Ameritrade (fka AMTD)

[mokew]

For the older crowd who will understand.

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.

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 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 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?

I live in my own little world, but it's ok.... they know me here.
Unknown