Stop and Smell the People

By the way, I’m healed…

It was about a year ago when I first confessed my sickness to SASTP Nation.

Through my confession I learned from your responses that many of you share a similar disease. Many of you wake up each morning with your brain radio already playing a song from your past. For a great majority of you you wake up to a song you like. For the rest of us it’s pure hell.

I had a week where I awoke to Billy Ocean playing in my head every day. It was beyond cruel. My particular form of brain radio is the worst kind. It plays only music I would never buy but had memorized due to some other weirdo in my life playing it in my presence.

Day after day… one crappy song after another… each and every morning.

I healed temporarily right after my initial admission to having the disease. But a week or two passed and whammo! I wake up to the torturous sounds of Leif Garrett. I wanted to die. My only solace was thinking he

ended up in prison for meth or heroin or something like that. I wish him no harm but his “music” was every bit as awful as Britney Spears’. In fact, give him a couple of breast implants and I defy you to tell them apart.

Well, I have good, no, GREAT news! I am healed. It took a new baby to change the channel. I no longer wake to the soul sucking sounds of Bananarama. Now when my eyes catch first light, I hear the musical stylings of five animated creatures called The Backyardigans!

Awesome.

It’s pure goodness. For those of you with no toddlers in your life radius, The Backyardigans is a children’s show with better music than almost the entire 1980s decade.

I have a dozen or so of their songs deeply embedded in what’s left of my brain. I can’t remember my computer login at work but I know every friggin word to, “Eureka eureka, when you finda what you seeka eureka eureka…”

I have to admit, it’s a step up. No it’s a whole flight of stairs up. It makes me smile. And that’s as good as it gets for my brain radio.

Looks like my baby boy is bringing healing to my life I never expected. We can all use a little of that… MR

I’m not just trying to milk this… honest… probably.

I’m curious which ones of the “100 things our kids will never experience” from the previous post hit you in the heart.

It’s interesting to me which ones caught me off guard. Most of the ones that hit me hard had to do with what I’ll call “simple pleasures.” Drinking from a garden hose, playing “Kick the can” after dinner with all the kids in the neighborhood, playing for hours with matchbox cars on imaginary roads in a dirt patch next to my house.

Others that hit me were things like “pay phones” and “album artwork” and one I didn’t even add to the list: a banana seat and  a sissy bar on my Schwinn Stingray. I felt like Easy Rider on that thing. And in reality I was the least cool kid in the neighborhood. But that bike made me feel impossibly cool.

I’m just curious which of the 100 hit you over the head.

Tell all… MR

We’ve topped 100!

We passed 100 but I get the sense there’s a few more good ones out there so I’m not ready to move on just yet. I put the most recent add-ons to our list at the bottom this time because I didn’t feel like renumbering the whole list. I’m sleepy. They’re in RED.

SASTP Nation is compiling a list of things we all grew up with that our kids will likely never see or experience. The age range of those writing in is all over the place. I’ve tried to edit the list down to something, say, people 35-and-up could agree on.

If I dropped one of your suggestions and you think I’m nuts, just suggest it again. I’m slow, but I get there. Usually.

Enjoy…

1. Standard 3 speed transmission in cars with the shifter on the column

2. All businesses closed on Sundays

3. Only 3 channels on the TV (ABC, NBC, CBS), maybe 4 if you could get PBS

4. BBQ grills with real charcoal (No one had a gas grill! Or had ever heard of one!)

5. Matchbooks or wooden stick matches, no butane lighters

6. S&H green stamps.

7. Clipping baseball cards to your bike spokes so it sounded like an engine when you were riding

8. Getting punished by your friends parents if you step out of line.

9. Playing with little green army men in the dirt for hours

10. Drawing out roadways on the driveway with a stone or chalk and playing with matchbox cars

11. Making your Halloween costume from items found in your house (or friends house) instead of buying one at the store

12.  Records Players… later the more sophisticated name “turntable” was all the rage

13. Electric football where the players just vibrated around

14. Holly Hobby dolls

15. Boom boxes

16. Sleeping with the windows open

17. Playing outside all day when your Mom didn’t know where you were, but knew you were ok

18. Drinking from the water hose

19. Pulling into the gas station and having someone fill your tank and check the oil as a courtesy

20. Cracker jacks had nice prizes

21. Plastic glasses in oatmeal boxes

22. Dirt roads

23. Milk truck delivering to your house (although they are making a come back)

24. Family farms

25. The Little Rascals on TV

26. Bath night

27. The Bugs Bunny-Road Runner Hour

28. In my grandmother’s neighborhood (in Hamburg, NY) we loved walking the few blocks to go buy some milk in glass jugs from the vending machine

28. For the ladies, remember short hairstyles with “spit curls”

29. Clothespins. I heard someone at Target ask the cashier, “Where would I find clothes pins?” The cashier looked totally blank

30. Using the phone maybe once a day… maybe less than that

31. Getting spanked or paddled by teachers in school

32. Black & White TV

33. Powdered dishwashing detergent

34. Kitchens with NO automatic dishwasher

35. Clothes lines

36. Painting a house with a paint brush

37. Sandwiches wrapped in wax paper

38. Non-electric pencil sharpeners

39. 8 tracks

40. Tape recorders with actual cassette tapes, not digital chips

41. Home heat source was wood fired furnace

42. A big, round, black, vinyl disc you lay on a spinning table and a special “needle” would be placed on it… VOILA! Music!

43. Mix tapes (we spent hours, even days making these. Now kids assemble “playlists” with mouse clicks on a computer in minutes)

44. Flashcube cameras (The four-sided kind you popped on and off)

45. Wax fingers and lips

46. Balsa wood airplanes (some had rubber band powered propellers)

47. Waiting days to see what your pictures looked like

48. Carbon paper

49. Rabbit ears (that’s a TV antenna for the kids reading this)

50. Getting up to change the channel

51. Party lines

51. Tang

52. Betamax tapes (This format lost out to VHS tapes)

53. Pull tabs from soda cans… the type that actually came off

54. Grass trimmers that worked like giant scissors you actually squeezed by hand

55. Lawnmowers that required no gas or electricity… just you pushing

56. Tube radios and TVs that had to “WARM UP” before they worked right

57. Rotary dial phones

58. Garage doors without remotes

59. Houses without AC

60. GameBoys, Atari, Pong,

61. MS-DOS

62. 45’s,

63. PF Flyers

64. Photos in physical albums

65. Newspapers in print

66. Transistor radios

67. Sack lunches

68. Princess telephones

69. Ice cube trays (especially the metal trays that had the lever that you pulled up to break the ice)

70. The small box on your TV that you had to get up and turn the dial to make the antenna on house turn to pick up another channel.

71. Cars without seat belts

72. Seat Belts that were lap only

73. Cars with the high-beam button on the floor you pushed with your left foot

74. My Partridge Family (Metal) lunchbox

75. Free Hotwheel cars and tracks when the service attendant pumped your gas and washed your windshield.

76. Mimeograph machines and the smelly purple ink on mimeographed paper

77. The MovieFone guy/voice that you called to get movie listings

78. Pay Phones

79. Catching lighting bugs at dusk

80. Chatty Cathy or Mrs. Beasley dolls

81. Real Crayola Crayons (not the waxy ones out now)

82. Reading an actual book

83. Camping… in a tent… and a huge rock or tree for a bathroom

84. 10 cent ice cream cones

85. Playing outside in the summer from dawn ‘til dusk

86. Playing house with dirt for a floor and trees for a roof

87. Dippity Do (for your hair)

88. Making mudpies after it rains and having to be hosed off before being let back in the house

89. Saturday morning cartoons…. from 7 a.m. until noon

90. AM radio

91. Bee hive hairdo

92. Cut out paper dolls with full cut out wardrobe

93. Playing Spud

94. Flashlight tag

95. Tetherball

96. Walking on stilts your dad made for you

97. Pogo sticks

98. Playing neighborhood ‘kick the can’

99. The great art on  LP record covers

100. Knowing all your friends’ phone numbers! (Now we just push a button on speed dial.)

101. Stretch Armstrong

102. Cabbage Patch Dolls

103. Fuller Brush Man

104. Jelly jar glasses

105. Penny candy

106. Candy cigarettes (these truly seem like a bad idea to me now… but then it was cool. Stupid… but cool.)

107. Bands releasing a new LP every year, sometimes more often!