GenX Nostalgia: Reality Bit

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GenX Nostalgia: Reality Bit

To my fellow members of Generation X: we were famous in our youth for being cynical, disdainful, averse to groupthink and phoniness. But even that hasn’t protected us from making a rendezvous with capital-N Nostalgia as we pass through middle age. The temptation to wallow in the Beauty of What Was (minus all those pesky bad parts that our aging memory prevents us from remembering, anyway) instead of the Harsh Reality of What Is (sad 401Ks, sassy teens, sagging skin) is just too hard to resist.

Lately I’ve seen a plethora of Gen-X-penned, funny, sharp essays about the things that were empirically awesome about being a kid in the ’70s and ’80s. But Generation Let’s Keep It Real, why don’t we keep it real? It wasn’t all Michael Jackson hits and scrunchies.

Here’s a short list of things you and I survived which, thank John Hughes or Paul Westerberg or whoever you called God back when you were a teen, our kids never have to endure.

Lax Automobile Safety Practices. Raise your hand if you were every nearly bounced out of the flatbed of a truck onto a hard asphalt surface! In my case, it was no flatbed but the folded-down-soft top convertible of our next door neighbor’s vibrant orange VW bug. When Mr. Fitz folded down the top, it was a signal to every kid on our street to climb aboard – into the back seat, the front seat, around the gear shift, and, when there were no more seats to go around, to simply nestle atop the folds of fabric held together by metal ribs. Then he’d take off on a low-speed round-the-block funride. Hit a pothole? See you later, bantamweight Chipper Flanagan, we’ll pick you up on the next circuit. Try not to bleed in the meantime.

Skeeching. The act of holding onto the back bumper of a moving car travelling down an ice covered road, knees slightly bent (warm weather variation: balance on your skateboard) and get a free ride that is practically designed to land you, the kid, under the wheels of a motor vehicle. Helmets? We obviously had nothing in our brains worth protecting. (Ed. note: I described this post to a friend over dinner the other night and he said, “I once got both legs run over while I was skeeching. I survived, though, because vans aren’t that heavy. If you’re going to get run over by a vehicle, make sure it’s a van.” Proving my point about the brains.)

Swanson’s TV Dinners. We didn’t have them a lot, which made that rectangular aluminum tray full of processed food goodness all the more special. The Salisbury steak-shaped meat product that caused second degree mouth burns, while the molten-hot lava applesauce giving your trachea a nice heat peel on the way down? That there was good eating.

Lax Automobile Safety Practices, Part 2: My first driving lesson? I was thirteen, my older brother and his freshly minted license were at the wheel of the station wagon, and he suddenly took his hands off the wheel and said, “Your turn!” I screamed, grabbed the wheel, and steered us straight into a leaf pile. Neither of us thought that was weird, only funny. My almost-16 year old daughter is diligently working her way through an online course to get her learner’s permit, and once she does I have high hopes that she’ll never aim toward a mailbox in her car, for sport.

Unbagged dog poop. In my youth, there was one man on our street who bagged his dog’s waste, and we thought he was a capital-F Freak. “Ugh! Poop bag man waved at me again today!” we’d report, after walking our mutt up and down the street and allowing his poop to remain wherever it fell, like Nature intended. Nature must have also intended us to clean dog crap off bare feet, flip flops, and sneakers at least once a day.

Tab. Who’s thirsty for a beverage with a top note of Chemicals, and a lingering afterburn like turpentine? Mmmm. Must be the carcinogenic sweetener that makes it go down so easy.

So yes, there were some awesome things about our childhood that it would be cool if our own kids could experience. Freedom to roam, an intact ozone layer, .

But face it: the fact that you and I are here to sit around and wax nostalgic about them is pure luck.

If I had to pick a song to remind me of the kids in my ‘hood, this is it. Because we were a bunch of boys and girls who loved to have our fun. And we thought a song about a bullfrog was wicked funny.