Memory Lane: Episode 1

As we do, I sometimes remember things from my childhood that I haven’t thought about in a long time. I thought maybe I should write some of these things down once in a while, thus beginning a blog series I will call “Memory Lane.” (Super original, right?)

This morning I saw this on Facebook:

I’m definitely of the Goosebumps generation. While I wasn’t a “mega” fan, I still read a few of the books and watched some of the shows. We watched “The Haunted Mask” a lot (my brother was a big fan), and at some point, we scrounged up a cat, and my brother named her Carly Beth after the girl in “The Haunted Mask.” I say “scrounged up a cat” because we had lots of cats, and we really did tend to find them in weird circumstances, and I don’t remember if we found Carly Beth in a ditch, in a dumpster, or at a shelter. 

I knew that Carly Beth’s name came from Goosebumps, but until I saw the images on Facebook, I’d forgotten what the story was. Now I remember that Carly Beth put on a scary mask, and it became her face (Oh, man! I’m totally going to make my kids watch this!) 

The interesting thing (and something I didn’t connect until now) is that our cat Carly Beth ended up with a mangled face for a while. She got some kind of infection and lost all her fur on one side of her face. It was pretty gnarly and oozy, and I often compared her to Two Face from Batman because that’s what she looked like.

Carly Beth was pretty miserable and unpleasant during that time. Kind of like her namesake. So be careful who you name your pets after - you never know what they’ll have to go through.