Where Were You in 1975 and Before That?

Just Reminiscing

This morning I remembered pet rocks. Do you remember them? I think it would probably make you old. I’m old. Why can’t you be old if you remember them too? There is nothing at all wrong with being old. The alternative is that you are dead and buried or sitting on a mantel somewhere.

You didn’t need to feed pet rocks. There was no pet dander to speak of, so it’s not like you would be allergic to them. After a time, I think people started painting them, but I just remember river-tumbled smooth stones being our pets. Sitting on a windowsill in the sun would be a satisfactory place for a pet rock to hang out. You could buy a pet rock for $3.95.

I looked it up on the internet, and pet rocks were invented in 1975 by Gary Dahl. He was an advertising executive. A good salesperson could sell ice to an Eskimo, so inventing a pet rock was ingenious. 1975 was the year before I was married, so it might not be considered one of my formative years. In retrospect, I think I finally grew up when I was 48, so in that sense, 1975 could be considered a growing-up year for me. I was twenty years old then.

When I was growing up, when I was 12 years old in 1968, the Stones, the Beatles, and Sitting on the Dock of the Bay by Otis Redding were some of the music artists out there. I was too old to play with Barbie dolls anymore. I read a lot. I’d already been to seven of the 13 schools I attended, so I was introverted. I hadn’t had a boyfriend yet, though I had already had a number of crushes. The boys never knew. They were all pranksters, the bad boys, the fun boys. I ended up marrying a bad boy, who has been the significant fun in my life the last 46 years we’ve been married.

Woodstock happened in 1969, and I was aware of that. I was in the 9th grade, too young to participate but not too young to be interested. I had a Woodstock album for years. Had I saved all the albums I owned, I could have sold them for a lot. I didn’t, so it’s all water under the bridge.

In 1968 I was writing. It was writing done surreptitiously because nothing was sacred in my family, especially if my siblings were involved. So, not only did I have to be careful about what I wrote because it was used as ammunition against me, but I had to be careful where I hid the diary. It was one of those lock and key books, which I believe one of my brothers, I’m not saying who because it could have been any of them, knew how to pick locks. Actually, they all hated me because I was the oldest, so they could have teamed up and gone after me, which they occasionally did. Being the oldest in your family is not always the greatest place to be.

I remember there was never enough room in the diary to write all my thoughts. Silly book.

Nowadays, if I were to buy a paper journal to record my thoughts, I’d make sure the days were not noted so I could write as much and as often as I wanted to. I have been buying cool-looking journals for years. I remember trying to stick to one book at a time in my writing. Now, I write in whichever book pleases me at that particular moment. So, my handwritten entry today might end up being directly after an entry I made in 1989. I think that is more fun that way. I also generally cannot find the last book I wrote in when I want to record something on paper.

I do, though, have a digital journal as a Word document on my computer. This particular one was started on 3/29/2022. It’s 122 pages long right now. It’s also about a week and a half away from being one year old. I think I’ve got a good 10 of them here and there on my computer. They began when my monitor was pretty big. Flat-screen monitors had not been invented then. In fact, I don’t think cell phones had caught on either. I remember pagers were the order of business in those days.

It is easy to find things in a digital diary or journal. You just do a ctrl F to find whatever. Like the last time you made bread and what happened when you burned the batch. I crumbled out the innards, which were okay, and froze them to use as breadcrumbs later on. So, it wasn’t a total loss.

I remember being incensed when my youngest brother got to stay up until 10 PM. At his age, I had to be in bed by 8:30 PM. When I complained, I was told, “So what?”. I can’t remember who said that to me. It must have been my mother. I would never complain about anything to my father, so, yes, it must have been Mom.

I didn’t realize I was the most protected of any of them though I did end up one fine afternoon eating all the dog shit. Our cocker spaniel Pretty left it scattered on the living room floor while my exhausted mother napped on the couch. I don’t remember doing that, but it didn’t kill me. Come to think of it, maybe I was the one who scattered it, and the dog had a nice, orderly, all-in-one place pile of poop before I got to it. It doesn’t matter anymore. But the phrase, “Eat shit,” is one I actually identify with. This would have been in 1957, and I may or may not have been two years old. We were in Alaska before it became a state.

So, no, there really isn’t a point to this article. I just felt like writing and remembering pet rocks seemed to be a good place to start.

Now, maybe I’ll get dressed. Maybe.

I had fun writing this today. Maybe you’ll see more of me because I did get that tax information for 2022 off to our tax lady, and that is what has been eating up my time and energy for the last few months.

Pauline Evanosky is a psychic channel, and no, I can’t tell what you are thinking. I am a retired office admin person, a bookkeeper at times, and a writer. Soon to be published in 2023 a series of books for young folks about Getting a Job, Keeping a Job, and Looking for Another Job. I’ve written almost 300 articles on Medium and would love it if you would subscribe to my stuff. I don’t like to get dressed anymore and have a fabulous disposition as long as they don’t take away my pills.