Random childhood memory: The Ground Round Bar and Grill. I've only ever visited that establishment once in my entire life. I was probably six or seven years old at the time, but I remember being so excited because for one, my family was very poor and rarely ate out so going to *any* restaurant was a big deal and two, because the restaurant was in heavy advertisement rotation on television during the regular cartoons we watched after school. (Those cartoons being the aforementioned She-ra/He-man, G.I. Joe, Transformers, et al.)The big advertisement at the time was that parents paid whatever the kid weighed for the meal. I don't know if the place still does that, for that matter I don't even know if there are any Ground Rounds in Minnesota anymore. (Edit: according to the oficial website the answer is yes, but not anywhere in the Twin Cities.) As a fat kid, it was unbelievably humiliating to be "weighed in" at the door. My elder brother teased me mercilessly over the fact that his meal was less than mine, despite his being more than three years older than me. The deal with the weigh-in kids meal was that for dessert you got an ice cream sundae in a little plastic cup that looked like a baseball hat. I don't remember which hat I got, all I know is that it wasn't a Twins hat, because my younger brother got the Twins hat, much to the chagrin of my older brother.
They still make those caps, that's actually what made me think of the restaurant. Some guys at work have a few of those hats as decorations for their cubicles, including one for Boston. Unfortunately, I have been unable to convince the guy who has the Boston hat to give it to me. It's not like he even likes the team, I think he just likes knowing that I want it, so he's refusing to give it to me.
I don't really have a point to this post (blog?). It's just funny how I can still picture walking into that restaurant and stepping up on the scale, the red LED lights posting my weight and my older brother laughing hysterically because he had been weighed first and his weight was so much less than mine. It's memories like this that I wish I could just purge from my mind. Maybe not remembering this stuff would mean that I could get along better with my brother, maybe trust him, maybe let go of all the pain he caused me growing up. I doubt he even remembers, or if he does that his memory matches mine at all.
It's something to ponder.
