My Mom used to cut chicken, chop eggs and spread mayo 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,
our school sandwiches were wrapped in wax paper in a
brown paper bag not in ice pack coolers,
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),
no beach closures then.
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
high top 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
[and provided comic relief]
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 sang the
national anthem 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 TV 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 lot,
built forts out of
branches 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
(kids liked it better because it didn't
sting like iodine did)
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) there too
and then we got our
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 that 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 lawn mower 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 ever survive?
"LOVE TO ALL OF YOU,
WHO SHARED THIS ERA . "
***************************************************
Advice for the day: Don't
argue with an idiot;
people watching may not be able to tell the
difference.
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