The Wonder Years was on last night. Well, I guess it’s on every night on the HUB channel. I always liked the show, even from the very beginning. It is in fact the reason I got my first and only speeding ticket.
Before I move on to the wonder of the Wonder Years, I guess I should explain the ticket. This was back in the day before DVRs and I never seemed to get around to setting up my VCR so that it could record a specific time. I was over at my friend Cathy’s house and was running late. By the time I left, it was 7:50 p.m. I made the dash for my house. I was in such a hurry that I didn’t see the massive white police van jutting out from the building on my route.
$145 later, I had my first ticket. It was later reduced by the judge when I pleaded temporary insanity and told her of the reason I was speeding. I guess she was a Wonder Years fan, too.
Now for the reason I loved the show. No it wasn’t Winnie. I was going to joke about this, thinking she was impossibly too young for me. But as I went to find a photo, I found out that Danica McKellar is only a year younger than my last ex and dare I say, much sexier. Now there’s some future therapy sessions.
But I digress. This isn’t about Winnie, but about Kevin. Wait, that didn’t come out right either.
Let me explain. The Wonder Years takes place during the time I grew up. In many respects, it mirrored my life perfectly, except for the fact that I didn’t have Olivia d’Abo as a sister. In fact, I had no sisters, but certainly I had variations of brother Wayne, three of them to be exact.
Kevin was me: unsure, insecure, crazy about girls, a bit of a dweeb, not overly popular and very idealistic about the world around him. Last night’s episode was particularly apropos. Kevin had a pimple, and as we all know, those were one of the biggest nightmares we could ever have in our young lives. I still vaguely remember my first zit. It was a monster and the more I tried to hide it, the worse it got. Well, that was the scenario last night, overdubbed with the droning of Ben Stein as the science teacher, showing how movies in class about erupting volcanoes.
The moment was made worse, as you can imagine, by the impending visit of the daughter of her parent’s friends. In my own world, that would have meant a visit from Lori Burton, the Hermiston Watermelons.
If I had had a pimple on the days of her visit, I would remember it. But certainly acne showed its ugly head on numerous occasions in my youth. I wasn’t a crater face by any stretch, but I had my share of ugly moments.
Just like in the show, these always seemed to come up at the worst times. I wouldn’t have minded much if I had pimples on something less noticeable, say my balls.
I confess that in the first three years of the Wonder Years I didn’t miss an episode. I was late for one (see above), but beyond that, I made it a practice to be home to watch the show, if only to relive my own youth through the eyes of Kevin Arnold.
Even though it’s a bit sanitized in the show, and more nostalgic than perhaps it really deserved, it was an incredible time to grow up. We certainly weren’t as cynical as we are now, we still believed that anything was possible in the future, we respected our elders, we could go riding on our bikes and there was a fair certainty we would return home by dinner time (we’d better), we rarely had homework, spare the rod and spoil the child had more than a grain of truth to it, we felt safe in the world we lived in, and when we went to bed that night, we couldn’t wait for the next days to come, even if it meant a pop quiz in math.
O.K., so I’m lying about the pop quiz . No one liked pop quizzes, except perhaps Glen Baker, the Paul of my world. Well, he wasn’t exactly Paul on Wonder Years. That role would go to Bob Core.
Yes, I had a sting ray. I didn’t have the money to have a name brand one like Kevin. I had to make my own. And I never would have had a New York Jets jacket. I was a Green Bay Packers fan.
And I never had Winnie (though she filed for divorce this month so I can always hold out hope) in my neighborhood. Just the Hanshew girls and we weren’t allowed to ever play with them alone. They were Catholics, and my mother knew what kind of girls they were. She was right, too it turned out.
Me? I was Kevin. I didn’t have a clue. If a Winnie had ever talked to me, I would have simply clammed up, gulped, excused myself in mumble-speak, and once safely around the corner, curse the world for my shyness and inability to talk to any girl that I had an interest in.
That’s why I never married Debbie Doutrich, Karen Snyder or Julie Arnold. I was cursed. And now math-whiz Danica is out of my league, not because she’s too young but because she’d never date a guy who sucked so badly in math. Our only date would go like this. She would mention pi and I would say my favorite was rhubarb custard. Trying to grasp for something else to say, I would mention my ‘ex’ and she would respond ‘y’. There would be awkward silence. I’d attempt to figure out an angle, we’d reach a midpoint, she’d say something oblique, I’d test a variable in desperation and come across mean, and even though there was compound interest, something just didn’t add up in the end.
In the Emerald City, wishing I would have paid more attention to Mr. Summers in Algebra class,
– Robb