While some painted by numbers, my mom cooked by the smoke alarm – Part One

There are times when memories of your childhood come flooding back, and no matter how well you’ve plugged your fingers in the dike, it always has to give way and overtake you. I’m never too happy to remember my childhood as it wasn’t that happy, but at least I got out of it alive.

I am a child of the seventies. It was a time of lack hook rug kits that you never knew what to with once they were finished. Macramé planters with big, brown wooden beads hung from every ceiling. There was string art, and parents didn’t worry back then about handing small kids hammers and nails. Of course there was knit or crocheted blankets hanging on the back of every couch, with the matching throw pillow cases. Who could forget such raging crazes as the mood rings that changed color, the bell bottoms that always got caught and chewed up in your bicycle chain (this was before chain guards), and believed the Dr. Schols’ ads that said if you wore their clog sandals, you’d get toner looking legs. The only thing you got were your toes stubbed as your feet would slide forward out the front of the sandals. It was the day when Foster Grants ruled the sunglass scene, and on your feet were either platform shoes, or cheap pop out roller skates that never turned easily and landed you face down on the pavement.

When I see boot cut jeans today, I wince. When I see those big floppy train engineer hats back in style, I cringe. Thankfully, I haven’t seen my red and white polka-dotted polyester pants make a comeback. When I tried to describe this to an eighteen year-old kid a few weeks ago, she asked, “What’s polyester?” I couldn’t find an example of the fabric to illustrate the hell all seventies children experienced.

To watch an old re-run like “All in the Family”, it’s not for the bigoted language to show us what we used to be like, but to look at the kitchen table that I still see on “Everybody Loves Raymond” (in the parent’s house), complete with the vinyl and chrome seats you’d stick to on a hot summer day. It’s to look at a TV set when you still had to get up and change the channel yourself, and as a kid, you didn’t mind doing that back then. And it was for the love of everything harvest gold and avocado green – the only two colors that existed back then if you look at your parents’ old scrapbooks (if you’re too young to remember). You chewed on the lead based paint and you didn’t go to the doctor’s office for every little thing – only for your mandatory school injections so your parents could find a few hours of peace and quiet before you returned home and reminded them, “why didn’t I take my birth control pills that day?!”