Like the corners of my mind.....

Scroll down for this week's Ten on Tuesday list!!!!!

Working on this week's Ten on Tuesday list really brought back a lot of memories for me. And I realized that it's funny the things you remember - the moments of time that stand out in your memory.......

I grew up in a time of no VCR's and no cable TV - not until I was a teenager, anyway. We saw movies in the movie theater. My Granddaddy was a Mechanical Engineer whose Dallas company built movie theaters, including the little two-screen theater in my community. (For an interesting fact about that, see #26 of my 100 Things About Me post.) So we got in to all the movies for free. I went to countless theater openings around Texas (he liked to show off his grandchildren) and the biggest fun was going to his office with him, where they had the Candy Warehouse - it was a free shopping trip for us to pick out all the candy we wanted! Heaven for a child, I tell you.

When thinking over the movies of my childhood, I could remember exactly where I saw each one - usually at one of Granddaddy's theaters (until the multi-plex opened at the mall and it became cool to go to the movies and hang at the mall with my friends). Last night USO Girl and I were talking about the various movies we remember and she mentioned Staying Alive (the sequel to Saturday Night Fever) - and this is how I remember it....

It was the summer of 1983 - I was 13 years old and had just finished 8th grade. I had one foot in childhood and another in adolescence. My grandparents drove to Houston from Dallas with Wendy Bird (my cousin), picked me up, and we all drove to Harlingen where Granddaddy was opening another theater. Those were the days we listened to "Sneaky Snake" and "I Like Beer" on the 8-track in their car; Wendy Bird and I had made a cassette of our own with cool music like "Jack and Diane", "White Wedding" , and "China Girl". We spent a week at a motel in Harlingen - Wendy Bird and I had our own room that connected to our grandparents' room. We played Barbies and swam in the motel pool - we had breakfast and lunch every day at a cafe across the parking lot called The Hot Biscuit (Wendy Bird and I called it "The HB"). I can even remember what we ate most days - grilled cheese and bacon sandwiches and vegetable soup. Granddaddy went to work every day, but in the evenings we went on adventures - including a couple of trips over the border to Mexico, where I tried frog legs for the first time (they really do taste like chicken!), Wendy Bird and I had our pictures drawn by a local artist, and we got huge sombreros from one of the many shops.

When it came time for the theater's opening, they did a run-through of the movies during the day - so Granddaddy brought Wendy Bird and I up there and we got to see Staying Alive as the only 2 people in the house. Our own private showing. We were hot stuff. That evening we dressed up and went back for the Grand Opening Event - and we got to see War Games as the first movie shown to the public in that theater. We felt so special that OUR Granddaddy built that theater and we were there as Guests of Honor (or at least we were in our eyes).

In the grand scheme of things that was probably an insignificant little trip - nothing special planned, just two girls hanging out with their grandparents for a week-long business trip. But it stands out so strongly in my memory. It makes me wonder what my children will remember about their childhood - what things that I consider insignificant will be special memories to them?