One of the interesting things about (Getting older? Not being a kid anymore? Surviving?) is that memories tend to accumulate, fragment, and occasionally, resurface in weird ways. Last night I had a bit of animation stuck in my head. Like an earworm only there’s video involved too. I only knew that it was from an old kids’ show and involved a little alien creature who spoke entirely in rebuses. And I couldn’t for the life of me remember where it came from. I was racking my brain over every ancient cartoon series I could think of. (Linus the Lionhearted? No. Tom Terrific? No. Hoppity Hooper? No. Rocky and Bullwinkle? No, not even R&B).

Let me place what happened next in context: I remember plots and storylines. Anything. Books, tv shows, whatever. Mrs. Ogre doesn’t. Many times she’ll be going, “I know I’ve seen this episode before, but…” and I’ll say something like, “Oh, that’t the one where the bad fairies show up.” Doesn’t matter if I saw the thing twenty minutes or twenty years ago. That’s the sort of thing I remember, but I was drawing a complete blank on the little alien. Then Mrs. Ogre blinked and said, “Beany and Cecil?” And danged if I didn’t realized that she was right before she’d finished saying it. Now that I had enough to go on, Google found it: Strange Objects, ca 1962, starring “Beeping Tom” the space alien. I was seven. Mrs. Ogre wasn’t more than 4 1/2. She remembered it, not me.

I think that worried her a bit.