From when I was about 10 when I had no need of shaving what so ever.
“I’m about to shave without using any water. Nothing to make my beard wet and soft but this - Rise.
I’m actually getting a clean shave, the reason - Rise puts moisture into your beard and holds it there for as long as it takes you to shave. Now if I can get a shave like this using Rise with no water, imagine what you can do using Rise with water”
“I’m Rula Lenska.” She went on to sell a TV or something, but I kept asking my childhood self–who in the heck is Rula Lenska? I thought I should know her somehow, but she wasn’t on any TV shows/movies/books etc that I knew of. I still have no idea who she is!
I used to know the old Emergency Broadcast System spiel by heart, too.
I remember the word proctocystotomy, an operation on the bladder through the rectum. I had a phase where I looked up strange words in the dictionary and this is the only word I still remember.
This is a test. This station is conducting a test of the Emergency Broadcast System. This is only a test.
BEEEEEEP!
This is a test of the Emergency Broadcast System. The broadcasters of your area in voluntary cooperation with the federal, state and local authorities have developed this system to keep you informed in the event of an emergency. If this had been an actual emergency, the attention signal you just heard would have been followed by official information, news or instructions. This concludes this test of the Emergency Broadcast System.
That’s how I remember it, anyway. I was always afraid it would be an Actual Emergency but I wouldn’t notice because I was so used to the tests.
I have a very distinct memory of the moment when I actually learned to read. I had long since learned to recognize particular words, but I hadn’t really made the connection with phonetics. Words were shapes with meaning to me. It was afternoon in a kindergarten class in a little metal building, and most of the class was napping. Our teacher had a speculative look on her face when she handed me a little storybook and asked me to try to figure out what the words said. I got through a few words by rote, then got stuck. I looked around the classroom, and my eyes fell on the prominent alphabet over the chalkboard, and it finally clicked. I read through the book with minimal prompting, and the seeds of lifelong bibliophilia were sewn.
Less profoundly, I remember the ending to an episode of McCloud from when I was four years old. I was sitting in the hallway, where I could see the TV in the living room. It was long past my bedtime, but my mother had dozed off in her chair, and everyone else was asleep. The bad guy thought he was a vampire; at the end, he jumped off a bridge and vanished, leaving nothing but his cape drifting down to the water. I have a vivid mental image of the cape twisting as it fell.
I remember the very first word I ever read. Like Balance, I was an early reader; as I recall, this happened when I was about two years old. I was in the back of our truck (I believe we were moving), lying on my mother, and I remember opening my eyes and looking up, out of the window. I saw a sign on the road, with a single word on it, but I read that word, knew what it meant, and knew how it was pronounced.
I remember when it was Esso. I remember seeing the sign out of the Saint James Motel in Rochester, NY. My family was temporarily homeless, as we’d moved all the way from Iowa and our new house wasn’t ready yet. We were all packed into a tiny motel room. Outside was so dark and gloomy, and I remember that green and white Esso sign.
I think the OP was looking for something more along the lines of Zsofia’s post, but I’ll give you the memory this post brought up instead:
When I was a kid, my grandparents had a Pekingese that I adored. I combed him and played with him and kissed him on the nose and talked to him all the time.
One day, I was browsing in the dictionary and I found “French kiss-- a kiss in which the tongues touch”. “Whoa, those wacky French”, I thought. “That must be like when Eskimos kiss by rubbing noses.” I found Mr. Woo, put my face right up to his and stuck my tongue out. He leaned back, but I was determined to express my love. Nervously, Mr. Woo licked his lips…and accidentally brushed my outthrust tongue.
I went right to my grandma and proudly told her, “I French-kissed Mr. Woo!” I totally expected her to be ignorant of the ways of foreigners and then I would enlighten her, but that’s not what happened. Unfortunately, I don’t remember exactly what she did say…
I think it was VO5 shampoom shewas selling. I seem to remember that the fact Americans didn’t know who she was was part of the marketing campaign, creating the buzz of “who is she?”
Things You Might Hear At Our House: “Clover! No French-kissing! Gack!” Our dog is an enthusiastic face-licker, which is fine, but if your lips part but a mere fraction, you get French kissed by the dog.
I remember the linoleum in my bedroom in Fort St. James. Crikey, looking back on it now, it must have been ugly. It was grey, with little bubbles in it, depressed, not raised. I remember the way it looked in the half-light of the hallway fixture at night, leaning out over my bed. I remember it always being cool to the touch. I remember sprawling out of bed, looking at that lino in the light coming from the hallway, and hearing my parents in the living room, speaking the mysterious language of bridge: silence, then cryptic remarks: five hearts, two spades, three diamonds, pass.* I remember quiet, then everyone talking, then quiet again.
I remember my bathing suit and being in the garden and eating peas. It was summertime. I remember the birch trees and trying to understand what the word “snob” meant.
I remember the house was pink, with shutters painted black.
I remember a huge snowy owl perched on a fence in the middle of the day somewhere between Fort St. James and Vanderhoof. My parents stopped the car, and slowly backed up along the road, so we could watch it.
*I am well aware that I have no idea if these are reasonable bridge bids or what. But you get the idea.
Oh, I also remember my mom running over a big snake in the road and then backing over it and running over it again but she looked back and it wasn’t there and freaked out and convinced herself it was up under the car somehow so she drove to the neighbor’s house (we lived way out in the country) and had them check with a machete handy.
I remember having a box turtle that had wandered into the yard. It always stayed in one corner, and I could always find it. One day it was gone! I was devastated! Later I found it next to a tree. I was elated! Another day it was gone for good.
FN 9425 was the number plate of our first car in NZ, a 1972 Ford Zephyr, which means I was about four at the time we got it. Our next car was a 1978 Toyota Corolla, HQ 2835, which made me about ten. My current car? Half the time I can’t rmember the number without going outside to check.
I remember finding a robin’s egg in the yard and creating a sterile environment for it by spraying windex all over the place.
I remember two commercials for Camay soap: one was a widower who now had to buy Camay for his daughter because she was getting to be a young lady and the other was one starring another Rula Lenska type: Princess Pignatelli, who would say “People always say to me, 'Luciana, you have such bee-yoo-tiful skin!”
Meanwhile, they no longer advertize Camay and you’re lucky if you find a cake covered in dust on the bottom shelf at Wal-Mart.
Back when Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom was on in the 70s, my brother and I would happily chant the Mutual of Omaha phone number as they repeated it over and over during the commercials: 1-800-228-9800. No idea if that number would still reach Mutual of Omaha.
Note the illustration of a practitioner of this technique, advertised in all the better comic books of the late 1970s, crushing a gun in his HANDS OF STEEL.
A particularly wise and perceptive girl in my 5th grade class remarked that if you sent them your $2.75, they probably sent you a rubber gun.