It was the night of the slumber party. The little brother served bowls of ridged potato chips and garlic and onion dip to the teenage sister and her friends in pajamas. But wait! Wasn’t there a truck driving past the house at that moment? Try to remember! The truck was painted violet with decorative tendrils of fuchsia, and silver, remember? But wasn’t that a strange color for a truck in the late 1950s? And what was such a truck doing on your residential street? It was doing something! But wait! The fuchsia tendrils, there was a name for such decorative flourishes! Was it customized detailing? Try to remember! Such designs appeared on hot rods and souped-up V-8 dragsters. But wait—the little brother didn’t care about engines or cars, or trucks! Memory follows appetite! Follow that appetite! The chips! They were ridged! The edges rippled, as if cut with special scissors! And those scissors are called pinking shears! Cutting such saw-toothed or wavy or ridged edges is called pinking. The tendrils on the truck were fuchsia and silver.

Like the pinking silver of those special scissors! And what of the dip? It was white, and bright green-yellow, almost chartreuse. Try to remember! The girls’ pajamas were white cotton with little animals. But wait! There were other little animals, weren’t there?! Of course! The girls’ bedroom slippers! They were fuzzy, and big. They had puffy, pom-pom balls of soft fabric on the toes. The balls were chartreuse, fuchsia and vermillion! Some of them had little black and white plastic eyes! They looked like adorable, squeezable blowfish, didn’t they? And as Bill Haley and Little Richard played and the girls danced, the eyes rolled around, and you looked up and bit into a potato chip and saw the truck driving by the house and (do you remember?) you thought, it looks like some kind of circus truck. But it wasn’t a circus truck, was it?! Now you know what really happened! The chips, the dip, the teenage girls in pajamas with slippers with puffballs with eyes, Bill Haley, Little Richard, the tendrils of silver and fuchsia, the ruffled, ridged chips, the shears, pinking? It was no circus truck, was it? Was it?