It Was Personal History Awareness Month (And I Missed It)

 It Was Personal History Awareness Month (and I Missed It)

Would I lie about something like that?  It’s important to be aware of one’s personal history. I try to be aware of my personal history as often as possible. Unfortunately, I forgot to commemorate it it last month. I was too busy throwing away all of the term papers I didn’t read during the summer semester and entering fictitious grades into the system. I spent more time creating personal histories for my students than I spent commemorating my own history.

Enough about their personal history. I’ve got my own personal history, and I have a lot of it. Ask my wife. Worse, ask my mother. She’s eighty-five years old and every time I visit, she can’t remember my name, but she beckons me with a reminder of my personal history.

The whole family was gathered for Easter dinner a few years ago, and my mother wanted my attention.

“You. The one who broke the Tiffany lamp forty years ago! Could you stop talking and pass the roast beef that you hacked to pieces?” (Another entry onto the ledger of my life of crime--- the hacked roast beef). The lamp again. She hasn’t used that one for awhile. She saves the Tiffany Lamp Incident for special occasions. I should quit trying to set the record straight about that one. Any response just raises more questions.

“Mom, how many times do I have to tell you? Ralphie was beating me with the cat and I was getting my eyes clawed out. It was me or the lamp!” I replied.

“Ralphie wasn’t even there at the time, were you, sweetheart?”

My brother Ralph has a clean blotter. The firstborn of our family has never done anything wrong, and at middle age, he still won’t confess to his part in the Tiffany Lamp Incident. If you believe my mother, his personal history reads like The Lives of the Saints.

“I was with you, shopping at Sears, Mom,” Ralph said. You gave me the charge card to buy underwear. I still have the receipt.”

I let it go. We’re all grown up now. He has a possibly verifiable alibi. 

But who keeps a receipt for underwear for thirty years?

I’m surprised that nobody mentioned Personal History Month during the last faculty meeting. There’s always some sort of awareness week.

Maybe everyone else was too busy throwing away unread student papers and making up students’ personal histories too. My colleagues criticize me for acting detached. Maybe it’s true. Next year, I’ll remind everyone of Personal History Awareness Month in a departmental memorandum and urge everyone to disclose something very personal about himself at the next faculty meeting. Then I'll tell everyone about my fallen arches.

Wow. I’ve got something to look forward to now.

Post script: As I look on the list of notable things on the list, I see that it was also Self-Discovery Month. What in Hell is that? Was I supposed to have spent a month looking for myself? I guess it’s sort of like back when we were all urged to get in touch with our “inner child”. I was bummed out when I found out that my inner child had left the country and was last seen building sand castles and canoodling with a scantily-clad local beauty on a beach in Tahiti.

I sent him an email but he never wrote back.