doc834
October 12th, 2004, 05:25 AM
My Mom used to cut chicken, chop eggs and roll out pie crust 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 ever getting E-coli.
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 hightop Ked's (only worn in gym) instead of having cross-training
athletic shoes with air cushion soles and built in light reflectors. I
don'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 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 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 they were 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 don'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 our 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 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 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????
Easy----Simply; "In God We Trust"
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 ever getting E-coli.
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 hightop Ked's (only worn in gym) instead of having cross-training
athletic shoes with air cushion soles and built in light reflectors. I
don'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 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 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 they were 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 don'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 our 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 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 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????
Easy----Simply; "In God We Trust"