Wednesday, January 18, 2017

Memory Day: 1989

In 1989, I was 9 going on 10 and comfortable in my role as "the smart kid" younger than everyone else in the fifth grade. This was the year that the show, Doogie Howser, M.D., came out, so "Doogie" became one of the nicknames I got stuck with. Still, I had my close circle of friends including Aaron, Mike, Sharif, and Daniel.

I enjoyed playing the cornet, although there were no band concerts in this first year. Instead I spent most afternoons ignoring the Ed Sueta Book I practice book in favour of solo versions of the theme songs to various TV shows. I could dazzle with the theme song from the Garry Shandling show, but I hated to practice boring things.

After school, I was enrolled in a gymnastics class where I excelled at splits:

Meanwhile, my sister was turning into an edgy 7th grader with clothes from the GAP (and it was more important to carry the GAP bag around school than it was to actually have the clothing). We got along reasonably well, although she always bossed me around on Tuesday nights when my parents went out to choir practice and she was in charge.

We had two guinea pigs at home, Speedy and Pokey, which were cute for about a day and then really annoying from then on. They followed the normal progression of pet ownership -- we kept them until my dad got tired of taking care of them himself and got rid of them.

This was also the year we finally got a Nintendo Entertainment System (as well as two Game Boys), months after all of the other kids in the neighborhood. More enthralling than Nintendo, though, was the AdLib sound card we installed in our computer to add sound to all our ____ Quest games. This was the first step in my progression towards writing my own music with a computer. I also bonded with a six-grade girl in our shared multi-grade TAG language arts class because she played Infocom text adventure games, and we would make copies of our latest games and trade them in spite of those crazy write-protected 5 1/4" floppy disks.

In the fall, I started 6th grade (still at James K. Polk Elementary) in Mrs. Turner's class. Around the same time, I graduated out of the Cub Scouts and into Boy Scout Troop 131, where I rapidly became a Tenderfoot rank within the first six months (as part of my dad's drive to get me to Eagle Scout before I lost interest in the whole affair).

Other posts in this series: 1979 | 1980 | 1981 | 1982 | 1983 | 1984 | 1985 | 1986 | 1987 | 1988 | 1989 | 1990 | 1990 - 1991 | 1991 - 1992 | 1992 - 1993

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