Ephemera

The other day my five year old dragged me to McDonald's. I haven't been there for lunch in years (we went for breakfast a few times last year, when he was still in preschool) because, really, the food just doesn't taste good to me any more. Perhaps you need to be a starving, dining-hall-bound college student to appreciate it. But, anyway, I ordered a Big Mac. And it was actually good.

Now, the Big Mac, unlike many of it's calorie-ridden compatriots, has been around for a very long time. I still remember seeing commercials for it when I was in elementary school, back in the Dawn of Time (that would be the 70's). One in particular showed people saying the ingredients backwards. Unlike my offspring, who can recite the entire script to any movie they've seen more than once, I have a hard time memorizing things. Always have and probably always will. My brain just doesn't want to do it. However, I was totally entranced by Backwards Big Mac, and I worked VERY HARD to learn to do it. Despite forgetting many a memorized classic poem and Shakespearean speech, I can still do it today. Bun seed sesame a on onions pickles cheese lettuce sauce special patties beef all two. It's probably more impressive in person, a few hours into a cocktail party, but there you go.

Another thing I memorized in my youth was this:

Drink Coca-Cola cigarettes,
Smoke Wrigley's spearmint beer.
Kennel Ration dog food makes your complexion clear.
Simonize your baby with a Hershey's candy bar.
And Texaco's the beauty cream that's used by all the stars.

Take your next vacation in a brand new Frigidaire.
Learn to play the piano in your winter underwear.
Doctors say that babies should smoke until they're three.
And people over 65 should bathe in Lipton tea....with flow-through tea-bags.

I think it's funny what we remember. I cannot remember the phone number I had for seven years in Virginia or even what I had for dinner last Tuesday. I'm not one of those people who can tell you their seventh grade locker combination. I don't even remember the addresses I lived at over the years. I'd say that I'm like Sherlock Holmes, purging all extraneous information from my brain, but I'd also make a poor witness to a crime--I can't even tell you what vehicles my neighbors drive, and I stand next to their cars every morning at the bus stop. But, I can still play the first song I ever memorized in piano lessons, and I can still remember Backwards Big Mac and Mixed-Up Billboard. Sometimes, for whatever reason, these things will pop into my head from nowhere. I'll be driving along, mulling over adult problems and kid logistics and what's for dinner tonight and suddenly my head will be singing "Great green globs of greasy grimy gopher guts/Mutilated monkey meat/Itty bitty birdie feet." And it makes me smile.

And that's my silver lining for today.