Gotta Be Over 40 to Understand
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 get food
poisoning.
My Mom used to defrost hamburger on the counter AND I used to eat a
bite raw sometimes, too Our school sandwiches were wrapped in wax
paper, in a brown paper bag, not in icepack coolers, but I can't
remember anybody getting e.coli.
Almost all of us would have rather gone swimming in Lake Ontario or
the Don River 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
hightop 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, and she could even give you an aspirin
for a headache or fever.
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 'Fishface Allen' from Stafford Street coming to our
place 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 class?
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!
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