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The younger readers will have to
consult with the older generation to understand some of the
terminology. Sorry about that. Enjoy; it is true! Hard
to believe we are still alive.
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 street
lights came on. No one was able to reach us all day.
We played dodge ball 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 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 the
pledge and staying in detention after school caught
all sorts of negative attention for out 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? Our's wore a regulation cap
and everything.
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.
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).
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?
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?
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