September

This was one for the books.

On the day last weekend of August I held a Housecooling Party at my small studio in McKinley Park. I was almost one year from being married and (hopefully) grad school, and one of my best friends, Sam, was moving to Chicago to be my roommate.

On the last weekend before Labor Day Mitch and I borrowed my parents car to go camping at Warren Dunes State Park. For five dollars that year, one could camp on the parking lot (“ash-fault” the way Mitch said it), and so we pitched a tiny-dome tent and joined a sort-of weird community of St.

I don’t remember anything specifically from this month, so I will add a memory that may or may not have been from this period.

One autumn in the middle of the time when I was home schooled, my mom made a trip to a store based out of a house where she bought her teachers’ supplies.

This was a very quiet month.

It was the last month at my lease at an address on the Eastside of Flint: Maryland Ave between Minnesota and Iowa. I’d been working at Angelo’s all summer, hadn’t really made any money, hadn’t really lost any either, and I decided to take a break.

A generally frustrating month at the beginning of an overall interesting year. In fact, in many ways this summer seemed the most “typical” of the four years after finishing college. I’d been out for a full year, and had spent the summer living in the basement of my friends’ house.

When going back this far, I have to fall back almost exclusively upon confirmed and memorized facts rather than actual memories. I’d just turned five years old. My brother had been recently born, and my sister was two. In either late August or early September, I started attending Valley School which was, at that time, located in Grand Blanc Township.

June 1995 – June 1996 (Year 18) was one of the most momentous years of my life, but I didn’t realize it as early as September. The whole summer had been swept up in one massive project, the second Flint Youth Theatre production of Trace Titanic which had toured to Minneapolis in early August.

By way of explanation.

I’ve only gotten about 10% done this week of what I’ve meant to have accomplished. I’ve been going to sleep at about eleven each night, my big accomplishment I think is watching Rome three times, I stood up friends for a hang-out at least once, and I’m behind in both reading and writing.

This remeniscence would feel indulgent if it hadn’t been randomly determined and if I haven’t been posting these memory pieces for a couple years now. That is, I didn’t aim for this recollection, nor have I plunged right into it.

At the end of August, I finished up my last class at the University of Chicago.