When We Were Young

When we were young
There was Sesame Street

Do you still have Sesame Street?
Do you know who Cookie Monster is?
Do you wonder how Bert and Ernie can afford to live in such a spacious apartment when neither of them has a job?

I don't know if you have Sesame Street
That's what we had
When we were young

We had Fraggle Rock
And Rugrats
And Doug
And Snick
And TGIF

We didn't have computers, not really
But we did have Super Nintendo
And regular Nintendo, of course
And Sega, we had Sega
And Sega meant Sonic the Hedgehog
And Mortal Kombat

And if you could beat Mortal Kombat
You were the coolest person ever
Until you did beat it
And then you felt sort of...unfulfilled

That was the thing about our video games
They were winnable
But when you'd win
You'd expect something grand to happen
And nothing ever did

Maybe that's why we all grew up
Feeling so dissatisfied with our achievements

When we were young
We could beat every game
On every level
With only one or two cheat codes
Given to us by a magazine

When we were young
There were no malls in Providence
There was no Waterfire
There was a Thayer Street
But we were certainly not aware of it

Our Friday nights
Consisted of being dropped off at Warwick Mall
So we could walk in and out of shops with our friends
Get someone's older sister's boyfriend
To drive us up the road to the showcase
So we could sneak into a rated-R movie
After having purchased tickets for a movie about a dog that talks and plays baseball
And then after the movie
Running across the four-lane main road
To share an Outback appetizer
Amongst the thirty of us

...And probably not leave a tip

Hey, we were young

When we were young
If you wanted to send a message
To seventeen people at once
You couldn't

You just couldn't

Having a party line was amazing
Having the Disney channel was amazing
Having a girlfriend or boyfriend was life altering

Seeing two kids your own age
Holding hands
Was like witnessing
A public hanging

It was scandalous

When we were young
Sarcasm was a tool
We didn't quite know how to use

Terror was just a word
Just a word like any other word

Terrorism was something
That happened in the eighties
Before Reagan wiped it out

Things were good

Weren't they?

Or am I remembering it wrong?

All I know is that we had Sesame Street
And I would like to find a place for us and you
To meet

So can we meet there?

Can we meet on Sesame Street?

Do you have Sesame Street?

Because there's so much you have
That we didn't have

And yet there's so much you don't have
That we did

We had just enough technology to make us feel like we were in the future
Without so much of it that we felt like we were disconnected from the present

Do you feel that?
Can you feel that?

And more importantly

Do you have Sesame Street?

. . . . .

Okay

Well...

Then maybe we have more in common
Than I thought we did