The 90s Child

Remember when...

🌈Saturday morning cartoons were the ultimate form of entertainment.

🌈Boy bands either rocked or were mocked.

🌈TV sets and computers were luxury items that weighed a ton.

🌈Stickers on your school notebooks gave you +100 cool points.

🌈Grunge was in.

🌈Rad was not a shortened version of radish and dudes rarely lived on a ranch.

Track #1: The Road Trip

The year was 1999. The month was June. The date? I don't remember. I was eight. My math skills were a little bit of fractions with a lot of hate for decimals.

Dad and I really thought the world would end in six months. While most people were stockpiling cans (that probably had enough preservatives to keep until 2099) we took to the open road.

I had scabs on my knees, three loose teeth and a newly budding addiction to Nintendo. Dad was a lot closer to 50 than 40. Looking back, it might've been as much about his mid-life crisis as the supposed end of the world.

Whatever the cause, it was the most memorable span of my otherwise boring childhood.

I was going through his stuff today and found the mixtape we'd made. We took turns deciding what songs to put on it. The world might go up in a mushroom cloud on January 1, 2000, but we'd go out with totally rad tunes ringing in our ears.

Track #2: The Drive-Thru

We ate at more roadside restaurants and twenty-four-hour diners than I care to remember. My meals of choice were pancakes, mac & cheese and burgers, fries and a milkshake. Strawberry or chocolate. Never vanilla.

That's why our visit to Lucky Clucky's Fried Chicken stands out in my mind.

Well...it's one of the reasons.

It was a tiny town in a forgotten corner of Colorado or Wyoming, I think. Evening was giving way to night and we were ready to chew our way through the upholstery. Normally, Dad was obsessed with watching his cholesterol. He saw fast food as the mother of all evil corporate schemes. He probably would've let me try my first cigarette before he willingly bought me a kid's meal.

I was hungry enough to be bold.

"Dad, can we go through the drive-thru?"

He looked in the rear-view mirror and smiled at me. "Sure."

That was the moment when the world ending stopped being a joke and started looking like a certainty.

He hated those tin boxes you have to yell into to place your order. We went in and sat at a plastic-topped table with cracked red faux-leather benches. The menu had a surprising number of offerings for a place that only did chicken. I guess when you're the only place in town, you've got to get fancy.

I got the popcorn chicken which turned out to be little grease blobs wrapped in a lot of breading with a tiny nugget of chicken at the very center. One piece even had a chip of bone. My meal came with a cheap toy in a little plastic bag. I think it was one of the characters from Tarzan. The elephant, maybe. That junk all ended up in a garbage bag when I was packing for college. They never could hold my attention for more than five minutes but I remember a few years before that, when Mom was still with us, how not getting one was grounds for starting World War III.

Track #3: The Amusement Park

It wasn't a planned stop but when I saw a Ferris wheel on the horizon, I begged for a ride.

Dad even braved the roller coaster, though when it ended he was regretting the corn dog he'd hastily consumed. While he rested on a nearby bench, I tried my hand at carnival games.

I couldn't knock over the stack of cups or take down the alien ship with ping pong balls but the duck pond and balloon game gave me enough cheap plastic junk to send me away feeling like a winner. The stuffed green dog smelled funny but was almost as big as I was.

It almost felt like having a younger sibling at last.

Based on many sleepovers, that dog smelled better than any newborn ever did.

I lost the CatDog keychain within a week and broke the miniature Slinky Dog but to this day, I still have that smelly green dog.

Track #4: The Motel

Motels are a gold mine of fun stuff to do when you're a kid.

First, there's the bed. You can make a total mess and leave the sheets rumpled and untucked when you get up. It's also big enough to sleep four kids so you can pretend it's the deck of a pirate ship or the surface of the moon and go bouncing all over without falling flat on your face.

Then there are the weird cabinets that usually just have boring hotel junk but once in a while, if you stick your hand to the very back of the drawer, you find something good. It might be a quarter or some toy forgotten by the previous occupant. As long as a concerned parent doesn't see you slipping the treasure in your suitcase, it's yours forever.

Most important of all is the TV. We couldn't afford cable at home. Nickelodeon and Disney were magical channels made just for kids. Cartoon Network was okay in a pinch. I'd have to surrender the remote and listen to the dumb, boring news eventually but as long as Dad was in the shower, the TV was all mine.

I think he took his time on purpose, to give me the full hour.

News and baseball scores. That's all he ever watched while I was awake.

I never could stay up long enough to see what he watched late at night but knowing my dad, it was probably The X Files.

Track #5: The Movie Rental Store

It was September when we rented the cabin. It was the sort of cozy log cabin you'd expect to see on a show about the wild frontier.

I thought it was so cool that I got to help Dad chop firewood and select our TV Dinner of the night instead of sitting through five boring days in a row of lessons.

Reception was poor but we weren't totally deprived. The TV had a VCR.

Once a week, we'd drive twenty miles into town and pick half a dozen VHS tapes at Blockbuster. Some were new releases, others were old favorites and a few were just weird enough that we had to check them out.

Not that Dad would let me watch much above PG. He didn't want me picking up the kind of language that would land me in detention for a month...just in case the world didn't end.

We always had popcorn, too. The kind swimming in imitation butter that you make in the microwave. It gives me heartburn just thinking about it now but man that stuff tasted good.

Track #6: The Pumpkin Patch

We went looking for our jack-o-lantern pumpkins the week before Halloween. I wanted the biggest one in the patch. It took almost an hour but I finally found the perfect one.

Its rich orange skin almost glowed under the sun rays escaping from a heavy bank of clouds. I was running through a list of my favorite cartoon characters, trying to decide whose likeness would look best carved in orange.

Dad walked up with two smaller pumpkins he planned to put beside the mailbox. I rolled my eyes at his lack of imagination. We had to trade. My pumpkin was too big for me to lift!

It was as we were waiting in line to pay that I saw the man with the cell phone. He kept holding it to his ear, trying to speak to someone on the other end and muttering under his breath every time the call disconnected. This was no shoe box but a sleek blue phone that could easily fit in a pocket. I was impressed.

Actually carving the perfect portrait into a pumpkin proved much harder than they make it look on TV. We settled for the standard grinning monster face. Dad stuck his hand into Ugly's mouth and pretended he was being eaten, sending me yelling from the room while he laughed himself silly.

Track #7: The Holidays

I don't know if you call it a Thanksgiving feast when there's only enough for two people. The turkey was dry and you could've laid bricks with the mashed potatoes but the apple pie was totally rad.

It took me years to realize that pie had come out of a box.

Dad spoiled me all through December. We sang carols with the locals until we were hoarse and our fingers were beet red with cold. There was always someone waiting at the end of the lane with freshly baked sugar cookies and hot cocoa.

Dad bought me just about every toy in the catalogue. Beanie Babies, Pokemon Cards and Cabbage Patch Dolls littered the cabin floor. My rainbow Furby was definitely my favorite of the lot. It's a shame I gave him away to a younger cousin.

Opening presents was epic...but it's not what I remember best from Christmas night.

We were sitting under the tree. The rainbow lights strung around the boughs were the only source of light in the room.

"Dad?"

"Yeah, Sweet Pea?"

"You don't really think the world's gonna end next week...do you?"

I could see the twinkling lights reflecting in his eyes. "I don't know, Honey. I just...I don't know."

His words scared me.

I'd been convinced my dad knew everything.

Track #8: The End

I stayed up all the way until midnight and was insanely proud of myself.

Dad and I shouted "Happy New Year!" and he let me blow the noisemaker.

He carried me to bed. I was dead to the world by 12:06.

Looking back, I wonder how many additional hours he sat up, listening for any hint of horrors befalling the rest of the world. At what point did he flip the TV off in disgust (or jubilation?) and go seeking the comfort of his own pillow.

I wish I'd been a little older. I wish I could have sat up and made jokes about all those doomsday believers who were staring at whole rooms full of canned goods and wondering what to do with several hundred servings of beef hash and creamed corn.