Blast From the Past

Every once in a while, by pure chance, you hear a song or see an image that triggers a distant memory in your brain, opening a tiny window into your past. In an instant, you’re transported to another place and time, as surely as if you had been Captain Kirk in Star Trek and said “Beam me up, Scotty.”

This happened to me the other day. My daughter and I were going to Petsmart for a dog bed for an upcoming road trip (more about that in a later post) when I saw something that took me back thirty years.

In the Petsmart parking lot, we saw a replica of the “General Lee,” the car driven in the 1970’s tv show “The Dukes of Hazzard.” (I assume it was a replica - it had Nevada plates.) It was parked among other cars so I couldn’t get a great picture of it. Plus I didn’t want to linger around, lining up multiple shots and running the risk of getting extremely embarrassed when the car’s owner came out. (There is a better picture, plus tons of information about the show, on Wikipedia.)

Just seeing that car brought back memories. In my mind, I could hear Waylon Jennings singing the Dukes of Hazzard theme song, "Just a good ol' boy, never meaning no harm...."

I remember many Friday nights watching the Dukes of Hazzard and Dallas with my younger brother in our Albuquerque home. It seems like I was in high school but since the Dukes of Hazzard apparently aired from 1979 – 1985, I would already have been in college and I was surely spending my Friday nights at fraternity parties and football games instead of watching tv. So this memory must come from the summers at home with my family.

My teenage years saw an ever-changing line-up of Friday night tv shows: the Brady Bunch, the Partridge Family, the Donny and Marie show, Love American Style, Fantasy Island, The Love Boat (or was that on Saturday??), MASH, and the aforementioned Dukes of Hazzard and Dallas. Now I’m not saying that I was overly influenced by all that tv-watching, but it is worth noting that my first job after college was in Dallas, in the very office building where J.R. Ewing had his office on the show Dallas.

I don’t know when those Friday nights of faithful tv watching ended. I suspect it coincided with either turning the legal drinking age and/or moving away from home and family. Things go full circle though. Now it’s my family, just the three of us, watching tv on Friday nights. Our typical Friday schedule starts, much to our daughter’s dismay, with a half-hour of “Nevada Week in Review” on our local PBS station, and then we watch more family-friendly entertainment. I wonder if my daughter will remember any of this someday when she stumbles upon a blast from her past.

If you want to have some fun hearing sound clips from the past, from tv show theme songs (like I Dream of Jeannie and I Love Lucy) to great one-liners in movies (including what remains to me the most terrifying sentence ever spoken in a movie: “I’ll get you my pretty, and your little dog too”), check out this website, which I learned about from one of my favorite bloggers, Ro.