I Remember When...
and I remember Engelbert Humperdink and his suave style and potent voice and his 'there goes my everything'...
I remember when fruit-only ice cream, precursor of 'smoothie', was in vogue as the ultimate indulgence; I used to drive! a few Kms. to get a coconut one or a passion fruit one...
and I remember the drive-in (only one) hamburger place and the auto-cinema in town: I never had a taste for them as, I used to think, what's the fun of waiting in the car...if we were eating 'out'
and popcorns won't taste the same if eaten and 'messing' up dad's car ..
I remember the wild mango trees by the beach and the bees threatening anybody close to those mangoes on the month of May, particularly, and I remember the ripe papayas, of some four kilos or so, at a cost of one whole dime!!! and the same for watermelons...and,in an analogy of "the wheels of the bus go 'round 'n 'round" (all-inclusive of eternity and fate, free will (huh?), and success and failure, and being and beingless), I remember reading and being delighted by Flannery O'Connors and her "revelation' story which is about exposing the 'self-righteous' ... In a way, feeling in the right track most of the times has nothing to do with living for real and being human
that is, dreaming, hoping, achievements, failures, erring, ups-and-downs, happiness and sorrows, love and lovelessness, and celebrations and tragedies, which sum up a good part of our conscious 'life', or unconsciuos?
I remember when internet was dial up.
I remember when computer mice all had those rolling balls in them.
I remember when cell phones needed working antennae's.
I remember writing to Bill Clinton in elementary school because he was the president.
I remember when Princess Diana died and our entire elementary school somehow had been conned into believing that she'd died in a shark attack.
I too remember candy cigarettes. I remember my mom banning them too.
I remember my most favorite treat as a child-- The Wonder Ball.
Oh I am so young compared to all of you oldies!I remember when you could buy individual cigarettes
I remember Curly Wurly out chewing everything for £0.3p
Alas, I remember when i could chew my own hair
I remember Mr. Clean’s ads and that of the Pepsodent tooth paste and that of Palmolive Gold (don’t wait to be told, you need palmolive gold!)…
I remember when people used to ask those inexpert driving around if they got their license in a laundry detergent bx;
I remember the town fairs and the good care everybody took of kids; I remember the circus once a year, with the spectacular tigers and the magician and the rope walker…We all needed to bring chairs :
and that was almost more fun than the circus itself: a reason to be teams and sit close to each other…
I remember my first cookies; mom let me go thru the whole process but…them cookies weren’t cookies, they were hard as iron…
I remember my First Communion: dressed like a bride and Sister Felisa with me in all photos…How I love her till today; she is now 89 and living in Rome. She met my kids and she cried of happiness; she taught me to write essays when I was 9.
I remember mom’s best friend, a lady from some part of Europe who made the best apple pie on earth…
I remember my kids first teacher: it was sort of a teacher and day care but she taught them to read and write and recite and love insects and appreciate nature and wonder around for bees and butterflies…
I remember my best friend going thru divorce and feeling that the world for her might end, when in fact, she bounced back and all doors opened for her and her prosperity…
When I hear the song “in my life” I can’t help to cry. How can we, humans, feel the past as gone when all we do today represents all we learned and cherished and were lucky to have and live by…It’s impossible not to feel melancholic, nostalgic, and yes, tearful,…yet it’s so exquisite to remember…
I remember.....
when milk was delivered to our door in glass bottles with cardboard stoppers
when you could buy 10 pieces of candy for a dime
when gas was under $0.30 a gallon (or was that a litre....)
when bread was $0.25 a loaf
when there was a "cent" key on the keyboard (which has now been replaced with the "^")
when typing meant using a manual Underwood
old vinyl records being played in our wood record player/cassette tape/radio cabinet
when TV was only black and white (a good old RCA and, yes, it had bunny ears, manual tuning and you had to get up to change to one of the three channels)
when my dad purchased our first color TV, but it was still a manual channel changer
when all of us neighborhood kids went outside and played from sun up to sun down without ever worrying about being abducted or getting lost. Parents would call out when dinner was ready... we would have dinner, then rejoin the game without skipping a beat
playing hide and seek with only flashlights in the middle of the night
growing fresh vegetables in our garden
hauling manure and soil in buckets to fill our garden every 2 years
riding my first horse when I was 2
our old '69 Le Sabre Buick -- I loved that car!! Miss it dearly!!
getting my drivers when I was 14
pop came in glass bottles
my grandfather's coke machine in the store -- you opened the door to the chest cabinet only to find the coke immersed in ice and water which kept it cold
Ah, such great memories! Especially the one walking to school in a -35 C Canadian winter where the snow banks reached heights of 7'-9' BEFORE the roads were plowed. We had real snow back then!!
Oh, and I remember when we
brought the Constitution home
converted from Imperial to metric
our first and only female Prime Minister (Kim Campbell)
the colored bar codes and sound when stations went off air at night (usually around 1 am)
...... so much more!!!That's the exact cooler that he had in his store!!
My favorite was the ginger ale too. Still is.
I remember:
Pixie sticks;
Double bubble gum in little squares that came wrapped up with a comic strip;
Rotary dial phones;
Only one phone line in the house;
North Star running shoes ;
Drive-in theatres (and hiding friends in the trunk.....);
First computer with a memory of 256 kb ;
Trouble with Trebles in black and white.... then in color;
Wild Kingdom;
Partridge Family;
The Brady Bunch;
The Six Million Dollar Man;
The Bionic Woman (seriously, I rarely watched TV....)
Hee Haw
Get Smart
Bewitched
Flintstones
Bugs Bunny (the original cartoons)
Tom & Jerry
(no, really, I rarely watched TV.... it was my sister who watched TV)yes
I remember the bionic woman (actress Lyndsay something?); I also remember my parents watching Bonanza and The Praire House...
I remember my first semester in college: "the calculus ruler" a hand-held mechanical ruler for all arithmetic computations and to find logarithms, and values for trigonometry stuff; it was the predecessor of the, a lot later, hand calculators that were available (for my kids!); I also remember programming language Fortran and RPsomething and that we needed to punch a card for every instruction line, and then feed the whole bunch to a card reader which in turn would send the 'program' to run; we would pick our hard copy listing the next day to check results: usually, if we were good at it, we would need three visits to the "IBM" center (the computer processing room was called IBM center and the computer itself would use a good size area of that room and nobody was allowed to enter there but the specialist ...So a weekly Fortran project would use more than 1/3 of our useful time, in the best of the cases...and profs did not know how to make us handle the abstractions involved in computer science, at that time...we struggled too much unnecessarily..
I also remember that my physics prof was a french guy who barely spoke anything but french!!! so I learned to like French and even took it as a second language for a whole year; ahhh la vie!
I rememeber my Modern Math prof: old and the skinniest guy ever, tall, and who got mad when we asked questions that were almost of an obvious answer Some students made him mad on purpose, so the class itself got shorter..but then, prof noticed this 'habit' and guess what...he decided to give us 5 minutes for questions at the end of the class and/or during break time!!!! clever he was, but the loneliest chap..
I remember the anatomy lab, where we arrived at on our fourth semester, for those aspiring to be docs,; it was a life changing episode for me: the smell was unbearable, so much, that I left it to throw all of my breakfast right there...sadly, I needed to redirect my purpose in life t and I did
I remember playing superbreakout on my Atari
I remember watching Star Trek in color for the first time
I remember Huckleberry Hound, The Laff Olympics and the Pink Panther
I remember lite brites, tinker toys and Lincoln logs( yeah they make them now but I bet they are not popular like they were!)
I remember typing class and my name being on the board all the time for looking at the keyboard
I remember when phone receivers were connected to the phone by a cord.
I remember the Rambler, Hornet and Gremlin ( yes my dad had excellent taste in cars
)I remember when the Ty-D-Bol man was smaller than the toilet.
I remember Freddie the Flute
I remember eating moon pies
I remember making mud pies with dirt and little orange-berries. Eating the berries when I was little and then finding out as an adult they were poisonous.
I remember when we thought it was butter but it wasn't , it was Chiffon.
I remember when MTV first came out and HBO was the only cable station. It played "North Dallas Forty" over and over and over again. Yup I remember all of that.I remember when I used to dream about being a world famous lead guitarist or singer. Alas, I only ever got to play to small audiences at drunken parties, or a works charity do
I remember :
• when the doc told my mom that my sis had anemia and the treatment was a daily orange juice fresh with the raw egg yolk beat in!!! little was said in those days about salmonellas or hepatic health issues; to cure everybody while healthy, my mom adopted the ‘cure’ for everyone; I remember that I swallowed that cure with a squizzed nose and always blaming my sis for that punishment
• our fasting Fridays by lean breakfasts, supervegetarian lunchs and black tea and soda crackers for snack-dinner (bedtime was 7pm!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
• my first boyfriend twice as nicer than clever…
• reading poetry till midnight instead of getting ready for a test on mineralogy, next morning (high school)
• our telephone was black, heavy and robust
• as a great thing, our neighbor would treat us with pepsicola
• I wore my first prescription glasses at age 14
• When dad taught me to swim, at age 4
• When mom combed my hair right before catching the school bus
• My mom’s beautiful pony tail
• For years, every Sunday afternoon, after beach, dad took us and our neighbor’s kids to the only icecreamery in town and we all had the same one: banana split
• At home, there were two refrigerators kitchen maid, never ever a microwave…
• Once a week, as our favorite,mom would prepare for us three layer sandwiches with only one slice of ham and plenty of lettuce and spinach and one slice of ugly tomatoes and we would eat them watching a movie (real reels and stuff
• Never ever eating French fries at home: it was always either boiled potatoes smashed and dressed with olive oil and paprika, or, simply mashed potatoes
• Salads on every single meal
• There was only one pharmacy in town and the owner did not mind if one knocked at any time for a needed medicine or advice or… the nasty shots as prescribed by the doc
• Jumping on our beds, a forbidden sport by mom and dad, I landed on one corner of the metal frame and got a cut shaped as a triangle that required 9 stitches at the hospital…my mom was so mad a t me…
• My piano teacher (age 7), Sister Francisca, was mean to me: at any slight or minor mistake with the solfeo, she would hit me in my hands with a looooong ruler; obviously, I quit piano, and till today, I regret it
• The happiest guy and the only dentist in town was also the only vet!!! And when checking us he was always joking, to relax us; then when the drill was used I’d be tense and he would tell me “do not laugh now”
• The only priest in town celebrated Mass FOUR times on Sundays!!! And twice daily
• Xmas day: good meal with lots of parents friends and their kids; no Xmas tree but a Nativity, no gifts interchange at all, no toys, but all gathered sharing jokes, playing a lot a funny games, singing Xmas songs…On New Year’s Eve, one minute before midnight, all at the table, eating the twelve grapes, as the tradition had it, and champaigne toast among adults, us kids, apple cider and one million hugs from everybody to every body…
• And there is more
How sad Melinda nobody should ever endure that torment or pain.
I remember having to take fish oil
- weekend cartoons
- biking from suburbs to a farm, climb the trees for pears,
- climb trees for crab apples
- sliding down huge hills
- stocking hats
- skateboarding
- patio pool parties
- summer campsI remember when I couldn't see my face for acne
I remember when I was attractive to girls
I remember how miserable both my grandfathers were
I remember how lovely both my grandmothers were
I remember my parents saying NO more than they said YES
I remember being the fastest runner in the whole school
I remember the day I could no longer run (motorcycle accident)
I remember how the summer used to go on forever
Ahh, I remember when …....when Jeff's (on "Lassie") grandfather died, and the family moved out; while Timmy's family moved in.
..when "The New Darren" replaced "The Old Darren"
..when Barbie didn't have "bendy" knees at all, and when Jill and Ginny got "bendy" knees that involved "hinge looking" knees on the dolls
..when Ginny dolls' lashes went from being painted on to being new, "glass eyelashes"
..when underwear ads couldn't involve underwear being showed on actual human being
..when my mother hand me a mysterious note (with one word, beginning with "K" on it) to hand the teenager who worked at the drug store, so he could hand me a mysterious box in a brown wrapped, and I could bring the secret package back to my mother. (It cost fifty cents at the time. I once dared to unfold the tiny note, saw what the word was, and still didn't have a clue.)
...when McDonalds french fries were a dime, a hamburger was dime, a cheeseburger was fifteen cents, and eventually a Big Mac would be thirty-five cents.
..when cigarettes were 26 cents for short ones, 27 cents for regular sized ones, and hundred were 28 cents (I worked in a grocery store, so I knew these things).
..when butterfly chokes in carburetors sometimes got stuck (but you could punch them in with a screwdriver)
..when dashboards and steering wheels were metal or other uncushioned stuff
..when babies and toddlers rode in car seats that hooked over the top of the front seat (and had a steering wheel and horn so the baby could "drive")
..when mothers left their babies in carriages outside city stores (with or without an older sibling) while the mother went into the store to shop
..when "Minipoo" "dry shampoo" came out ("when you can't shampoo, Minipoo")
..when there was a network of wires over city streets, so that "trackless trollies" could run
