Store Bought: Part 10

In high school, we talked about middle school. I went to St. Augustine Catholic School, where gym class was held in the carpeted basement off of the girls’ bathroom. Our sixth grade English teacher wore flamingo-print shirts and spent a week’s worth of class time showing us slides from her vacation in Alaska. The cafeteria served baked bologna. These stories speckled our high school lunch tables and bus trips to Mt. Blue for cross-country meets.

In college, nobody else has ever heard of baked bologna, so we have to talk about the only things we have common: TV, video games, and cereal. Everyone at college remembers Legends of the Hidden Temple, Mario Kart, and Count Chocula cereal. Except me. I remember Zoom, Klutz books, and Berry Berry Kix. Consequently, during these conversations, I usually direct my attention back to the television or think about what I should make for dinner, because there’s no use in trying to change the subject. A conversation about childhood nostalgia is a freight train. Every detail reminds someone of something else, so the conversation picks up momentum quickly, and pretty soon if any non-video-game-playing pansy who doesn’t know a single Hanson song steps in the way of it, she’s going to get squashed.

People are passionate about their childhood products. Walk into a room filled with children of the 90s and shout, “I hate Spice World! Nerf guns are for losers!” You’ll quickly find that you have just made a lot of enemies. The interesting part of this phenomenon is that the crappier the products were the more protective people are of them. Think of pogs and wax lips and Sabrina the Teenage Witch. They are all intensely stupid, and that’s what makes them so popular. It’s instinct for us to stick up for our childhood products, because those are our personal histories. If you tell someone that the TV show they spent 500 hours of their childhood watching is dumb, you are insulting 500 hours of their existence. Nobody ever remembers that for 465 of those hours that they watched TV it was because they were bored and no one would play UNO or basketball with them. People remember the time they were watching the show with their brother and he laughed so hard that Sprite squirted out of his nose. They remember that snow day when they came in from epic fort–making and watched the show while they drank hot chocolate and felt their toes tingle back to life.

It’s impossible not to be biased about our childhood products because they are our personal histories. Nobody else will ever understand as precisely well as I do how wonderfully purple my milk turns when I eat Berry Berry Kix. However, this nostalgic bias can create new bonds between people as well. Every girl with the memory of buying her first Backstreet Boys CD and listening to it on repeat for all of sixth grade will appreciate every other girl that hums, “you are (beat, beat) my fiiiiii--rrrrre” while flipping through the sale rack at the mall. Other times, our biases give us baked bologna, which our new friends will never understand, but which will always bond the graduates of St. Augustine Catholic School in a way that no other food could have. When television shows and salted, baked lunchmeats become our legacy, we must extract the best parts from them to claim as ours – their humor, their back-stories, and their familiar disasters.