Home
I love the sarcastic irony in this. The rest of you over the age of forty will likely do the same...
Great days long gone by.
"You could hardly see for all the snow,
Spread the rabbit ears as far as they go.
Pull a chair up to the TV set,
'Good Night, David. Good Night, Chet.'
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 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.
Speaking of school, we all said prayers and sang the nation al 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 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. 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?
LOVE TO ALL OF US WHO SHARED THIS ERA, AND TO ALL WHO DIDN'T;
SORRY FOR WHAT YOU MISSED. I WOULDN'T TRADE IT FOR ANYTHING. "
Great days long gone by.
"You could hardly see for all the snow,
Spread the rabbit ears as far as they go.
Pull a chair up to the TV set,
'Good Night, David. Good Night, Chet.'
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 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.
Speaking of school, we all said prayers and sang the nation al 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 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. 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?
LOVE TO ALL OF US WHO SHARED THIS ERA, AND TO ALL WHO DIDN'T;
SORRY FOR WHAT YOU MISSED. I WOULDN'T TRADE IT FOR ANYTHING. "
