Down at Fraggle Rock

By Michael

The girls took us to see the Jim Henson exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry last week. It was a 35^th anniversary present. Not the tickets, although we didn’t have to pay, but the day was the gift. Any day with Jill and the girls is priceless.

We met for lunch at some outside café where we usually couldn’t dine in October, but the sun was bright and the air was warm and it was, did I mention, priceless. Then we drove down to the museum to see how many words of the Fraggle Rock theme song I remembered (Dance your cares away, worries for another day…) and met the boys for dinner at a new restaurant that serves goat weenies. (Don’t ask.)

Walking through Henson’s history was like walking through our own. I finally received confirmation that he did the Kraml Milk ad that I watched on the black and white TV in my parents room when I was about seven. He wasn’t JIM HENSON then, just some guy doing ads with puppets.

Fast forwarding, I watched Sesame Street on mornings when I was working the afternoon shift at UPI, but the girls didn’t come in until the Muppet Show and Fraggle Rock reruns were on the air. I coached Susan on how to say Wokka Wokka on her first Halloween, when we plopped a Fozzie Bear mask on her face and announced it was a costume.

The Muppet Movie and Muppets Take Manhattan were on VHS by the time they could watch and I was surprised to find that they never watched The Muppet Show in its original screenings. It was in reruns by the time they were born. So it turns out that I was singing all those theme songs by myself?

Time has a way of warping our memories, making us think we watched or went with our kids when we didn’t. And sometimes they remember stuff that we told them about, but they never really saw.

They have memories that are more accurate than mine, mostly because I have more dead brain cells clogging up the works. I have memories that are more accurate than theirs, because they were too young to read a calendar or see that little {R} in the TV listings that indicated they were watching reruns.

Turns out, it doesn’t matter. Facts have a funny way of becoming irrelevant on memory lane.

Michael Rosenbaum is 5 Minutes for Parenting’s first dadblogger. He is a business consultant, playwright and author of Your Name Here: Guide to Life.

Michael blogs on life issues at Your Name Here Guide to Life and manages the Adult Conversation discussion group on Linked-In.