These are good memories!
SOME OF THESE ARE OLD BUT SOME ARE NEW AND ALL ARE SO VERY
TRUE!!!!!!!!!!!
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 icepack 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)
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
whileplaying 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?
