Those Were The Days

Pam: This morning I saw a young mom and her toddler picking out DVD’s to add to their collection. It’s all too easy now. I think it’s kind of sad that kids can see their favorite show anytime they want.

Ann: I don’t know. At times, video tapes were a life saver for me when my kids were little. How do you see it as sad?

Pam: Don’t you remember what a big deal it was when Charlie Brown or The Wizard of Oz was going to be on? It’d be all we talked about at school that day. Then that night we’d take our baths early, get into our jammies, pop some Jiffy Pop, turn down all the lights, and ‘shush’ each other during the opening credits. It was a big deal. Now kids can watch anything they want, any time they want. It’s not special anymore.

Ann: You’re right. There isn’t that shared experience of all the kids watching How the Grinch Stole Christmas at the same time and then talking about it in school the next day. It is sort of sad.

Pam: I remember when I was about three and my brother Jack was five. We were very excited to watch Cinderella on TV. We did all the usual rituals and we felt special because our little sister, Mandy, was only one and a half and was put to bed before it began.

Ann: Oh the privileges of age!


Pam: Hey, this was big stuff. The program started and my brother and I were enthralled when the phone rang and my mom went to answer the only one in the house hanging on the kitchen wall.

Ann: I remember that. Ours was like that too. We had one of those red vinyl bar stool kind of things with the fold out steps just beneath it so us kids could reach it.

Pam: Well, Mandy had just mastered climbing out of her crib and my mom didn’t know that while she was on the phone, our sister had joined Jack and me in front of the TV. Then she started asking us for “wa-wa”.

Ann: She wanted a drink of water?

Pam: Yep. But we were not going to miss one second of Cinderella to get our baby sister a drink. So we kept telling her no. It’s not like now where you can pause it and come back or where you have the entire thing memorized like kids today. This was our one shot to see it and we weren’t going to miss a word.

Ann: Your poor sister.

Pam:Well she got back at us. Since we wouldn’t get her something to drink she went looking for it herself and found a wonderful collection on a mirrored tray on my mother’s dresser. She’d pulled out a lower drawer, stood in it, and drank a whole bottle of perfume!

Ann: Oh my gosh! That’s awful…what happened?

Pam: My mom came back into the living room where we were all sitting on the floor in front of the console TV and she could smell the perfume in the air. So she started to sniff each of us, narrowed it down to Mandy, checked out the bedroom, and figured out what happened.

Ann: How frightening. Did she call an ambulance or poison control or something?

Pam: I don’t think they had poison control back then. I just remember my dad driving really fast, my mother in the front seat holding Mandy wrapped in a blanket, and my brother and me in the back seat balling our eyes out because we were missing Cinderella.

Ann: Was she okay?

Pam: Well, they did whatever they do when a baby drinks perfume and she was fine as far as that was concerned. But she had two older siblings to contend with who were not very happy with her for quite some time.