retro

i walked into the school today, little boy in tow, and was perusing the lost and found table when the vice principle came up to me.
"i hear you have crabs" he said.

first thought:  'it's just a yeast infection!'  praise you Lord Jesus that this thought did not escape through my lips.

second thought: 'who's spreading this rumour about me?'
i replied with a very dignified "WHAT?!"

he looked at my face, began to register what had just been said, and quickly stammered "crabs in your house!  crabs in your house!"

ah, yes.  our pets.  we have hermit crabs and my kids brought them to school yesterday for show and tell.  i said to this quickly reddening school administrator "we call them HERMIT crabs, not just crabs".

i walked away thinking who can i tell?  who can i tell?  you!!  i love it when life reads like a novel.

i've been thinking lately about how my young years must appear to my children.  no internet.  i mean, i can hardly fathom it myself!  we had to actually go to libraries and look through encyclopedias to find out answers to trivia, and use dictionaries to check word spelling.  we had to spell!  and at the library we used microfiche to look at old periodicals - which sounds very spy-tech, but was really extremely boring.  i typed my papers on a typewriter.  i struggled with the white-out - the strangely repulsive and alluring smell....could i really get high from it?  i took drafting and gleefully laid out my rulers and mechanical pencils.  marks for penmenship - i'm in heaven!

my parents did not think it was right to own a VCR - they were also led to believe that movie theatres were filled with drunken smokers and would surely lead me down the path to hell.  imagine their surprise when i told them it was smoke free and that the most dangerous drink item was jolt!  anyways, obviously i didn't see many movies as a kid, which is why i was ALWAYS the last one to sleep at slumber parties.  i was the one to swoon over ralph macchio and then turn off the VCR, then the lights, and pick my way over the sleeping bodies to my blankets.  how could they all miss it? 

we would rent a VCR player (beta or vhs?) from the local video store for birthday parties.  i remember walking in, so excited and giddy to be on this threshold of maturity, and my mother said "look in the section over there - R - for religious".  so, over to the R section my little body goes - i'm probably 10? - and i start looking at the movies.  i quickly start to recognize my mother has made a horrible terrible mistake.  i'm looking at the backs of the boxes - yikes!  in those days if something was rated R, they meant it.  my mom finally came over to me (she'd been renting the machine) and, as well quite quickly, saw her error.  wrong section!  wrong section!!

we owned a car phone - which i remember as this box that sat on the hump on the floor between the seats of the car (what happened to that hump?) with a phone that looked like an army walkie-talkie.  i'm curious to know if that is actually true, was the phone actually that humungous?  no, on second thought, i'd rather believe it, even if it is a lie.  i had this sneaking suspiscion that my dad was no ordinary accountant - what accountant would have a car phone?   something so sleek and cutting-edge... he must be CIA. 

i wonder if my kids think of me like i thought of my mom when i heard she had an outhouse as a child.  like i grew up in "the olden days", in a world so far from this one, how could i ever understand what they're going through?  i'm sure the fact that i'm not on facebook isn't helping.  i mean, in all honesty, i think of life before PVR and i wonder, how did i cope?

on that note, Downton Abby has left me crying two weeks in a row, and i've decided i'd like to be referred to as "darling".  why not embrace my old-timer self?

i suddenly have a hankering to make a mix tape.  with "nothing compares to you" on it at least twice.  i'd make you a copy but my white ghetto blaster with the "fast dub" option is, i believe, in my parents garage.  was it really called a ghetto blaster?  were they invented in the ghetto?

okay, i'm not sure how to end this blog, because, as i'm sure you're realizing, i could just go on and on.  so, there.  i'm stopping.