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 ecoli.
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)
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 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?