How Did We Survive?
Subject: 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.
Our baby cribs, toys and
rooms were painted with bright colored lead based
paint. We often chewed on the crib, ingesting the paint.
We had no childproof lids on
medicine bottles, doors, or cabinets, and when
we rode our bikes we had no helmets.
We drank water from the
garden hose and not from a bottle.
We would leave home in the
morning and play all day, as long as we were back
when the street lights came on. No one was able to reach
us all day.
We played dodge ball and
sometimes the ball would really hurt.
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.
We ate cupcakes, bread and
butter, and drank sugar soda, but we were never
overweight; we were always outside playing.
Little League had tryouts and
not everyone made the team. Those who didn't
had to learn to deal with disappointment.
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.
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.
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
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 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 regulation cap and everything.
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 lot, 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.
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).
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.
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 social ills, that we
didn't even
notice that the entire country wasn't taking Prozac!
How did we ever survive?