Welcome to another edition of The Jumpstack, where this week, we deeply dive into childhood. Let’s un-repress some memories together!
Waiting for Gilligan
Children can be bloodthirsty. Which is why my logic for killing Gilligan was simple: all other options had been exhausted.
Even when Gilligan was absent from the common area or somehow incapacitated, the others would inevitably be thwarted from escaping the island.
Clearly, none of the castaways were ready to accept the necessity of eliminating Gilligan for good. But I was.
The Skipper should make the call and end his “Little Buddy.” And, if not him, then the Professor. Hell, Mary Ann could do it with her bare hands.
But they never did: when the series wrapped after three seasons, it didn’t have a finale, so the passengers of the SS Minnow were perpetually trapped on Gilligan’s Island. But it wasn’t all for naught: watching the show as a child prepared me for Samuel Beckett as an adult.
The replies that followed the two tweets—which have now been liked over 10,000 times—was an unprecedented airing of ancient grievances:
Check out the rest of the thread if you like to find people who share your childhood audience feedback—or add your own in the comments.
This is bad, very bad
So, you wanna hear my grease-fire ReBoot story? You don’t actually need to be familiar with the show ReBoot, but here’s how the episodes began:
My best friend in middle school lived on the ground floor of the same apartment building as me, and we’d meet at her unit before walking to school together.
That morning when I knocked at her door, Melanie* opened it, still in her pyjamas. (*Names changed to preserve privacy.)
“It’s a PA Day!,” she informed me while laughing, and invited me in to the living room, where her younger brother Marshall was watching ReBoot.
I dropped my backpack, took off my shoes, and quickly settled down the couch with Melanie. A day off from school, with all the adults at work, was a massive improvement over my prior expectations.
This was short-lived, for after a few minutes Melanie made a face and said, “What’s that smell?”
“OH NO!” cried Marshall, who leaped from his spot on the carpet and raced into the kitchen, Melanie and I in hot pursuit, arriving just in time to see Marshall open the oven door and pull out the rack to reveal an entire pan on fire.
We all screamed for a few seconds. Marshall’s breakfast burned unlike anything I had seen before. Melanie started yelling at Marshall—and Marshall, frantic, grabbed a glass and filled it in the sink just as I realized I was staring at a grease fire.
“IT’S A GREASE FIRE!” I shouted, but it was no use: Melanie and I screamed as Marshall threw the water from the glass onto the pan and the fire exploded into a column of inferno, flames as high as the doorway.
The hit of heat made us all stumble back, covering our faces, and we ran into the living room where ReBoot continued to play.
“Where’s your baking soda?!” I asked Melanie, who raced to the kitchen and pulled a battered box of Arm & Hammer out of the fridge. But the baking soda was hard as a rock, and we couldn’t get it out of the package. Marshall tried putting the fire out by waving a towel, but the fire ignored it.
I grabbed my house keys and told them both I’d check my fridge, and to open the windows to let the smoke out, and flew out in my socks down the hallway and past the superintendent’s secretary opening the office door.
I ran to the elevators and mashed the button, but both were at the top of the building and seconds were precious. I ran up the six flights of stairs and burst into my own apartment, quiet and empty.
We didn’t have baking soda.
Terrorized with failure, I ran back to Melanie’s door, afraid of what I’d find.
In the meantime, they’d opened all the windows and the patio door, but the fire was as strong as ever, and the smoke was getting thicker. As I closed the front door, the hallway fire alarm went off. The sound spurred us all into action: Melanie grabbed a soup pot lid; I ripped the side of the baking soda carton, exposing the hard brick inside; and Marshall screamed. I threw the brick onto the fire, which disrupted it long enough for Melanie to slam the lid down on the pan. In minute, the fire was out.
Relieved, we caught our breath and congratulated each other for saving each other’s lives—until we noticed that the white kitchen was now black with soot, from ceiling to floor.
The fire alarm stopped. Melanie ran her finger down the wall and stared at it. Our day off was now a frantic mission to scrub all traces of the fire from the apartment before their mom got home.
After setting up fans to get rid of the smell, and raiding my apartment again for more paper towels and cleaning supplies, we spent the next six hours scrubbing every surface of the kitchen.
We finished just in time to sit down to watch TV again when Melanie’s mom arrived.
She took one look at us and was immediately suspicious as to why we all looked like chimney sweeps after a shift—and were far too entirely enthusiastic in greeting her. She glanced around the room but could see nothing out of place, and with a now-confused look on her face, she walked into the kitchen.
Of course, the three of us followed. We found her still confused, turning in a circle, like she knew something was off and she couldn’t figure out what it was.
“We cleaned the kitchen today for you, mum!” said Marshall in an anxious voice, and Melanie hissed at him to be quiet. Their mother stopped moving, and focused on Marshall.
“Why would you clean the kitchen?” she asked in a too-calm voice. We all grimaced. She glanced around the kitchen again, then raised her eyes to the ceiling and gasped.
Our attempts at cleaning the ceiling was not as effective as we hoped: the ceiling looked like modern art. Immediately, we confessed. Their mother remained calm, before thanking her daughter for her quick thinking and me for sticking around to clean the mess.
“Now Marshall—,” she said in a doom voice… but Marshall was already out the patio door, running as fast as he could. It was time for me to go home.
My mother asked me later that night what I had done, since it was a PA Day. I told her I just hung out with Melanie and Marshall and watched television. I never told her what actually happened.
To this day, I keep a generous supply of baking soda in my kitchen.
Back to basics
As we get ready to leave summer behind and barrel-race into fall, I thought I’d share something that I’ve found very helpful in managing day-to-day pressures: that parenting resources for kids’ mental health are fantastic resources for adult lives, too.
Discussions about managing stress and anxiety in adults can be complex and rhetorical, rather than practical—whereas advice for children is simple and provides ideas and habits you can implement easily. Does it matter if it was designed for a six-year-old if it works for you at 40? It never hurts to learn a new way to look after yourself.
And that’s it for The Jumpstack this week! If you liked it, feel free to hit that heart and share with anyone you think would like it, too. If you haven’t already, sign up for more (free!) every Tuesday in your inbox. Next week: FALL.
— Jump