Parenting & Family Quote by Jean Shepherd

Jean Shepherd’s line is a trapdoor disguised as small talk. “That reminds me” pretends to be conversational glue, the polite bridge between your story and his. In Shepherd’s hands, it’s a sly declaration of ownership: whatever just happened in the room is about to get absorbed into a larger mythology, the private epic of being a kid in America. The phrase isn’t apologetic; it’s predatory in the best way. Memory pounces.

The intent is pacing as much as content. Shepherd, a radio storyteller and patron saint of the long anecdote, uses this sentence like a comedian uses a drumroll. It signals a shift from the present’s boring facts to the past’s emotionally upgraded version of them. “When I was a kid” is the password. It gives him instant authority (childhood as credential) and instant permission to exaggerate, because childhood is where exaggeration feels like truth.

Subtext: you think you’re hearing nostalgia; you’re actually hearing a method. Shepherd understood that American identity is built out of retold incidents that get funnier, sharper, and more cruelly precise with each rehearsal. The line flatters the audience, too. It assumes you have your own “when I was a kid” chamber waiting to echo back, which creates complicity: we’re all members of the same unofficial congregation of remembered humiliations and minor triumphs.

Context matters because Shepherd’s whole project, from his radio monologues to A Christmas Story, is about how the ordinary becomes legend through narration. This sentence is the ignition switch: the mundane gets promoted to folklore, and the teller gets to be both witness and author.