Comment: Remembering Random Stuff

I remember wearing a red and yellow choker around my neck and a blue leotard and having the Olympics in the back yard with my sister and the neighborhood girls. I looked like a boy and longed to be a girly-girl.

I remember going to music camp and having a massive crush on Nicholas -------, who would never love me because I was skinny and ugly and awkward. But he liked me because I was funny and non-threatening and I knew the girl he swooned for, an aloof and busty French girl whose family was so rich they had her flown in to camp on an aquaplane. Me? I could barely paddle a canoe without falling in. Tipping was fun and scary because the initial tip was good, but the threat of touching evil, murky, slimy seaweed forever terrified me and had for as long as I could remember.

I remember hearing that story of the man who jumped into the man-made lake to save a kid and how his legs got caught in the seaweed and he died. It was a pond at the local amusement park and every time we rode over it on the monorail it filled me sadness and fear and regret and great anxiety. I thought about the man, who I think was a police officer, and how he was pulled down forever in his valiant attempt to save someone whose stroller got too close to the edge.

I remember my no name corduroys, and feeling gawky and ugly in high school with all the curvy, sophisticated girls who had their periods. High school started so early where I lived; grade 7 and you’re in with the 17 year olds. Since I’d skipped a grade, I was 11 in there with teenagers, and I didn’t know what the hell I was doing.

I remember the smoking section, yes, in those days, there was a sanctioned smoking section for the STUDENTS, if you can believe it. (This was somewhere during the Paleozoic Era for you history buffs.) I remember watching Andrea ----- transform from a geekyish girl to a cool smoker girl because she dated this guy Sean who was a rebel and cool and she just changed overnight from a good girl to a sort of bad and cool girl. They started wearing matching jean jackets.

Sean spit on my face in first grade and I remember it still because it hurt me deeply. We were later performing together in a school play and of course he didn’t remember. He turned out to be a decent yet cool guy (the two were not, apparently, mutually exclusive) and he apologized when I told him. He was mortified. I don’t think there is anything much more demeaning than being spit on. It’s some kind of primal reflex to respond with (a) anger, (b) shame, or (c) a combination of both that is quite a toxic blend. If you’ve ever been spit on, I’m sure you can remember when, who, and how. But you may never know why. Why indeed does the spitter spit? It’s a question for the ages.

I remember “heavenly hash” ice cream, which, in retrospect, is a really funny and inappropriate name for a food that children and adults eat legally. It was just chocolate chips, nuts, and marshmallow swirls in chocolate ice cream, and in the US it’s probably called rocky road or shaky highway, or hideous road trip or something, but nobody in the family really liked it; and yet we always bought it and ate it for dessert every night. Ours was a house of ice cream for one and all. There was never any doubt that ice cream would be served after a meal. But the hands-down absolute worst flavor was the “maple walnut” ice cream. Only my dad loved it and yet we were all forced to endure it. Eating it was like licking a maple tree.