HEY!! I remember these days........ it's my childhood.
Remembering The Bad Old Days
My Mom used to cut chicken, chop eggs and roll out pie crust on the same
cutting board with the same knife and no bleach, but we didn't seem to get
food poisoning.
My Mom used to defrost hamburger on the counter AND I used to eat it raw
sometimes too, but I can't remember getting E-coli.
Almost all of us would have rather gone swimming in the lake instead of a
pristine pool (talk about boring), the term cell phone would have conjured
up a phone in a jail cell, and a pager was the school PA system.
We all took gym, not PE . . . and risked permanent injury with a pair of
hightop Ked's (only worn in gym) instead of having cross-training athletic
shoes with air cushion soles and built in light reflectors.
I can't recall any injuries but they must have happened because they tell us
how much safer we are now. Flunking gym was not an option. . .even for
stupid kids! I guess PE must be much harder than gym.
Every year, someone taught the whole school a lesson by running in the halls
with leather soles on linoleum tile and hitting the wet spot. How much
better off would we be today if we only knew we could have sued the school
system.
Speaking of school, we all said prayers and the pledge and staying in
detention after school caught all sorts of negative attention We must have
had horribly damaged psyches.
I can't understand it. Schools didn't offer 14 year olds an abortion or
condoms (we wouldn't have known what either was anyway) but they did give
us a couple of baby aspirin and cough syrup if we started getting
the sniffles. What an archaic health system we had then. Remember school
nurses? Ours wore a hat and everything.
I thought that I was supposed to accomplish something before I was allowed
to be proud of myself. I just can't recall how bored we were without
computers, play Station, Nintendo, X-box or 270 digital cable stations. I
must be repressing that memory as I try to rationalize
through the denial of the dangers could have befallen us as we trekked off
each day about a mile down the road to some guy's vacant 20, built forts out
of ranches and pieces of plywood, made trails, and fought over who got to be
the Lone Ranger. What was that property owner thinking, letting us play on
that lot. He should have been locked up for not putting up a fence around
the property, complete with a self-closing gate and an infrared intruder
alarm.
Oh yeah . . . and where was the Benadryl and sterilization kit when I got
that bee sting? I could have been killed!
We played king of the hill on piles of gravel left on vacant construction
sites and when we got hurt, Mom pulled out the 48 cent bottle of
mercurochrome and then we got our butt spanked. Now it's a trip to the
emergency room, followed by a 10-day dose of a $49
bottle of antibiotics and then Mom calls the attorney to sue the contractor
for leaving a horribly vicious pile of gravel where it was such a threat.
We didn't act up at the neighbor's house either because if we did, we got
our butt spanked (physical abuse) here too ... and then we got butt spanked
again when we got home.
Mom invited the door to door salesman inside for coffee, kids choked down
the dust from the gravel driveway while playing with Tonka trucks (remember
why Tonka trucks were made tough . . . it wasn't so t hat they could take
the rough Berber in the family room), and Dad drove a car with leaded gas.
Our music had to be left inside when we went out to play
and I am sure that I nearly exhausted my imagination a couple of times when
we went on two week vacations. I should probably sue the folks now for the
danger they put us in when we all slept in campgrounds in the family tent.
Summers were spent behind the push lawnmower and I didn't even know that
mowers came with motors until I was 13 and we got one without an automatic
blade-stop or an auto-drive.
How sick were my parents? Of course my parents weren't the only psychos.
I recall Donny Reynolds from next door coming over and doing his tricks on
the front stoop just before he fell off. Little did his Mom know that she
could have owned our house. Instead she picked him up and swatted him for
being such a goof. It was a neighborhood run amuck.
To top it off, not a single person I knew had ever been told that they were
from a dysfunctional family. How could we possibly have known that we
needed to get into group therapy and anger management classes? We were
obviously so duped by so many societal ills, that we didn't even notice that
the entire country wasn't taking Prozac!
How did we survive????
Easy Simply; "In God We Trust"
