Can you remember things from as far back as grade school? I have a few very fuzzy memories of kindergarten but my brain really wanted to hold onto some random memories from first grade. Maybe it was because it was Catholic school and the nuns want to continue to punish me.

There’s this meme that gets passed around Facebook often in the vein of “you were a child of the 70s and 80s if you remember this.” And it’s a picture of Rainbow Parachute Day. EVERYBODY loved parachute day as a kid…

Unless you were me and it triggered the memory of being locked inside a racquetball room in the gym of your Catholic school before cell phones were invented.

Time is a funny thing. With the passing of many, many years the details get murkier about how long we spent in that locked room. It could have been two minutes, it could have been 20. It could have been 2 hours. What I do remember is someone (maybe the gym teacher?) attempting to MacGyver the door lock with a shoelace.

If you can believe it, there is something even MORE triggering about Catholic school and gym days. Brown shorts and yellow shirts. So fug. We had no access to the bathrooms and were required to change in the room in front of everyone – gender separated thank Jesus – with the boys (of course) peeking into the classroom window frequently enough that they were reprimanded against doing so. Which then made us very aware that this was A Thing.

You know what else was A Thing? Me getting sent to the principal’s (head nun’s?) office because I dared to wear unapproved colored socks with my hideously-colored plaid school uniform.

Then, as in now, you can’t get me to follow your silly fashion rules.

But a rule that I will continue to follow based on my first grade experience is to never look directly at the sun during a solar eclipse. The end.

Extra Reading:
This is where your childhood memories went {via Nautilus}