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

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

Challenger's not the event that defines a generation around then for me, it would never have occurred to me that it could when the end of the Cold War's just a couple of years later. I was 16 when the Berlin Wall came down, and that's old enough to have known the world was going to end in the thermonuclear version of World War III; and people five years younger than me just don't seem to have that perspective, that having a future at all is an unexpected gift. [ Which I think also lends a different tone to the way I feel about some of the ways in which that has been stolen in the past five years or so. ]

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I'm in that five-years-younger range, from what you've said about the Berlin Wall, and I knew the world in general and my world in specific was going to end in nuclear war. I did.

But I didn't exactly believe in the fall of E. European communism as an antidote to that. I knew it was big, but I didn't...trust it, is I guess what I'm saying. Especially since the US was at war again so soon after. Sure, it was a little war with a little country, but it reinforced the notion that we weren't really safe even when we wanted to think we were.