Remembrances of things past.
I'm at my parents' house in Baltimore for Thanksgiving (my favorite holiday!). Not too long ago, my parents finished the basement in their house, which they moved into when I was in college, and there's now this superfantastique entertainment room downstairs. I was poking around, looking at all the new furniture that's been installed since last I was here, and I saw that in one of the closets, my parents had put some old board games and the like, transported from a giant toy closet we had in the house where I grew up.
Memory is kind of an amazing thing; there are all these memories we have locked up somewhere in our brains, hiding, completely invisible, until the slightest trigger comes along to rematerialize them. I opened the door to this closet in my parents' basement and saw the most random objects I cherished as a kid -- my collection of MicroMachines, a Fisher Price magic show kit, some beanbags I used to teach myself to juggle, my neon green tennis racket. Suddenly, faced with items I hadn't remembered existed, my whole childhood appeared in front of me, like some strange, personal, virtual reality museum in my head.
Another thing I happened across which I had forgotten but now remember so vividly, was this small plastic-topped container that lived on the kitchen counter in my old house. It's a pink can, basically, which held, in its original incarnation, delicious hazelnut candies, wrapped in gold foil. I remember the first time I tried one of these as a kid -- they were a gift from some foreign relative or other -- being afraid of this new thing called hazelnut, but quickly finding out it was even better than chocolate. Anyway, we kept the can to keep things in -- coins, paperclips, etc. There was a collection of thumbtacks stuck through the plastic lid of the can, still there when I discovered it in the basement last night. I opened up the can, and inside was a collection of...pogs!
Does anyone remember pogs?! Perhaps the stupidest collectors item ever, but very popular among the middle school set back in the early 1990s. They were these small cardboard discs, a little bigger than a quarter, that us grommets would collect and trade. They were ubiquitous. Pogs were like the MySpace page of 1991 -- every company, restaurant, movie, TV show, consumer product, cereal brand, you name it, had pogs emblazoned with their logo for eager young 11-year-olds to hoarde. I think there was some inane game you were supposed to play with the pogs, but that wasn't what it was about. (For game-playing entertainment, we were too caught up with Nintendo and pencil fighting.) No, pogs were tokens of social networking for pre-teens with high bangs and French-rolled jeans. The real game: whoever had the vastest and most diverse collection wins. And you had to have *cool* pogs, too, not just any old ones they gave out at the 7-11.
I did a quick search on eBay, curious to see if there was a market for these relics of a more innocent time. As it happens, there isn't. There were lots of listings with people selling pogs, actually, but the most exciting auction seemed to be an $8.51-bidding war for a collection of pogs with Garfield, Power Rangers, and the band Poison.
I'd say that rush you get from opening up a can of your forgotten past is worth more than $8.51 any day.
Memory is kind of an amazing thing; there are all these memories we have locked up somewhere in our brains, hiding, completely invisible, until the slightest trigger comes along to rematerialize them. I opened the door to this closet in my parents' basement and saw the most random objects I cherished as a kid -- my collection of MicroMachines, a Fisher Price magic show kit, some beanbags I used to teach myself to juggle, my neon green tennis racket. Suddenly, faced with items I hadn't remembered existed, my whole childhood appeared in front of me, like some strange, personal, virtual reality museum in my head.
Another thing I happened across which I had forgotten but now remember so vividly, was this small plastic-topped container that lived on the kitchen counter in my old house. It's a pink can, basically, which held, in its original incarnation, delicious hazelnut candies, wrapped in gold foil. I remember the first time I tried one of these as a kid -- they were a gift from some foreign relative or other -- being afraid of this new thing called hazelnut, but quickly finding out it was even better than chocolate. Anyway, we kept the can to keep things in -- coins, paperclips, etc. There was a collection of thumbtacks stuck through the plastic lid of the can, still there when I discovered it in the basement last night. I opened up the can, and inside was a collection of...pogs!
Does anyone remember pogs?! Perhaps the stupidest collectors item ever, but very popular among the middle school set back in the early 1990s. They were these small cardboard discs, a little bigger than a quarter, that us grommets would collect and trade. They were ubiquitous. Pogs were like the MySpace page of 1991 -- every company, restaurant, movie, TV show, consumer product, cereal brand, you name it, had pogs emblazoned with their logo for eager young 11-year-olds to hoarde. I think there was some inane game you were supposed to play with the pogs, but that wasn't what it was about. (For game-playing entertainment, we were too caught up with Nintendo and pencil fighting.) No, pogs were tokens of social networking for pre-teens with high bangs and French-rolled jeans. The real game: whoever had the vastest and most diverse collection wins. And you had to have *cool* pogs, too, not just any old ones they gave out at the 7-11.
I did a quick search on eBay, curious to see if there was a market for these relics of a more innocent time. As it happens, there isn't. There were lots of listings with people selling pogs, actually, but the most exciting auction seemed to be an $8.51-bidding war for a collection of pogs with Garfield, Power Rangers, and the band Poison.
I'd say that rush you get from opening up a can of your forgotten past is worth more than $8.51 any day.
posted by Adam at 11:51 AM
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