If you can remember these days...then you're as old as me!!

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Kinda long, but quite interesting....   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. We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors, or cabinets, and when we rode our bikes we had no helmets. We played with toy guns, cowboys and Indians, army, cops and robbers, and used our fingers to simulate guns when the toy ones or my BB gun was not available. Some students weren't as smart as others or didn't work hard so they failed a grade and were held back to repeat the same grade. That generation produced some of the greatest risk-takers and problem solvers. We had the freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned how to deal with it all. 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 Keds (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 weare 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 of Allegiance and stayed in detention after school and caught all sorts of negative attention for the next two weeks. 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 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 white hose and shoes, 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 that 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 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 spanked (physical abuse) ... and then we got 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 hefell 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 ? ! ? ! ?

We were probably way happier than any kid is today. We just didn't realize it then :-)!!!!!    

-- Anonymous, July 15, 2003

Answers

Times do change don't they Mar! The thing that I realy have a hard time with is that kids don't seem to play. Well unless its organized play. Its summertime and on every walk I wonder where are the kids!!! The ballfields are empty, the parks are empty, they don't even seem to play in their own yards! Have other people noticed this or is it just me?? I was NEVER in the house when I was young......Kirk

-- Anonymous, July 15, 2003

Things most certainly have changed, Kirk! A neighbor of mine has two little boys (one is 6 and the other is 4). They built a treehouse for these kids to get them to play outside more. Well...this "treehouse" has electricity with a T.V. and video game system hooked up!!! And what is it with these "theme" birthday parties??

I can remember on Saturday mornings watching an hour or two of cartoons then heading out the door for the whole day. My mother had to honk the car horn sometimes to get our attention. We'd be out in the woods...somewhere :-)!!

-- Anonymous, July 16, 2003


I still have a scar on my leg from when I fell off the back porch of our house and cut myself on a piece of rebar sticking out from the cement. Should I sue my parents, the company who made the cement steps, the rebar company, or all three? :)

-- Anonymous, July 16, 2003

I remember spending hours in the winter outside in a factory parking lot building forts out of all the snow plowed into hugh piles. We would make all these great walls and tunnels. We could have died if one collapsed. We were always almost frozen when we came in.

I remember my Mom saying go outside and having to be outside for hours. She wouldn't know where I was. I could have been hurt, or abducted. Again, those were the good old days.

My son is so lazy. He watches TV, he plays games and on the computer but you ask him for help with the farm and after a little while, it's like he is dying because he is so tired from working so hard (meanwhile, he is spending most of his time talking while I'm doing all the work) Sometimes I'll tell him to go outside for a few hours...I don't care if he is just reading, just to get out.

Sad note. A junior in the local high school was at a track practice after school. It was lightly raining outside. He saw a friend driving by and jumped on the kid's hood. The driver paniced and braked. The kid fell off and hit his head. He died. Terrible tragedy. Terrible accident. Now, the parents are sueing the school, coach, town. They said there should have been more supersvision (it was after the practice when everyone was going home) So what is going to happen? The school will soon no longer have after school activity. Gee, maybe the parents should have told the child that it is dangerous to jump on someone's hood, especially in the rain. Actually, my opion of these people has dropped since this.

-- Anonymous, July 20, 2003


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