Looking back, it's hard to believe that we have lived as long as we
have......
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, but I can't remember getting E-coli.
As children we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags.
Riding in the back of a pickup truck on a warm day was always a special
treat.
Our baby cribs, toys and rooms were painted with bright colored lead
based paint. We, often chewed on the crib, ingesting the paint.
We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors, or cabinets, and
when we rode our bikes we had no helmets.
We drank water from the garden hose and not from a bottle.
We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were
back when the streetlights came on. No one was able to reach us all day.
We played dodgeball and sometimes the ball would really hurt.
We played with toy guns, cowboys and Indians, army, cops and robbers,
and used our fingers to simulate guns when the toy ones or my BB gun
was not available.
We ate cupcakes, bread and butter, and drank sugar soda, but we were
never overweight; we were always outside playing.
Little League had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those who
didn't, had to learn to deal with disappointment.
Some students weren't as smart as others or didn't work hard so they
failed a grade and were held back to repeat the same grade. That
generation produced some of the greatest risk-takers and problem
solvers. We had the freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and
we learned how to deal with it all.
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
weare 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 the pledge and stayed in
detention after school and caught all sorts of negative attention for the
next two weeks. 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) ... 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 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?
