two back to her house, so that they can sort this all out there. You may be able to imagine the likely condition of a 1981 Toyota Tercel that was just hit twice with a Cadillac; the front driver's side wheel was at a forty-five degree angle to the ground. This car wasn't going anywhere.

Bonus Story: "I thought you saw me." (Part II)

[meadmaker.livejournal.com]

After some time that involved the police arriving, the tow truck arriving, the discovery that granny had no insurance, granny's son arriving, and said son magically producing insurance, my Toyota was hooked up to the truck and ready to be towed to the great junkyard in the sky (or, more likely, Grandview). My mother had managed to get the tow truck operator (I almost wrote "wrecker", but that would have been ambiguous in this context) to agree to drive her home, and the police officer approached her again.

About six years previous to this episode, my mother received a speeding ticket. It was the result of a speed trap set solely because a city council member lived in a neighborhood between my house and my school, but she was nailed pretty fairly. She paid it. Then, a week later, she was ticketed in the same place, in the same speed trap. My mother, full of indignation, refused to pay it. (This wasn't out of character for her. She also refused to pay a special vehicle registration fee imposed by the city of Kansas City, because she thought that the city had no business charging it.) The result of this refusal was that she had a warrant out for her arrest. So, off my mother went to jail.

I'm the youngest of my siblings. As I recall, by this time both of my sisters were off at college - one in South Hadley, Massachusetts, and one in Springfield, Missouri. Recall that I was out of the city at a high school speech and debate tournament. So, who did my mother have to call in order to come bail her out of jail?

My mother called her ex-husband. She tells me that the way that she phrased it to him was, "XXXX, this is going to be a change." The change is that when they were married, she had gotten calls from him a few times to get him out of jail for DUIs. (But he's much better now!)

Anyway, my father bails her out of jail, drops her off at my high school to pick up her car (which she had left in the parking lot), and she goes home. (I think he may still have accompanied her, because she was still really shaken.) It's not long after that that I called.

So, that's the story of the death of the first car I drove on a regular basis. It also explains how I came to have in my possession a car radio that wasn't connected to a car. Through all this, my mother managed to keep the still-in-the-box radio.

Re: Bonus Story: "I thought you saw me." (Part II)

[drwex]

That's awesome! Thank you.

[keyne.livejournal.com]

I may be able to come up with something if you prompt me. :}

[drwex]

Let's see... I haven't seen your kids in a while. Tell me a story about something funny a child did with you recently?