Childhood nostalgia

In My Humble Opinion
81

It’s interesting that this thread was revived. I was just thinking about how I really don’t have much childhood nostalgia. My childhood could have been immeasurably worse, to be sure, and yet I suppose the absence of really terrible memories doesn’t necessarily mean one will have warm feelings of nostalgia.

I don’t miss it. I think about my childhood very often these days, and I mostly look back with regret, shame, anger, and so on. I’ve developed this tic where I flash back to a mortifying, embarrassing childhood memory (including those that I merely witnessed, that were not my fault in any way) and I find myself muttering non-sequiturs (is that not a noun?) or doing something similar, in order to distract myself.

The crazy thing is, these memories didn’t bother me nearly as much when they were very recent memories. You’d think I would have warm memories of the time before depression set in, but no, not really.

I can’t be the only one.

82

Don’t you remember a “perfume” called “Love’s Baby Soft”?

I used to love the Sears “Wishbook” that came out every Christmas? It was a huge full color catalog, mostly filled with toys. I used to crack that open, and write up my Christmas list.

83

You weren’t the only one! Hours & hours of reading, comparing and deciding on the final choices. :slight_smile:

1957 Sears Christmas Catalog

84

I remember in the regular Sears (?) catalog, they had pages with pets for sale. They had little pictures of each dog breed available. Which reminds me of the ads in comic books offering miniature “tea cup” poodles and also monkeys. Jay Leno wrote of having bought a monkey from such an ad. It was kind of a sad story- the poor thing was totally crazy, and, iirc, managed to escape.

85

My memories are mostly of summer, because–

  • Summer lasted forever
  • Going outside to play and coming home only for lunch and supper
  • Going barefoot for the first time of summer and your feet were tender, but by August they were “toughened up”.
  • Reading my older cousins’ copies of Tiger Beat and other teen idol magazines
  • Cartoons were only on Saturday mornings, and only for about two or three hours
  • A quarter could get you a fine selection of candy if you chose wisely
  • Playing hide-and-seek in the summer darkness while the adults sat in the back yard having beer/drinks, seeing the cigarette ends glowing in the dark
  • People smoking everywhere–in stores, cars, planes
  • Finding porn in the woods! In magazine form.
  • Lying on a blanket in the back yard with my mother, watching the meteor showers in August. The glowing tip of her cigarette in the dark.
  • Ordering stickers in the mail and waiting anxiously for them to come
  • In school, the pleasure of ordering Scholastic books and the excitement when they arrived
  • Reading the Sears Christmas Wish Book and marking all the things I wanted
  • The smell of certain kinds of plastic–I had jewellery sets that snapped together and you could make different combinations. There’s a certain plastic smell, and it’s 1976 again…
  • I hated liver-and-onions night but loved my mother’s homemade soup
  • Family holidays and riding in the top bunk of a camper van, facing the window, which would slowly become more and more obscured by bug-splat. My dad would clean it off at the next gas stop. My mother was horrified decades later by how unsafe it was.

My favourite childhood nostalgia is that I didn’t have to worry about much, so my troubles seemed so big back then. I didn’t know about mortgage payments, insurance, dental bills, utility bills, putting the groceries on the table, all that. I do miss the days when I was a kid and someone took care of me. Dinner appeared on the table (even if was liver and onions), the light and heat was just magically present, clean clothes appeared in my room, someone took care of me when I was sick, and I got to just be a kid.

86

My Dad camped with me in my treehouse and cooked me eggs over the fire like we were really camping and not out in our horse corral :slight_smile:

Hating it when we got to stay up late on the weekends to watch tv and the national anthem and a picture of a jet would come on before the static signifying the end of the days broadcast.

Benny Hill

the Soul Train

Conjunction Function (I think that was the name)

Stompers! the one’s with a working winch.

The monthly book order at school.

Sneaking into the neighbors pasture to go swimming in the tank and scared the entire time of a snapping turtle bitting me.

Walking down to the “filling station” to get a soda and watching all the old men playing dominoes

87

Bolding mine.

That was on “Schoolhouse Rock”. Remember that?

88

Conjunction junction, what’s your function?

I’m just a bill, on Capitol Hill…

89

I love this thread idea.

Never worrying about your health or the health of people you love and care about. As a kid it didn’t occur to me that my grandma would die when I was in in my 20s. That after she died she would sell her house and there would be no reason to visit that town anymore. It didn’t occur to me that my dad would go from someone who could push a car with one leg to becoming someone who had to use support to stand up after sitting.

Morey? If I have $20 I am rich.

Trying to stay up all night.

Having friends over and using the video camera to make movies all night.

Playing monopoly all night. Losing even though you stole several thousand dollars from the bank.

TV shows you saw as a kid or teenager. Just going on Youtube and watching the intro credits to taxi, Mr belvedere, newhart, eerie Indiana, etc brings me back for a little while.

Driving the go cart.

Jumping your bicycle over a ramp

How everyone wanted to hang out and go into town once you got your license

Guess jeans were a status symbol

Spending an hour reading magazines because you were at the grocery store with your parents.

Looking through all the grocery bags when your parents got home for goodies.

Saturday morning cartoons

After school cartoons. Dark wing duck. Chip n dales rescue Rangers. Dennis the menace. Ducktales. (auto correct tried to correct that last one as fuck takes).

Summers lasted forever. Christmas took forever to come. Time worked different.

The innocence. You hopefully don’t know about the world or its problems.

The fact that everything was new and had purpose. I never regained that as an adult.

90

Fun to see younger generations (controllers) so similar

Here’s the song:

http://www.metrolyrics.com/old-days-lyrics-chicago.html
91

racing out the back door to play and hearing the inevitable “don’t slam the screen door” right after I had slammed the screen door on purpose!

burping contests with the neighborhood kids

putting on plays in our garage (the garage door was our ‘curtain’); or concerts sometimes

putting ants on sticks and floating them down the street in the flooded gutters after a rainstorm

pelting ju ju bees off the balcony at the local movie theatre on the heads of unsuspecting patrons (we were asked to leave frequently)

riding in the back seat of an older sister’s car as she cruised on a summer night at the local ‘merry-go-round’. If we ducked out of sight when a carload of boys drove by, we’d get an ice cream cone on the way home

sleeping in the back seat of mom and dad’s car with the road sounds lulling me to sleep

skateboarding down a steep hill, holding on for dear life (in the days before helmets and pads existed for skateboarding)

the embarassment of wearing house slippers on the first day of school because after going barefoot all summer, my shoes no longer fit my feet

the torpor of a hot afternoon in June sitting in a school room with no air conditioning, listening to the sprinklers in the park across the street and wishing I were running through them

92

And then your dad carried you into the house rather than wake you up, even though you totally woke up but pretended to still be asleep so you’d get carried into the house.

93

Plastic pools you filled with the hose.

Freezing kool-aid to make home-made popsicles.

Particularly strong for me is the memory of a secret hiding place in the woods at my grandparents’ house – an open area between large rhododendron bushes, that might have been a deer path. It was hidden from the house and from the river, on the crest of the hill, looking down at the river and the pier. I didn’t have anything to hide from, but I loved that spot.

94

SNL, Atari.

“Chevy, Chevy, I love when you fall down”…
(later in life that became “Sonic, Sonic, I love when you fall down”)

95

Nope, not the only one. :slight_smile: :frowning:

But I have a few.

The smell of the rain through a screen door/window. What is that? Lovely. All smells, really.

I adored Love’s Baby Soft cologne; it was my first. I even bought some a few years ago, just for the heck of it.

Circling things in JCP catalog for hours.

Little pointless things I did in the yard when there was nobody to play with. Cracking the landscape rocks with bigger rocks to see what they looked like inside, or just making dust. Making things with acorns and sticks and leaves. Frying leaves and ants with a magnifying glass (sorry! promise I’m not psychotic). Catching toads with a plastic cut-off milk gallon.

Sledding down *leaves *with my toboggan in the fall.

Taking all my change and such (I didn’t really have allowance) to the annual neighborhood rummage sale and buying junk.

Sitting on the floor in the backseat of giant sedans on roadtrips.

Sitting in the back of my neighbor’s dad’s pickup truck on the way to Lake Michigan or the drive in.

Collecting magazines from everyone to write in for free samples of everything. Halsa shampoo, junk food, lipstick, even Armstrong linoleum samples. It was just fun to get mail.

96

I’m an only child. I had lots of these.

Pulling the ice out of the drainspout on the eavestrough and seeing how big of an icicle I could get in the shape of the pipe.

Burning my initials into a piece of wood with a magnifying glass. Also burning little round holes into leaves.

Playing with “caps” - no cap gun, just taking a rock or stick and swiping it across the gunpowder circle to make a spark and poof of smoke.

Gobstoppers - taking the candy out of your mouth to see what colour it had changed to.

97

My friend, Julie and I were determined to count every grain of sand in the sandbox. We really thought we could do it, but we gave up after a couple of hours.

98

Egg-zackly! :smiley:

99

For my daughter it is now CollegeHumor

But also watching Sonic the Hedgehog on PBS!

100

My father worked for a radio station in West Texas that eventually upgraded into a TV station. The station did advertising for Six Flags over Texas, so he got free tickets. We’d go almost every year on our way to my grandmother’s house in Arkansas. Those long summer road trips were magical.