I would like to be out!!!
How did we survive??????
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 in 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 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
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 frontstoop 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?
AI
