The Most Gen X Memory

Written by Christopher Pentecost on February 3, 2024

Come on down… you have a fever of 103… you have puked twice since midnight… your hands are clammy, and you look like a ghost… you may feel like crap, but it’s about that time this week. I’ve been dealing with being sick, unfortunately, since getting covid back in late 2022. I tend to suffer with colds and allergies much longer than anticipated or what was to be deemed usual. So, so far, I’ve been stuffed up, cramped up, sneezed up, coughed up a lung, and all that kind of fun jazz.

And now that I’ve become an adult, I get to load myself up with more adult drugs than I know what to do with, which can turn your days from being sort of energetic into I don’t know where the last 36 hours went, but you wake up and sometimes you feel like a million bucks. Since covid, I feel like half a million tons of just pure S***! If you are a Gen-X, you know what came next. If you were sick and you got to stay home from school and you weren’t old enough to pull up a Ferris Bueller’s Day Off in excellent fashion, most of the time you would have been left in bed. Parents would have come in, checked on you, guessed you goodbye before they went off to work, and then it was just you and the house.

You crawl out of bed, for me, you then crawl down the stairs, sit yourself on the couch, then realize you didn’t have cable, and get up off the couch, push the knob on the TV to turn it on, change it to your favorite station, and watch a few cartoons before the daily talk shows came on the TV. And not the good talk shows like Jerry Springer, Maury, or random people finding out whether or not they were the father. No, it was like Donahue talking about why Nazis were such a bad thing, like we needed to be told that, Phil.

But once that was over, maybe you realize that, well, I hadn’t eaten breakfast because you hadn’t felt well and it’s a little late for breakfast. So you’d walk yourself to the kitchen and look for the one thing that, if you had a Mother Like Mine, was nice enough to leave out on the cat on the counter - a nice unopened can of Campbell’s chicken noodle soup. Now, for those of you who don’t know, those cans came not with the easy-open tops. Nope, we had to get the can opener, and for me, the can opener was one of those 1980s Black & Decker magnets on the top where you’d have to shove and cram the can in, be able to clamp down, then once it was open, you have to grab it before it fell and spilled everywhere. So, it wasn’t something that you could just set it and forget it, thank you Ronco.

You took the can opener, poured it in the pot, filled up the water because it was condensed, put the water in, put it on the stove, and heat it up. Or, if you were a little further along and had a microwave, you just throw it all in a bowl and throw it in the microwave. But then it was really condensed. Once you had your soup, it was hot, so you had to let it cool down. And you realized that, oh wait, I’m still sick. But what else do I need? Well, if you live up in Canada… Canada Dry Ginger Ale! The illness drink of Champions. Pour yourself a glass, notice it’s fizzy, take out a spoon, stir it until the fizz had all gone, use a straw, you’re set.

You grab your TV tray, which probably had some sort of 1970s sort of Paisley ideal of a pattern around the outside, and most of the time they snap together, but of course, it was also metal, so you had to make sure it didn’t bend. Didn’t want to break the TV tray, set that up in front of the TV off the couch, and run back, grab your bowl of soup, set that down, grab ginger ale, set that down. Oh wait, we forgot the crackers. Run to the cupboard, grab the individually wrapped sleeve of Christie’s Premium Plus saltine crackers, take it back out to the couch, which probably looked like a 1970s bad acid trip with patterns and shades of either orange, yellow, and brown. Sit down, wrap yourself up with a crocheted blanket, take some Saltines, crush them into the Campbell’s chicken noodle soup, and by that time The Price is Right was on.

You would sit and watch the showcase showdown, which was brought to you by pretty much the products you are consuming, and you would hope that maybe you would come close to even fathoming how much a 1986 Mercury Sable, which was not too far off of the Ford Taurus if I’m thinking correctly, or a trip to Costa Rica, someplace that I had only heard about in geography class. And that was what you did. That was your morning when you were sick. You probably get a lunchtime phone call from your mom just checking up to see how you’re doing, and then you would sit and play Nintendo for the rest of the afternoon until your parents came home.

It was the one time I was allowed not to cook dinner when I was at home if you grew up like I did throughout the 1980s, that was normal. Parents had to work, and a lot of the times you just got to stay at home as a latchkey kid. You were used to this. There are a lot of times where I stayed home because I was sick and had to clean up my own vomit because I missed. I overshot the bowl, yes, the yellow Tupperware bowl that either you puked into or you ate popcorn out of, and yes, we clean the bowl. I know it’s hard for a few people to really understand, but yes, we did clean the bowl.

Today was the first time that sat there and thought about being sick and what it was like not having someone wait on me being sick, making my own soup, learning how many Tylenols you could take. Now with two small children, I have to know all that stuff, which always made me impressed when my mom could say just take two Tylenol, drink some water, drink some Canada Dry, and just lay on the couch. And even now, I give those same sort of instructions to my children - drink this, lay down, chill out. Of course, they don’t have to get up and turn the knob for a different channel. They just sit there with their tablets but still bundled up in either their Oodie or one of our throw blankets with multiple pillows under their heads.

They don’t really like soup, which I find weird, but then again, different times. They don’t watch The Price is Right, but to be fair, it’s not the same without Bob. Drew Carey is nice and all, but there’s just something about Bob Barker that made it a little bit better just to sit and watch the little dude yodel up the hill or some person win five grand on Plinko. I know some of you have read this and have no idea what we’re talking about, but there are some of you currently reading this and can smell the soup, taste the salt on the crackers, and feel the warm hug of a crocheted blanket and how calm you feel drinking flat Ginger ale. And that may mean you may be a millennial or Gen-xer with Boomer parents.

And I think because we grew up needing to use our imaginations a little more through our formative years, that those memories tend to stay with us much longer than we had ever expected. When I started this, I purposefully put in different sort of ideas into the description to see if I can jog your memory. Many times I can’t tell you what I did yesterday, but vividly I can tell you what it was like to be sick at home by yourself in the mid to late 80s. I remember the smells, the sounds, the commercials like “where’s the beef” (I can already sense some of you chuckling at that), but it’s something that has stayed with us.

I have a lot of fun memories of those times where even if I really didn’t feel well in the morning, I usually got over it just after lunch. Soup can do that for you. I then would go downstairs, put my dad’s records on, and pretend I was in a band, air guitar for most of the afternoon. To this day, I still do that sometimes. I have always found that my memories of those times are always vivid, just like I could describe them above. They’ll probably be some posts where I get into other memories that have just stuck with me, some of them not great, others sort of bland, but I’m still not sure why they’ve stuck with me this long.

I’m sort of glad I got sick this week because it was nice, as much as I felt like s***, it was nice to relive a happy memory of a time where the colour of my partents couch matched the set design of the Price is Right sets and chicken noodle soup was the best food for when you were sick. I think I need to pick up some crackers and some flat Canada Dry Ginger ale.

[Photo by Calle Macarone on Unsplash ]