Dig through your couch cushions, your purse, or the floor of your car and look at the year printed on the first coin you find. What were you doing that year?

I found a twonie, which is to say a Canadian $2 coin. The date is 1996 and that year I turned 21. I was in the middle of my college years and I was finally legal enough in the United States to drink. I had already been cultivating a simmering alcoholism since I was 18 and legal in Ontario Canada just across the Niagara River from where I went to school in Buffalo, New York. I don’t have any log entries from 1996, but I do have memories. Mostly of college and all my friends that I had there. I was just starting to explore my life. Beyond high school, beyond family, college if nothing else gave me the time and space to see what I was going to become. I had already been friends with Jeffery since a few weeks after arriving at school, it’s funny but this year would be the tipping point where it could be said that he’s known me more than half of my life up to this point. As for that year, President Clinton was in office and we were occupied with blue dresses, whitewater, but for every bit of embarrassment he brought with him, he also left us with a budget surplus, the last time we saw something like that. Funny, but it was also during this time that I also let myself go, college led to stress eating and I gained a lot of weight. Now that I’m on this side of my heaviest and when it all began, which is during this time, it seems so tiny, so much water under the bridge – but there it is. I just wish I was journaling more and had entries that went back further. I suppose I should be glad that I started when I did, so at least I have something to turn back to and read when I grow old and decrepit.