A Trip Down Memory’s Lane

From what my oldish brain is able to remember, I cherished anything to do with pop culture for teens. Especially music. I had ghetto blaster( ugh, thats what they were called back then), Walkman, countless cassette tapes. I watched hours of MTV and Much Music. I had posters of my favorite movie stars on my wall. My favorite was one of Rob Lowe in a white tank top. My best friend had the same poster. We drooled over this image every day. 

I loved teen magazines of course. My clothes were of upmost importance to me. I loved make up, shampoo, bath products. Ugh! Lol! Oh and of course jewlery, which I always lost. I was very careless with my jewlery. So weird how now I could give absolutely zero fucks about any of that. I wish I did care tho. Even just a fraction of the amount that I once did would be okay with me.

Oh, My Micheal Jackson stuff. I had these sparkly socks that I loved.

In Elementary School it was stickers. That was the rage back then. We all had our own sticker albums. I can still smell the scratch and sniff ones. I miss stickers. They were fun. They were cute. 

Of everything I cherished though, my music was the most important to me. My dad still has my ghetto blaster. I remember when my parents got it for me, for my sixteenth birthday. How pleased they looked watching me so happy. 

Oh, some of my stuffed animals too. They are probably so lonely now, wherever they are. I had a unicorn in a basket. Her name was Uni. I had a moomintroll I loved (a character based of of a book series). I had a China doll. I played so hard with it and she eventually broke. But I did love her a lot. Of course I loved Barbies. Ugh. I never looked after them. Usually I'd end up cutting their hair and drawing on them. 

As an older teen, my dad was mushroom picking and he stopped at a gift shop and bought me a panda bear. I used this as my pillow for years. I loved my panda. It is a nice memory I have too. Poor bear. I don’t know where he is now. 

All the pop culture stuff of my teens was fun. As a child I struggled fitting in. I wanted so much to be a member of the pack. I wish I didn't care, but I did. But all the these trinkets and clothes and music were also ways I could connect with the other girls. It was a platform we could all relate to. It was stuff to talk about with each other. Still though, I was never fully accepted because of my weirdness. In high-school I finally was able to find a group of friends to hang out with. The snobby kids still rejected me, but the sting wasn't so poisonous for me anymore.

I just remembered that I also loved my diary. My mom got me a really nice diary for my 16th birthday. The thing is, is that I could never write neat enough. I wanted the words to look nice, and they just didn't. I would have loved word processing on a computer. Playing with all the fonts would have been so fun. Then I could have printed them out and put them into a binder. Alas, no fancy modern computers or devices existed back in the olden days, so I had to be content scribbling words in a diary. 

Oh! And also my cedar chest. Oh it was so beautiful. Another birthday gift when I turned sixteen. My mom called it a hope chest. Apparently it was meant to hold things for using upon marriage, lol! My mom was always buying me stuff to put in there. I remember her putting cookbooks in there. She wasn't even old fashioned. She had a career and everything. I think my parents didn't have much hope for my future given my learning difficulties. They decided the best option for me was marriage. I think they were also worried about my safety, surviving in the real world. I guess I needed a man to look after me, lol!

They were very happy when I became engaged at twenty one years old. Very lucky for me, that my partner turned out to be my soul mate. It could have gone another way. We only dated for six months before we married. Ugh. I hate that word marriage. For me, it represents how patriarchy has historically oppressed women through marriage. A whole other topic. 

Anyway, that cedar chest still exists in my home. The lid did break and then we lost it. I am going to have it fixed with a new lid. 

And what about comic books? I forgot about those. I loved those. And these dumb books I read. A series called 'Sweet Valley High.' Good lord, lol! I was obsessed with those books. At least they got me reading. Oh and in my early youth, the Judy Blume books, of course, of course. What about Charlotte's Web? Mom always made sure we had books to read. 

This is a great writing prompt. I have enjoyed remembering all of the cherished material possessions I had. There must be a land where they all exist. They didn't just disappear, right? 

PS I also want to add the three years that I lived in an apartment while my mom was going to school to become a nurse. Those were the very best years of my childhood. I promptly aquired a best friend and she lived right next door too. It was an apartment block, so inside of the block was a children's outdoor area. There were two playgrounds, a hockey hut, and a bike path. It's where I first learned to ride a bike. Oh also there was an indoor swimming pool. 

I was a free range kid. My mom was very busy and my dad remained on the property my parents owned. So I had all the freedom I could ever ask for. My best friend Sianelle and I would play all day long, and every evening too sometimes. We went to the mall a lot with her mom. Sianelle had the best toys, she was very spoiled. She was also very bossy and because I was also bossy we clashed sometimes and would fight. There was an old lady who would give us popsicles. I saw some things that a child should never see. I skipped school to watch cartoons and was pissed off when I discovered they weren't on during school hours. I never got in trouble for skipping school. I would skip school with Sianelle sometimes and we would play at her apartment. Her mom was very permissive, lol! We were 7 years old. 🥳

When we moved back to my hometown I was devastated for a long time. I was so angry at my mom. She thought it was funny when my brother and I confronted her about moving us away from a place we loved. We lived out of town on an acreage, and did have a lot of fun as siblings. I sure did miss having a best friend nearby tho. We stayed friends into adulthood, but she was very high maintenance and demanding. She was quite damaged from childhood. I remember visiting her once and she introduced me to crystal meth. We stayed up for three days making crafts and talking about past memories. I did love her. I still do. But I had to remove her from my life because our relationship was creating too much chaos for me.

I also forgot to mention my 10-speed bike. I was around twelve years old. I would ride it around in circles in our driveway, for hours and hours. I would daydream while I rode. I was ever so attached to that bike.

Don't forget about VHS tapes goddamn it! Yeah we watched a lot of videos. And I mean an awful lot. With my friends and at home. It was a family thing we did. I really looked forward to watching movies.