90s Childhood Memories

The world in the 1990s ended at the corner of your street, and that was enough world for anyone. You knew every crack in the pavement, every dog behind every fence, every house that gave the good sweets at Halloween.

Saturday morning was cartoons and cereal, and the cereal was the wrong colour for a food and you loved it. The TV had four channels. If you missed a programme you missed it, and you would talk about the episode you didn't see on Monday like a rumor.

Nobody could reach us. That, more than anything, is what has changed.

You called for your friend by shouting their name from the pavement outside their house. You came home when the streetlights came on, and no one had a way to check where you'd been, so you told the truth or you didn't, and either way, you were the one who lived with it.

Injuries were part of the day. A scraped knee, a bicycle over the handlebars, a splinter someone's mother dug out with a needle and a story. The pain was real and then it was over. It didn't turn into a post.

The music came in on cassette, hissing at the start of every song. The photographs came back from the shop a week later, and half of them had your thumb in them. Nothing was instant, and so everything was a small event.

It wasn't better. There were things we didn't have language for, and things adults were quietly getting wrong. But we were unreachable, and unwatched, and we spent long unbroken hours inside our own heads.

That is where a person is built. Not in a feed. In a driveway, in June, when nothing is happening and there is no one to tell.