Important Re-Memories

As I approach my 25th anniversary of being alive, I find myself nostalgic. I now start sentences with phrases such as, "Back when I was a kid..." and, "Kids today..." There's something about 25 that just feels old. I feel like there should be some sort of milestone, acknowledgment, right of passage or something to signify the fact that you're exiting the early twenties where immaturity and lack of responsibility are expected, and entering the late-twenties where there's no excuse for your failure to be an adult. (On a side note, I think I need to find more friends that are older than me as a favor to my self-esteem.)

What’s cool about turning 25? I can legally rent a car in most states now…my driver’s license expired…I’m half way to 50...? Neat. Throughout high school and the beginning of college, I used to think of 25 as that time when everything would make sense, or even if nothing made sense, at least I would feel like an established person. Now that I have reached this age, it’s hard to determine whether my thoughts about being 25 were wrong or if I’m failing at being 25.

Maybe part of the reason I feel old is because the past decade has really kind of sucked compared to the other decades I’ve lived through. Or maybe I just think this decade sucks because I’m an adult now and the 1980s and 1990s were awesome because I was a carefree kid. Either way, I think it's safe to say that we are digressing in terms of cool and it will have a negative impact on the children of this nation. So, forget about the recession, forget about the rapidly rising unemployment rate, and forget about the health care debate because all of your energy should be put towards making sure the children in your life become familiar with more important things, like Fruit Stripe Gum, lasers and the original versions of timeless classics.

So, below you'll find hearty helping of nostalgia, as well as a few things that make me yearn for a time that wasn’t so…dumb. I suppose these are also things that make me feel really old, which is how I felt when I tried to explain who Jem was to my 12-year old sister. Anyway, let’s hold hands as we Skip-It down memory lane…

Note: There is a good chance that this list might make you feel extra old if you are older than 25...just a warning.

Polly Pocket
My sister and I went through phase where we were obsessed with Polly Pocket. I think it was the challenge of actually playing with the ridiculously miniature Polly and all her accessories that made it fun…for a minute. Either way, I’ll take Polly Pocket over Da Bratz any day.

Polly Pocket = Awesome; Da Bratz = Scary

Pog
Whether you were six or 16 years old, if you didn’t have a sweet slammer and a solid collection of pogs during their brief reign in the 90s then you were probably also best friends with the lunch lady. Unless you went to one of those really lame schools that considered Pog a form of gambling, in which case you should have started an underground pogger operation during recess like the rest of us.



Fruit Stripe Gum
The most delicious gum ever created. The taste reminds me of summer and the linoleum kitchen floor Tori and I would spread our candy collections out on before making trades. It was like the NBA draft for candy, and it all started with the red and pink Fruit Stripe Gum flavors.




Land Before Time
Prepare yourself. This movie came out 21 years ago. I KNOW! This is one of my favorite movies of all-time because it was the first movie that ever made me cry; I was four years old. Oh, Littlefoot…




Skip-Its
Yes, I have a scar from falling while Skip-It-running up our asphalt driveway, but I was about to break my record number!



TMNT
“Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Heroes in a half shell, Turtle power!” Oh man, if you grew up in the late 1980s to early 1990s and you didn’t love TMNT then I don’t want to know you. I remember playing Ninja Turtles on the playground when I was seven years old and the best part was arguing about which Ninja Turtle character you were most like—I always wanted to be Donatello or Michelangelo because they had the coolest weapons. But my love for TMNT was continuous—in college I spent an entire summer reaching the highest level of the TMNT Nintendo game. My character of choice? Donatello, duh, the bō is unbeatable!



“Macarena”
The international dance sensation that was so popular 13 years ago it can still be experienced in the third hour of wedding receptions across the world. Relive it:


Child Stars Make Sad Grown Ups

We watched them go from this:


To this:


Same goes for Lindsay Lohan…Remember this double adorableness from her role in "The Parent Trap":


And flash forward to the present day disaster:


On a more positive child star note...Remember Jonathan Lipnicki? (“Do you know that the human head weighs eight pounds?”) He used to be my favorite little nugget ever 13 years ago when he looked like this:


But now even he is old:

(Okay, so he's not old, but he's older, or rather, old enough—and he's wearing a speedo. I'm just saying...)


Jurassic Park
Another dinosaur movie, but without the warm-fuzzy feeling of "Land Before Time." SIXTEEN years ago I remember going to see Jurassic Park in the theaters with my dad and sister. I was nine years old and Tori was probably seven. I think my dad thought it was just some kid movie about dinosaurs but about 45 minutes into the movie when people start dying, Tori got scared and starts crying so my dad had to take her outside and I was left to watch the rest of the scary movie by myself.




Jem and The Holograms
She was “truly outrageous.” When I was three years old I broke my arm because I thought that if I jumped off a building or a structure I would be able to dangle off the edge and hide from enemies, like Jem did. This is when I learned that I did not live in cartoon world.




Scrunchies
The coolest accessory to own circa 1994. You were even cooler if it matched your outfit in a nonchalant, but totally planned kind of way.






Care Bears
Originally created in 1981 for greeting cards, I was obsessed with Care Bears as a child. I loved that they had special powers that came out of their tummies (I always thought that if I ever had super powers they would come from my belly in the same manner). My sister and I used to run around the house screaming “Care Bear Stare!” while my dad chased us, pretending to be Professor Cold Heart. (And then they tried to remake it 2002 and ruin my memories.)


Umbros
All the cool kids had them, and if you didn’t have them you borrowed a pair from one of your friends who managed to have a rainbow collection of Umbros. These were seriously unflattering shorts though—they didn’t look good on anyone but soccer players. I never played soccer, but I had many pairs of Umbros.




Laser Portraits
We Have Lasers!!!!!!!!!! is a website that collects and posts various school photos from when a laser backdrop was the hottest way to capture your awkward youth. I remember that the photographer had several different laser backgrounds for you to choose from and I always wanted to do the crazy space lasers, but it never matched my outfit so I ended up with pink explosions or pastel wave lasers—lame.

Awesome. Awesomer. Awesomest.

Saved By the Bell
Only the best TV show ever created, Zack and the gang taught me important life lessons and that you can pause time by throwing up a quick “Time Out” (which I was very disappointed to learn was not actually true). If you ever to go to a trivia night at a bar somewhere and “Saved By the Bell” is one of the categories, call me on your giant cell phone and I’ll be there in 30 seconds flat to answer every question. And now, without further adieu, one of my favorite SBTB scenes:





And that concludes our trip down memory lane—pretty sure I got a higher Skip-It number than you, but whatever. I hope you enjoyed reliving some of the past and are ready to go out in public and have a conversation with a complete stranger about how "kids these days just don't understand..."

(If I left out anything totally rad, please use the comment feature below to express your anguish.)

Dead Ducklings and Memory Reconciliation

When I see Candy Buttons (the multi-colored dots on a strip of paper) I think of the Philadelphia Zoo and riding a train for the first time. When I taste blood I think of the time my dad pulled out my first loose tooth. Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Condensed Soup reminds me of the pork chops my dad used to make that were essentially drowning in an indescribable, chunky, gray sludge, which we subsequently ate every night for what felt like a year. The deafening sound of cicadas makes me think of the summer we visited our second cousins in Sioux City, Iowa. The sweet rubbery smell of a My Little Pony reminds me of birthdays and Christmases. Green ribbons remind me of summer camp. Oatmeal makes me think of chicken pox. Big Red gum reminds me of long car rides. And dry ice makes me think of all the times my sister and I pretended to be witches or mad scientists.

These are just brief instances, little snapshots of the past that pop into my head without warning. But none of the aforementioned memory triggers compare to the one I think of and recount most often.

(Note: The way I remember this happening might be different from what actually happened, so I guess you could say this is strictly from my seven-year-old point of view.)

It was newly summer, the end of the school year, and we were hosting a pool party for my second grade class. We lived in Powhatan, Virginia, a mostly rural (at the time) area, where it was headline news when the first stoplight was installed, and close encounters with wild animals and nature were pretty common. We also had a lot of animals of our own—or, as my dad would say, “it was a fucking zoo”—cats (which were endlessly fertile, thus a constant litter of kittens), pigeons, dogs, horses, rabbits, a couple goldfish, hamsters, guinea pigs, and ducklings were all part of our ever-growing brood. At the time of this pool party, the ducklings were the most new and exciting addition to our “zoo.” There were two ducklings, and during a forced break from swimming, I led a group of my classmates down to the ducklings’ cage, which was just beyond the pool, to show them these adorable, fuzzy, chirping creatures; however, when we reached our destination, there was nothing but an empty cage. I remember feeling panicked, thinking that it was my fault—had I irresponsibly left the door open? But, alas, this was not the case, for one of the ducklings lay dead on the ground—and it wasn’t in an ‘oops, it fell’ sort of way, it was in a ‘who done it’ sort of way.

I took off, searching for my dad, because surely he would know how to save the duckies. I ran up the side of our house screaming, “Daddy! Daaaad! DAAA-AAAD! HELP! SOMETHING’S HAPPENED TO THE DUCKS!” My dad, used to dramatic outbursts whether it was a dead baby duck or a dismembered Barbie, told me he would take care of it and to go back to the party. While he was problem-solving the duckling situation, I ran off to tell everyone about the tragedy unfolding, but I didn’t get far before I heard a few screams and my dad yelling. I ran around the pool and up to the side of the house where my dad had been, thinking someone must have found the missing duckling. But this was not the case, for there it was, the culprit of all evil, the monster, the murderer of my ducklings: a seven-foot long black snake with a large, duck-like lump just past its head (I’d say neck, but that doesn’t seem accurate). My dad was holding the monster by the tail as if it was a giant fish; he even had that proud predator smile, the one you see on fisherman in those 8” x 10” pictures encased in frames that have “Catch of the Day” engraved across the top. I was instantly horrified. I had seen, and likely tortured, many small garden snakes before, but I had never seen a snake as immense as the beast that ate my duckies. At this point my dad was too sick of the “zoo” to even entertain the idea of getting more ducks, and I don’t doubt that he experienced some sense of relief in their passing, but he still tried to make me feel better, telling me it was okay because the big, bad snake was dead now so I didn’t have to worry. He had to chop the snake into pieces with a shovel in order to fit it into the garbage. Then I ate a popsicle and went swimming.

Now my dead ducklings haunt me every time I go to a park with a pond, or when I walk my dog along the path in our neighborhood where ducks occasionally flutter in the puddles, or when duck is on the menu at a restaurant, or when someone mentions snakes. But sometimes it’s not even duck or snake-related, sometimes I’m folding laundry, or brushing my teeth, or writing a blog post. Perhaps it was the lack of resolution, the eagerness to move past the devastating murder of my ducklings, which has resulted in automatic playback of this memory. It was this weekend that I found out my dad’s version of this story is much different than my own, but that only seems to add to the trauma (I suppose it also confirms my ability to dramatize any event, as if I needed further proof).

Maybe resolution lies in the fact that my dad’s story is different than mine, even though in his version the ducklings are still murdered by a giant black snake, which he then killed (he confirms the whole chopping it up with a shovel part too), but he claims I wasn’t the one to discover the duckling homicide. Maybe the spirits of my duckies can’t rest until I do something to resolve their untimely deaths. Maybe I can’t rest until I do something to make myself feel better about their murders. I’ve considered a few options like, getting new ducklings and caring for them to adulthood (but that won’t work because my dog will surely eat them), or donating to a duck preservation society (but I’m practically a charity case myself so that seems unreasonable), or maybe I could buy a snake and turn it into a vegetarian before releasing it back into the wild so that it can teach other murderous snakes a lesson (but that seems to require a specific skill set, which I’m not really interested in acquiring).

I suppose a certain amount of unrest concerning this memory is inevitable. I guess I’ll just eat a popsicle and go swimming. Again.