Slurptegrity

Ok,  good parent moment.  Not on my part though.  This one (surprisingly) (wait, I shouldn't say that - I guarantee a punch for that) goes to Kathryn.  In a nutshell, Emily can ride a bike now - all thanks to some technique and a lot of patience that Kathryn dug up from somewhere.  I know what you're thinking - Kathryn actually had patience for Emily?

But I digress...

This post isn't really about that parenting moment - that's just preamble.  For those who don't know, we live in a cul-de-sac.  Which is great, since we have this nice keyhole loop where the kids can ride their bikes starting at the corner, past our house, around the bend, past the house on the other side of the street, and then end up at the alley.  Then, they stop, turn their bikes around and ride back.  They do this because we forbid them to cross the road because we are either:

A) Good parents who don't want their kids to get run-over or;

B) Paranoid, over-protective crazies.

Now, I could digress more here and talk about the stupid kids who insist on playing ball hockey in the busy part of the road, when there's a barely used section of road 10 FEET AWAY!  And who don't move their nets or their bodies when a car approaches.  (Come on - don't kids know anything about proper street hockey these days?).  But I will not, because that would end up with me smashing the computer.

What I will talk about is differences between what I did as a kid and what I let Emily do.

For starters, and this should be apparent to anybody over, oh, let's say 20?  We never used to wear bike helmets.  It was just run out the back door, grab your bike and off you go.  Nowadays it's a long process of getting the helmets down from the closet, adjusting their hair to fit the helmet on their heads.  Adjusting the straps to fit the children who have inherited my big head syndrome and then finally forcing them out the door because they've changed their minds about wanting to ride bikes after all.  I'm not saying that our childhood was better, cause let me tell you - blunt force trauma to the head ain't that nostalgic.

What I wonder more about is that I can remember taking my bike and actually leaving my parents' sight-line for the whole afternoon.  We would ride ON THE STREET!, or even worse, IN THE ALLEY.  In fact, my friends John, Anthony and I used to ride in circles up and down one alley driveway, across the alley, up another driveway, and then down this wicked little slope that for some reason was built in to the edge of the driveway.  You could get your bike up to about Mach 0.5 for a brief second before (and this was the smart part) shooting out into the alley from a hidden position right beside the garage.  I can see now why the owner of said driveway got mad at us for riding our bikes there.

The other main activity with our bikes was riding to the store to buy copious amounts of candy.  There were two places you could go in my neighbourhood for your sugar fixes.  The first was Sprague Drugs at Petrolia Mall.  This was the officially sanctioned place.  And by sanctioned, I mean that this is the place that my mom said was ok to go to.  Sure, you did have to cross the busy street (40th Ave) - but there were medical professionals there at the store to watch out for us.

The place that we usually went, however, was the little convenience store in the tower at Lord Byron.  For some reason, my mom HATE HATE HATED it that we went there.  First off, we would normally take a side trip through a ravine.  And then there was Lord Byron.  I guess it was my mom's middle-class snobbery that assumed people living there were all child molesters?  I don't know - sincere apologies if you lived in Lord Byron in the early 80's.

The store there had the most amazing selection of candy ever.  There were the usual things like blue fish, cinnamon lips, etc... but then there was weird and crazy crap that you have never seen anywhere else and I have never seen again.  I remember one thing that was this little foil-topped plastic rectangle that came with a little plastic spoon.  Inside the foil was basically Nutella - but two different colours.  That stuff was effing amazing.

The store there didn't just have awesome candy, it also had an arcade game.  The one I can remember playing the most was this super-awesome cowboy game where you fought people on top of a moving train.  Yeah, that's right mofos - a MOVING EFFING TRAIN!  I used to think it was the pinnacle of arcade games.  Then I Googled it (arcade game western train) - and found out it was this:

Which is pretty lame.

As I was reminiscing about this - I wondered about where I got the money for my candy-fueled train-punching escapades.  I had absolutely no idea, other than pennies found on the ground.  We didn't get regular allowances.

As I got older, we graduated to playing video games in the basement on my Nintendo, or my friend Craig's Sega.  (note to reader - we're talking 8-bit here - the original Nintendo Entertainment System and Sega Master System).  We did not, however, graduate from our need for candy.  By this time, a new 7-11 (pronounced Sev) clone had opened up at Petrolia Mall - which must have made both my mom and me happy, since it probably had the best candy selection AND it was away from pedo-bear.

As a huge plus - it also had Slurpees.

The one Slurpee story that I do remember is getting to the Sev on our bikes, selecting our candy and getting our Slurpees.  Usually, the candy selection took a while - it was a delicate balancing act of what you really wanted vs. what you could actually afford.  It was an awesome lesson in economics.  The candy purchase usually ended up in a plastic bag that you could hang from your handlebars.  The Slurpee was usually held in one hand, so you could drink whilst riding home.

This one time - the candy selection took so long that the weather completely changed from mostly fine:  shorts, t-shirts, etc.  to not-at-all-fine downpour.  And P.S.  you can't return a Slurpee.  I remember getting on our bikes, candy bag secure on the handlebars and just riding as fast as we could to get home.  I learned a valuable lesson about Slurpee cups that day.  They are very very very good at keeping the liquid and wetness in the cup and very very very bad at keeping external wetness out.

I'm pretty sure that by the time we got back to Craig's house - ready for a marathon session of Wonder Boy in Monster Land - that my Slupee cup's integrity had completely collapsed and that what was actually holding my Slurpee in place was my frigidly cold hand, covered in a thin layer of wax and cardboardish mush.

I'm pretty sure that I still drank the Slurpee out of my hand though.

Learned behaviour

Do you ever catch yourself doing silly things that you laughed at your parents for doing?  I caught myself twice in the last little while, and both of them were strangenesses passed on from my mom.

First, I will NEVER (said Eve style) drink the end of the milk.  I will go out of my way to avoid using the last part of the carton / jug.  (as an aside, that last part should read carton stroke jug - not carton slash jug - sounds more posh that way).  I don't actually believe that inheriting this one is a bad thing - have you seen the nastiness on a milk jug at the end of its life?

The second one is definitely weird.

Kathryn was hogging the sink in the kitchen doing dishes or something, and I needed a cup of water for something (maybe a recipe?).  Anyway - I went in to the bathroom to get the water from the tap there.  Then I paused.  Could I possibly consider using bathroom water to cook with / (stroke) drink?

What you need to know is that my mom NEVER drank water from the bathroom tap.  NEVER!  It took me a long time to work up the courage to use that bathroom water for my urgent needs, even though I've seen the pipes in my basement and know that it all comes from the same place.


Makes me wonder what I'm passing down to my kids.

Obsolescence

I was searching online for books at the library the other day, and it struck me that kids these days have no idea what a card catalogue is.  Do you remember going to the library when you were a kid, probably do do a research project on Bigfoot, and having to go through the catalogue to find the books you needed?

I remember how awesome it was to learn that such a categorized fount of knowledge worked.  I also remember how it smelled - dusty paper mixed with wood finish.  Delightful.  But nowadays, you just find it all on the computer - infinitely more efficient, but lacking in that certain cachet that the old paper cards held.

Librarians must love it - no more sitting down at a typewriter (another obsolescence) to type out the various cards.  Also - remember those strange white-out strips for typewriters where you could erase what was typed?  Also, remember White Out, Liquid Paper and its more-funny counterpart, Liquid ape?

Somehow, the scene in Ghostbusters when they're in the library wouldn't be as good without the cards flying all over the place (I'm sure that scared librarians more than the ghost!).  Flickering computer screens just don't hold a candle to that.

But what else is this generation missing out on?  Videocassettes.

Actually, I don't miss them all that much (truth be told, we still have TWO working VCRs in our house).  But remember when you rented a video from the video store (hi, there's another thing that's on its way out) and someone wasn't kind before you and didn't rewind?  Do you remember being charged a fine if you weren't kind?  Did your family own a tape rewinder?

Speaking of tapes - remember when you were about to play the latest mix tape that someone gave you, and you had to look at the tape and flip a switch on the boom box (gone as well) if the tape was "metal" or "normal"?

I even have a faint memory of having to fill out this giant booklet of questions for homework - things like who was the first Lieutenant Governor of Alberta - and there was a special number you could call and some mysterious lady (probably a librarian on leave from card-catalogue typing) would look things up and answer some of them.  Or, you would have to look in the Encyclopedia your family devoted a whole shelf to (if you were rich) - or three volumes to if your sister won them on Hi-Q.

Anyway, I had fun thinking about these old technological relics.  I think I'll go Google some more obsolete technologies (and try not to ponder the oxymoronic nature of my search).

Childhood memories

The other day, I got to thinking about childhood memories and tried to think about the earliest memory that I had.  I came up with this one:

I have a hazy memory about driving in the car with my mom.  Pretty sure we were on the Whitemud, going down the hill to cross the bridge over Snow Valley (or Rainbow Valley, as we called it at our house, since none of us were Super-G aficionados).  Surprisingly (or really not, if you're in my family) - the car broke down.  I think it was the old Pontiac Acadian that my sister later retired by smashing in to a parked car (who does that? - sorry Colleen).  Anyway - it was raining, and I think my mom had to walk home, carrying me in the rain.  Remember, this was before cell phones - even those giant clunky ones that had a cord like in the movie Twins.

Whenever I think of this memory, I often wonder if I really remember it, or if I've been told the story so many times that I've fabricated the memory.  I think I was only 3 or 4 at the time, which makes me think that the whole thing is a fabrication of my imagination, or was embellished in the re-telling by my mom.  What probably really happened was that on a sunny afternoon, the car didn't start while sitting in our garage, and my mom had to hold my hand as we walked back to the house, instead of going to McDonald's for some Styrofoam-en-wrapped goodness.  Notice that the broken car thing was still there - that's the only detail that I'm sure is true, given our family's car history.

The other memory that comes to mind was the time my sisters got some Halloween-like face paint.  They all went off and painted their faces all girly-like, or maybe like some forgotten 80's gimmicky band - I dunno.  ANYWAY, I was probably 7 or so at the time, and I really wanted to have my face painted like the Hulk.  This was in the days before the god-awful CGI-generated hulk, when you had Lou Ferrigno looking like this:

Behold his awesomeness!

Anyway, dad got the face paint and got to work.  After a few minutes, which, in retrospect, must have been terrible to him, knowing what I know as a dad of girls who want makeup, nail polish, etc.  (I mean, I have absolutely no skills in this department - which I guess is a good thing), I was finished and ready to tear my shirt off and terrorize my sisters.

Except that the makeup was pretty pastel-shaded.  So I was less Incredible Hulk and more sea-sick Titanic victim.  I took one look in the mirror and then fled to my room to cry into my pillow (and cover it in sea-foam makeup).  I don't think I ever apologized to my dad.  He was just doing his best, and I had an Emily-style ingrate fit about it.

Why do I mention these memories?  Well, both of them were traumatic.  As a parent, I wonder what my kids' memories will be when they're my age.  Will they remember trips to England and Mexico, fun outings, Staycations?  Or will it be all about when I didn't let them have chocolate, or that our house is so boring because we don't have cable.

I think I'll stop bothering to create good memories - just make the bad ones extra-memorable.  Good idea?