Black and White
(Under age 40? You won't understand.)
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."
Depending on the channel you tuned,
You got Rob and Laura - or Ward and June.
It felt so good. It felt so right.
Life looked better in black and white.
I Love Lucy, The Real McCoys,
Dennis the Menace, the Cleaver boys,
Rawhide, Gunsmoke, Wagon Train,
Superman, Jimmy and Lois Lane.
Father Knows Best, Patty Duke,
Rin Tin Tin and Lassie too,
Donna Reed on Thursday night! --
Life looked better in black and white.
I want to go back to black and white.
Everything always turned out right.
Simple people, simple lives.
Good guys always won the fights.
Now nothing is the way it seems,
In living color on the TV screen.
Too many murders, too many fights,
I want to go back to black and white.
In God they trusted, alone in bed, they slept,
A promise made was a promise kept.
They never cussed or broke their vows.
They'd never make the network now.
But if I could, I'd rather be
In a TV town in '53.
It felt so good. It felt so right.
Life looked better in black and white.
I'd trade all the channels on the satellite,
If I could just turn back the clock tonight
To when everybody knew wrong from right.
Life was better in black and white!
Another Goody For The Oldtimers
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 ecoli.
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 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 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
Pass this to someone (over age 40, of course), and brighten their day
by helping them to remember that life's most simple pleasures are very
often
the best!
"The happiest people don't have the best of everything.
They just make the best of everything."
Live simply.
Love generously.
Care deeply.
Speak kindly.
Leave the rest to God.
-Sylvia
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