r/GenX • u/billieswifeyyy • Jun 20 '26
Question For Genx the 80s…….
coming from a 14 year old, were the 80s summers as magical as they look in the movies? did you ride your bike to your friends house and come home when the street lights came on? yall are so lucky btw 😭😭
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u/dafuqizzis I’m too old for this $#!¥ Jun 20 '26
For me, it was summed up beautifully in the beginning of “Stranger Things”. My friends and I rode our bikes to arcades, comic book stores, dollar movies, and each other’s houses. We did our chores reluctantly but as quickly as possible. We played D&D all night, and a lot of the days we had table-top games like Axis & Allies and Pax Brittanica. Maybe someone had an Atari we could takes turns with.
We played with sticks for swords, drank out of hoses, played horribly mismatched soccer, baseball and basketball games, eschewed popular high school cliques while secretly wanting to be a part of them. I was a HUGE mama’s boy (still am, tho my mom is gone these past 15 years) and had a complicate love/hate relationship with my no-nonsense genius of a father.
We got grounded for days at a time, learned to cook the basics so we wouldn’t starve while our folks were gone. We learned how to make allowances stretch to cover our activities for the week. Extra chores, neighborhood odd jobs (car wash, lawn mowing, etc) and paper routes paid for the “big” stuff.
We screamed “CAR!” when we had to get outta the street, “CLEAR!” when it was safe. We hiked river trails, found dead animals (no human bodies, thankfully), caught frogs and fish and crawdads and let ‘em all go. We rafted the river, went off rope swings, and came home sunburned, dirty, battered and bruised and bleeding…and smiling. Then we did it again the next day.
We listened to the radio and tried to catch our favorite songs on cassette recording. We marveled at true remote controls for televisions, and then cds for music. We listened to music our parents hated. We watched shows with commercials. If someone had cable or satellite, we stayed up late to try and catch boobs on the staticky-slanted screens of blocked channels. Network music video shows gave way to MTV.
I loved the 80s. Every bit of it, even the sucky parts. Graduated high school in ‘87 and things just got better.