Made With Real (Frozen!) Girl Scouts

[mrissa]

We just had a Girl Scout at the door! With her daddy, so I could have them come in: by themselves, the girls aren't allowed to come into strangers' houses. I know the drill. I did this myself, for six years running. It's just miserable weather for selling GS cookies. I remember how cold it would get.

This was a big thing for me. I really wanted Girl Scouts to come by last year, and they didn't, and porphyrin spoiled me by getting me the kind that get peanut butter and chocolate all over your front teeth, but that was a different kind of good, not the same.

And I have just remembered: I know Girl Scouts! In the right area, even! I just didn't know it was cookie time yet. songwind, ladysea, mnfiddledragon, marcbs, Heathah, anybody else in the area: let me know if your girls are selling, and I will buy from them. We can arrange it on e-mail or the phone or in person if we're going to see each other soon enough. (Heathah, I don't remember if Miss Siri is a Brownie this year or not. If she is, have her bring her form along when we do ice cream!)

When I started selling cookies, they were $1.75 a box. They're $3.50 this year. My most dramatic cookie moment is when we were delivering cookies and I got a nosebleed all over my white NASA jacket and we had to run to Mrs. Saul's house because we knew her and she would be home. If I was writing this as a story, I'd leave out the blood all over the NASA jacket, because this was the late winter or early spring of 1986, and the symbolism would just be too symbolic, my pure childhood dreams of etc. in the torrents of blood from the etc. etc. But that's how it happened, NASA jacket and Challenger and nosebleed all.

I wonder how many people are going, "oh, man, she's old enough to remember Challenger?" compared to "oh, man, she was young enough to be a Girl Scout for Challenger?" I was 7. I consider myself on the bottom end of a generation because of it: because any American who's too young to remember Challenger is not in the same generation as I am, even if it looks like we're roughly the same age at this point in our lives. I also think that if you can say where you were for the Kennedy assassination, even if it was "lying in my crib staring at a mobile," that's not the same generation as me, either.

What are your generational lines?

And how many of you sold Girl Scout cookies?

Comments

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

The Novel Gazing entry Leah is talking about is here (http://www.marissalingen.com/072704.html), just some things off the top of my head that have "always" or "never" been true in my memory.

As sad as it is to always have had a dying space program, I think that having the turning point when you're 7 years old and just barely old enough to see it happening is pretty sad, too.

But space as history: yes. This is what my mom didn't understand when I was a teenager, because I was into science and into SF but not at all interested in watching TV specials on the space program. I was finally able to articulate for her when I was in college (and less adamantly against space program related books and documentaries) that it was not at all a cheerful thing for a physics and SF geek to have human space travel be a history lesson.

And the next Boomer-or-older who whines on a con panel about how people of my generation and younger just don't care about space the way they is gonna get it.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Er. That's the way they did

Challenger

[dendrophilous.livejournal.com]

I was 10. I walked home from school with my brother. My mom was home, instead of at work, sitting in the living room crying. "The space shuttle blew up," she said.

Suddenly part of normal daily life had turned dangerous, and a few split seconds affected hundreds of people. I have vague memories of the nervousness in the community, would there still be a space program, will we still have jobs?

This November my nephews wanted to see their father's school, and he showed them the memorial we planted that spring. The younger one told me later "They went up into the sky, but the shuttle exploded." They won't remember Columbia. The older nephew used to say he wants "to fly in Grampa's rocketship." I hope there will still be rocketships.

["Grampa" has worked at Johnson Space Center since before I was born; one of the Challenger astronauts was an assistant coach on my community soccer team; nearly everyone's parents worked for NASA or a contractor]