This was sent to me by a good friend and much of it was so close to how I grew up I had to share with you. How many of you remember the good ole days?
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 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 $9.95 Ked's (only worn in gym) instead of having one hundred
eighty dollar 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. I guess PE must be much harder than gym.
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. 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.
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 there and then we got our butt spanked again
when we got home!
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,
now days! 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!
Ahh the memories! How did we ever survive?
