The Top Hits from Sixth Grade
When memories are fragmented or vague, I love to look up historical events to help create an accurate timeline. And I’m not sure there’s any boundary at all between memory and imagination.
Because I’ve been a rock-music fan since around age eleven, I can often tie memories to songs, then look up the dates of the songs’ popularity to help pin down a memory and possibly join it to others that surround the same song. I also often use historical weather data for the same purpose, because my childhood journal entries often describe the weather.
While trying to generate memories of sixth grade (because I’m a total masochist / really for a writing project), I watched this performance — the number one song of 1975 per WLS, embedded below. It triggered a memory of sitting in the very thin Mr. Tart’s science class at a table of four girls, hearing two of them talk about somebody and somebody who “went to third base” on the weekend at a party.
Since then I’ve wondered if the kids I knew were really in each other’s pants in sixth grade or if that was just big talk. At that science-class table I was wearing a boys’ Sears flannel shirt with a boys’ white t-shirt underneath and wondering if anyone knew that I dressed that way because I was afraid to start wearing a bra. I then remembered (or thought I did), in that same class at the same table, the girls copying out lyrics to “The Things We Do for Love” — but when I looked up that song, it turns out it was from two years later.
That in turn made me question more of that memory. Was I wearing flannel shirts already in sixth grade, or did I still wear tops my mom had picked out months or a year earlier? If I wore flannel shirts in sixth grade, it wasn’t because I was hiding the need for a bra. In eighth grade, that would have been the case. And I have a photo of myself in a flannel shirt in eighth grade, with short hair and a baseball cap, where I look so much like a boy that I can see why I was regularly mistaken for one.
So, when I remembered that science-class table, I was mixing up two different years: sixth grade and Mr Tart and “Love Will Keep Us Together”; and eighth grade and bra problems and “The Things We Do For Love.”
People like me who write about our own lives are trying to tell the truth. What is true? The dates that the songs were on the tops of the charts; that I sat at tables of four in school starting in sixth grade; that I dressed like a boy to feel comfortable at home and outdoors, and that this strategy backfired at school.
