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big_bad_buff
New member
The Bad Old Days
My Mom used to cut chicken, chop eggs and roll out pie crust 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.
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. 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) here too ..and then we got
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????
Easy --Simply; "In God We Trust"
My Mom used to cut chicken, chop eggs and roll out pie crust 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.
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. 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) here too ..and then we got
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????
Easy --Simply; "In God We Trust"
So true..we are overprotective to the point of ridiculousness now. 
