I remember, do you_.
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.'
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 t he school PA system.
We all t ook 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
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 whe
n we got home.
I recall Donny Reynolds from next door coming over and doing
his tricks on the front step, 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 and remember that life's most simple
pleasures are very often the best.
--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
Access the Recipes And More list archives at:
http://www.mail-archive.com/recipesandmore%40googlegroups.com/
Visit the group home page at:
http://groups.google.com/group/RecipesAndMore
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
