Wednesday, January 25, 2006

This Hasn't Ever Happened To You, Has It?

I just violently recalled something I said when I was four years old. Clear as day. The intonation, the high pitch of my voice, it all came back in one split second for no apparent reason. That phrase, for the record, was "He was flying around with his orange juice, oh my god!"

I remember this as the first time I said the phrase "oh my god" in front of my mom, a devout roman catholic. I'm pretty sure I got in trouble for this. I'm piecing together the image of what sparked this sentence, but it's blurry. There's an older kid flying around with, you guessed it, his orange juice. He's got a scruffy haircut (remember, this is 1983 we're talking about), high shorts, sneakers. I see him either running around the church basement, or galloping around my elementary school gym. I doubt either of these are right. For some reason, this kid having an orange juice didn't add up, and I was dumbstruck. I guess the bar for surprise is set pretty low before you reach five.

I have a knack for remembering random stuff like this, so it's not surprising that it happened at all; the fact that there was no apparent trigger was odd, though. If I see a color, hear a song, pick up on a scent, that could be enough to open the gates to the nostalgia garden, but here there was nothing. I was listening to a pavement song called "Jam Kids", typing on my computer with the standard OS X desktop, absolutely nothing out of the ordinary or remotely related to days gone by. I guess that's the way it goes sometimes. Sigh.

So, if you were a kid fitting my description, and sometime in 1983 you were running around in a public place with a glass of orange juice, go ahead and leave a comment. I'm pretty curious about it all. Wait. A Xerox corporate picnic, maybe? Yeah, I think that was it. Orange Juice. Older kid. Xerox party. Anyone?

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