Dia Reeves

Mimeograph ink
When I was in elementary school, everything was printed via the mimeograph machine in the front office. The teacher would send a kid down to make copies of worksheets and such, and the kid would come back and pass the papers to everyone in the class. The sheets were warm, and the ink was purple and smelled kinda sweet and kinda toxic, like glue or gasoline. Not that mimeograph ink smelled anything like glue or gasoline–it had a unique scent all its own. Good times, man.

Records
My aunt and uncle had an extensive collection of oldies’ records, crates and crates full of them. There was something almost soothing about the hiss and pop of analog sound quality that I can’t put my finger on, something sensuous about having to pick lint off the needle so the record wouldn’t skip. You couldn’t just make a playlist and click play; you had to be very hands on and flipping the records over and skipping over the groovelines in order to hear only the songs you wanted to hear.

Slip-N-Slide
That’s how you knew it was summer, when you you pulled out the Slip-N-Slide. Do they even make those anymore? It was this long skinny yellow surface that you wet with water from the garden hose. You set it up in the backyard (or if you’re like me and grew up in an apartment building, your cousins’ backyard) and then you’d make a running start and then flop bellyfirst onto it, slide, and then go flying off the end of it onto the grass. The cool move was to try to stay on your feet and surf down the thing, a trick I never managed to pull off.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 10th, 2010 at 6:17 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.