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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 P.E. 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 P.E. 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,
PlayStation, 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 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 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 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 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".
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