My mama let me ride in the back of a pickup truck to Vacation Bible School, and she still tells people I was a careful child. Half of my millennial memories would get a parent a visit from somebody with a clipboard today. We trick-or-treated until the porch lights went off, nobody knew where we were, and supper was the only deadline. Somehow we lived to tell it, and boy, did these folks tell it.
The way-back was first class and nobody could tell me otherwise.
He called once. To ask where the remote was.
Every roll had three photos of a thumb.
Recess, but make it menthol.
Now I pump my own gas and the screen still asks for a tip.
Dialing a 9 took three business days.
Peer pressure, now in grape flavor.
Zero stars from crash tests, five stars from me.
Wheel well riders were the real VIPs.
The armrests had ashtrays. The armrests.
Lord, the freedom. Growing up in the 80s and early 90s meant your parents released you into the neighborhood like a house cat and trusted the streetlights to send you home. My cousin and I once biked four miles to a gas station for candy cigarettes, and nobody even asked where the dollar came from. Today I panic if my kid’s phone dies at the mall.
Then there are the things that used to be normal that make me want to apologize to my lungs. Smoking on airplanes. Smoking in restaurants. Smoking in the car with the window cracked one polite inch. Not all of these childhood memories are cute, either, and a few are an honest reminder of how far folks have come, which I am grateful for even while I laugh at the station wagon stories.
I think we pass these around because remembering is easier with company. Somebody mentions waiting ten days for vacation photos to come back blurry, and suddenly a whole comment section is holding hands. We don’t really want the old days back, Lord knows my knees don’t. We just want proof that somebody else was there too, eating bologna in the way-back of the wagon.
The wagon is gone. The pictures are blurry. The stories got better.
I went straight from these to Nostalgia Memes Are Fun Right Up Until You Do the Math on Your Own Age, which was a mistake for my self-esteem, and then 35 Millennial Memes For The Best Generation With The Worst Knees finished me off. Stretch first, honey.
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Phil co-founded Thunder Dungeon with Roy in 2012 and has been a meme tastemaker ever since, helping turn a page of funny finds into viral photo and video creations, one of the largest meme community apps and a daily home for memes. He's more than memes, too: Phil is an award-winning comedic actor and director whose feature films are on streaming platforms.
Sleeping on two chairs surrounded by loud adults is a core memory for an entire generation.