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 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. 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, 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 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 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  and remember
that life's most simple pleasures are
very often the  best.  

---