Things you can’t un-remember, Eating off the floor

Yesterday we were talking about movies and the genres that each of us liked best. Since both of the guys I was working with have young kids, family movies was the most agreed upon preference; however, one of my co-workers mentioned his love of B rated horror movies and had a sample of a movie he had watched recently.
I was not watching but I could make out some of the louder sound effects – ones that I would generally associate with that type of movie. As the movie progressed and the two guys laughed and joked about some of the horrible acting and ridiculous stunts, on of them suddenly stopped watching and moved away. I have no idea what he saw but I thought his remark was worth capturing. “Some things”, he said, “can’t be un-remembered.”
Not, some things can’t be forgotten, but some things can’t be un-remembered. Like the song that continues to play over and over in your head, driving you crazy. Or a scene from a movie that always comes to mind in a particular situation, a noise heard while you are in the shower or a thump heard close by when you are just going to sleep.
Sometimes we do that to our children by exposing them to television scenes or movie scenes that leave a lasting memory in their minds that cannot be un-remembered. I think of one child we watch and the fears he has of certain things because of some of the movies he should never have watched but was so ridiculed by an older sibling that he forced himself to watch even when secretly terrified.
Granted, many of these situations come upon us suddenly and cannot be un-watched once they have played. That’s why I usually leave the remote with Mama who has zero tolerance for anything sexual or scary played on any device; TV, computer, X-box, etc. I have to trust her abject horror of such scenes to protect me and the kids – even if it annoys me at the time. She has a terrible time un-remembering such things and I do not ever want that to change.
My daughter Maggie called me tonight while she was watching two children, five and ten years old respectively. The five-year-old, a girl, was really rambunctious and she interrupted our conversation several times. One such interruption I heard Maggie say, “That’s why we don’t eat things off of the floor.”
She explained, the girl had bent down, lips to the floor, and eaten a stray cheese ball – one of the puffed kind – directly off of the floor and was now pulling hairs out of her mouth.
I can think of several other good reasons we do not eat off of the floor, but that works.