- Going to school. My parents went to school, my friends (a term only loosely applied some years) went to school, I went to school. (I read and loved and memorized Calvin & Hobbes, and never once did I question why he, also, went to school. I never asked why his mother, who had chosen to leave her job when he was born, neither home educated him nor returned to work. These days I look at those comics and just see the poster child for our current lifestyle.) What’s water? said one fish to the other.
- Going to the mall. Need new clothes? Go to the mall. Want to see a movie? Go to the mall. Your parents need to drop you off for a few hours with your friend? Go to the mall. Bored? Go to the mall. Eat at the food court; browse Waldenbooks (where I stole bookmarks by shoving them down my underpants); KB Toys; the music store (where I bought my first album, on tape, which I had to scrape the Explicit Lyrics sticker off before I showed it to my parents); the pet store, which was mostly just cages of puppies and kittens that we found adorable and not at all problematic; Radio Shack if someone needed a floppy disk; Friendly’s if your parents were in an expansive mood (clamwich and a clown sundae). I can still remember where in the mall they all were, first or second floor; I can tell you that the Chinese place was on the leftmost edge of the food court, Baskin Robbins on the far right. Piercing Pagoda was not for the likes of me; my mom took me to the pediatrician to get my ears pierced, and not until I hit some arbitrary age.
- Eating less healthy foods at your friend’s house without their mom consulting yours. (See, most notably: macaroni & cheese from a box; cereals that were not Cheerios and did not advertise a high fiber content.) The reverse was also the case: My friend Jen has never gotten over the dinner where my father served lamb burgers with goat cheese hidden inside.
- Mowing the lawn, raking leaves, shoveling snow. All acceptable kid jobs, blisters included. (And what did we do with the grass and leaves? Of course I piled the leaves under the swing that hung from the tree in our front yard, but what then?)
- Riding a bicycle without a helmet. Riding it to your friend’s house, and just… around. Because we were kids, and we had to come up with some way to entertain ourselves; we never expected entertainment as a sort of baseline.
- Toy commercials. How else could we learn what to want? Micromachines, Cabbage Patch Dolls, Barbie… My father taped, on VHS, the shows I wanted to watch so I could fast-forward through the commercials. Still, somehow, I knew. Another American I know referenced Gushers the other day and though I don’t think I ever managed to consume one, yeah, I knew.
- Sleepovers. At which I got ear infections, or dreaded playing Truth or Dare, or was peer-pressured into watching Carrie and the Exorcist at far too tender an age. (School years went by calendar-year-of-birth, so I was almost always the youngest.)
- Telephones. It was possible, once upon a time, to be unreachable. It was possible to leave your house and if anyone wanted to talk to you they had to damn well wait til you returned. And if you wanted to talk to your friend you had to be prepared to talk to their mom or dad, and you had to check it wasn’t too late or too early, and not hog the line because nobody had call waiting (except one kid; there’s always one). And then later there was the modem, and AOL CDs, and that very particular sound that we can all call up in a heartbeat despite not having heard it since 1998.
Recipe: Kate doesn't like bok choi but it keeps showing up in her dinner boxes so we made Ginger Scallion Noodles.
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