The things we almost forgot

A game from childhood, a viral video, Bob, Bertha and the micro past.

It is perhaps a gross understatement to say that my childhood was vastly different than the one our kids are experiencing.

That’s probably been at least somewhat true for countless generations and hundreds of years, but it feels particularly true now that nothing stays the same for much longer than five minutes.

The most exhausting thing about the time we are living in is that history no longer provides reliable clues about the present or future.

Childhood comparisons are far less daunting and far more nostalgic, but they nevertheless reveal the pace of change. Our kids are just as surprised to learn that you couldn’t just order takeout from a covered wagon in the mid-1800s as they are to find out that there was no such thing as the internet when Mom and Dad were kids.

You couldn’t just watch whatever you want whenever you wanted to? What did you even do? I’m a moment of weakness away from ordering one of these shirts.

Please be patient with me. I’m from the 1900s.

But yes, what exactly did we do? I looked out the car window during long trips. I had an imaginary friend named John Doe, which sounds a little concerning in retrospect. I watched a lot of baseball and played even more.

One specific memory, though, rushed back at me earlier this week: Playing the board game “Mille Bornes” at my grandma’s house when I was quite young.

I don’t think I had thought about it in more than 40 years, and nothing specific (to my knowledge) triggered the recollection. It had seemingly vanished forever from my consciousness, only to reappear unprompted.

My memory of the rules was fuzzy, but I knew the object was traveling as far as possible while avoiding various mishaps. And I seemed to recall that all of the cards were written in both English and French.

My assumption had been that it was some strange regional novelty that had drifted over from Canada, given I had grown up 75 miles from the border.

What I did not know, but recently learned because of the magic of Wikipedia that didn’t exist back then, is that Mille Bornes originated in France but “was very popular in the United States, at one point outselling Monopoly.” There’s even a citation, so it must be true.

And I did not know that the literal translation of the game is a thousand milestones.

What I’ll never know is why I suddenly remembered it.

What I know is it started me down a path.

---

Our kids like to stay up late, something they will be able to enjoy for about six more weeks. Grade school for our two girls in Minneapolis used to start around 9:20 a.m.; in Eagan, the first bell is at 7:35 a.m. — sure to be a literal rude awakening for them and, a year from now, their younger brother.

For now, though, they are squeezing every minute of light and dark from the summer. This means post-dinner playground trips that often end in twilight, and that means they are wide awake when the bats come out.

The first time we saw them, I turned to my wife and said, “Remind me to show you this video I saw the other day. Someone filmed bats upside down and it looks like they are Goth kids dancing.”

Viral videos are a weak currency in 2024, devalued by inflation and a lack of scarcity. I promptly forgot about it roughly 12 seconds later, only to have the exact same scenario present itself a couple weeks later.

Hey, there are some bats flying tonight. Oh, the video!

This time, I pulled it up on my phone immediately. My wife, with fine-tuned 1980s sensibilities, loved it immediately. All three kids — each gripped at every moment by various stages of FOMO — demanded to see it.

The video became a thing in our family, and at some point I became a little obsessed with the song playing in the background. Modern sleuthing being what it is (looking at YouTube comments), I quickly found the full version of it.

The song is Sudno, by what seems to be a pretty popular Belarusian post-punk band called Molchat Doma. The words to the song, as translated from their native language into English in the video captions, are about as dark as possible.

The vibe of the whole thing is immaculate, and for some reason one night we decided to play the song for the bats. Maybe we just wanted it to be true, or maybe it was really true, but it sure seemed like more of them came out while the song was playing.

It got especially dark that night, late enough that on the way home and with the help of flashlights we spotted several frogs and toads in the short grass.

For reasons that are still not quite clear, our kids started naming all the biggest ones after picking them up.

All of them had “B” names, the first two being Bob and Bertha.

Now we take a “frog walk” pretty much every night, which we’ve learned requires leaving the house around 9:45. At around 9:30, our dog starts looking at us like, “Is it frog walk time yet?”

The next day after the initial frog walk home from the bat park, we had just left the house in our car and made a turn. Suddenly our son shouted from his car seat, “Is this the Bob and Bertha Road?”

Everyone burst out laughing once we realized what he was asking and figured out that he was, indeed, correct (and that we would soon be calling it that as its official name).

Oh, to be 4 and to have your world revolve around frogs. Or to ask similar questions like: “Is that the Noodles & Company we ate at after we saw the snake?” as he did a few weeks ago, again correct.

I want to think that he’s going to remember frog walks forever, even when his mind is full of a million other more complicated thoughts, but that’s his memory and not mine.

---

I went for two runs by our house in the last few days.

The first one started and ended on Bob and Bertha Road, where I saw a sign on the return trip saying it had been around since 1867.

It blew my mind to imagine it more than 150 years ago as a solitary dirt road surrounded by nothing but rolling hills and trees.

When our kids find frogs now, they always put them on the other side of the sidewalk near the houses so they don’t jump into the road and get run over. Back then, they probably didn’t need anyone’s help to stay safe (though maybe they don’t really need it now, either).

The other run brought me through Lebanon Hills Regional Park, an area I imagine has been largely unchanged through the decades.

I wasn’t listening to music, but I was wearing my new hydration backpack that our 10-year-old ceaselessly mocks whenever she sees it.

Slowing down enough so I could take a few sips (wherever I felt like it, unbeholden to the whims of water fountains, thank you very much), I suddenly remembered an old playlist I made during the pandemic called “All The Feels.”

A lot of things were building up inside me that I didn’t know how to release back then, and I thought a dozen songs that have an emotional effect on me might help.

This was of course a few years ago, and I tried it out on a run by our old house. Nothing much was shaking loose until I got to Father John Misty’s “Ballad of the Dying Man.”

Oh, in no time at all this’ll be the distant past.

Everything came spilling out on the spot, as I thought about life, our kids, the passage of time.

Why was I thinking about it now? Even just hearing it in my head almost got me again, and I had to fight back to keep going forward.

A minute later, a black and blue butterfly crossed my path. I paused to admire it, unsure if I had ever seen one like it before. I demanded of myself that I remember that butterfly, not every moment of every day but at various points for the rest of my life.

It occurred to me that by the time I had that thought, the butterfly was already part of the past, even if it still very much felt like the present.

I pulled out my phone and shouted “the micro past” into my notes app to describe the things that have just happened.

To add a layer between the constantly slipping present and our distant memories.

To overcome the idea that any time is disposable.

And maybe to connect the dots between a thousand milestones, a century-and-a-half, a generation and a few seconds.