The smell of dinner cooking in the late afternoon takes me back 40 years

Several weeks ago, my beloved Wickliffe Swing Band performed in the front yard of one of its drum majors. The drum major's mom had bought the winning ticket for Band on Demand, an annual fundraiser in which the winner gets to have the band play outside their home.

The kids did their usual bang-up job, after which I walked down Wickliffe's Maple Street and Elm Avenue on the way back to my car. Just as I took the left turn from Maple onto Elm, it hit me.

It was the unmistakable smell of someone cooking dinner. I don't know exactly what they were making, but it was that combination of savory aromas familiar to anyone who has ever walked a suburban American street at 5:30 in the afternoon.

I hadn't experienced that smell in years, and it immediately took me back to Harding Drive in the late 1970s and early 80s.

Most of the kids with whom I grew up ate dinner with their families. You would play together all afternoon, and at some point you each had to go home for dinner with parents and siblings. Then you could meet up again afterward to continue doing whatever you were doing before soup was on.

Those dinners were almost invariably prepared by moms. More than once I remember heading home for my own dinner and along the way smelling the entrees and side dishes the mothers of Harding were preparing that particular day.

It was a different time. I don't know that it was ultimately any better or worse than now, but it was most certainly its own unique time.

People still cook dinner, but they don't eat together as often as they used to. And far more frequently than was once the case, it's often a dad doing the cooking.

Like most people, I infuse my childhood with a degree of romanticism it probably doesn't deserve. But smelling that dinner cooking somewhere near Maple and Elm reminded me how blessed I was to grow up when and where I did.

I spent hours playing with Slime, and I really can't figure out why

Back in the 70s, the good people at the Mattel toy company came out with a product called Slime. It was exactly what you would assume it to be: oozing green slime.

It came in a little plastic green garbage can and the idea was pretty much just to play with it. There was no end goal or any sort of competition involved with Slime, unless of course you had contests to see who would dare to eat any of it.

You just sort of felt it, squeezed it, stretched it, and wrapped it around your arm or whatever, much like the kids in the vintage ad above. It should be noted, however, that I never came across anyone who, like the kid in the bottom left corner, turned criminally insane upon playing with Slime.

It wasn't a threat to stick to your clothes, really, but you did want to keep it out of your long, thick 70s hair, or there could be problems.

In later years, Mattel released Slime with Worms (which was purple and which I owned) and Slime with Eyeballs (which I think was green and which I did not own).

I can't decide whether Slime is a toy that works across generations and reflects a certain innocence on the part of all young kids, to the point that they can derive hours of amusement from it. Or whether it was something that only could have worked in the time when I grew up and was more a product of longer attention spans and less exposure to electronics.

Maybe both.

Either way, I can't tell you how much time I spent playing with my cans of Slime. The chemical smell of it still sticks in my head.

Not the taste, though. I never went that far.

As far as you know.