On Bruce and Chris and life before the World Wide Web

I did most of my growing up in the 1970’s, before cell phones, before social media, before computers were a way of life. In my school there was a total of one computer. A ginormous old thing that took up half of the office. To my knowledge no one but the school secretary ever used it.  Our lives were pretty simple. We wrote letters and then camped out by the mailbox for days waiting for a reply. We took photos and waited two weeks for them to be developed. We played Barbie Dolls and 45 speed records. We watched Charlie’s Angels and Welcome Back Kotter. We rarely ate in restaurants. Instead, we sat down to a big family dinner at our own table every night. And we made up games.

Many of our games were played while washing the dinner dishes. It made the hated chore a little more bearable.  We had a set of BBQ tongs that lived in a kitchen cupboard. One tong was an oversized fork and the other was a spoon. For some reason my sister and I called them Bruce and Chris.

One of our favorite games was The Bottom Object. This is how it worked: We filled the rinse side of the sink with hot water – as hot as we could stand it. I’m talking hot enough to melt the skin off your hands. A fork or spoon (one of Bruce and Chris’s children) was dropped in first. The washer had to wash the dishes as quickly as possible while the dryer used Bruce and Chris to retrieve them from the hot water. If you dropped one, you had to let the washer put two more in the sink before you could continue. If Bruce and Chris were able to retrieve their child, (The Bottom Object) before the washer finished her stack, and you avoided getting scalded, you won the game. And got the dishes done in record time

 When my mother passed away my father moved to a much smaller house and a lot of their possessions went into an estate sale. I helped him sort and decide what to let go of and what to keep. During the course of that week, I boxed up Tupperware, spare sets of dishes, and tablecloth and napkin sets without a second thought. When I came upon Bruce and Chris, I held them in my hands for a long time. No one had used them in years. It was likely no one would ever use them again. But memories of those long ago after-dinner dish games invaded, and I could not let them go.  I’d lost so much already.

Years later, when dad passed away, my siblings and I had more sorting and deciding to do. I kept the ice cream scoop. My mother’s mixing bowls. Her recipe book. The stainless steel cookware she’d received as a wedding gift. And Bruce and Chris finally went into the donation box.

I sometimes wonder how they’re doing.

I kind of wish I’d kept them.