Under age 60? You probably won't understand.
Black & White TV
You could hardly see for all the snow,
Spread the rabbit ears as far as they go.
'Good Night, David. Good Night, Chet.'
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. She would 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 pond 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 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 because we were taught we were
supposed to accomplish something before we were allowed to be proud of
ourselves. Oh, and what an archaic health system we had then. Remember
school nurses? Ours wore a hat and everything. Oh yeah... And there was
the Benadryl and a sterilization kit when I got that bee sting? I could
have been killed!
I
just can't recall how bored we were without computers, Play Station,
Nintendo, X-box or 270 digital TV cable stations. 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 $99 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.
I
recall Donny Light 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.
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 our butt spanked again when we
got home. 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?
