The Good Old Days

A good friend, Anita, sent this along. I thought you'd enjoy it. The Good Old Days 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 or a river 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.Speaking of school, we all sang the national anthem, and staying in detention after school caught all sorts of negative attention. 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... 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 $149 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 because if we did, we got our butt spanked and then we got butt spanked again when we got home. I recall Donny, or Bill, or Susie from next door coming over and doing their tricks on the front stoop, just before they fell off. Little did their Mom know that she could have owned our house. Instead, she picked them up and they were swatted for being such goofs. It was a neighborhood run amuck. To top all this off, not a single person I knew had ever been told that they were from a dysfunctional family or 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?