~Memories~

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 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 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,
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 that
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
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 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 social ills,
that we didn't even notice that the entire country wasn't taking Prozac!
How did we survive?

Author Unknown
...but still alive!

Thank you Shirley K!

Midi Playing: "Memories Are Made Of This"