Black and White (Under age 40? You won't understand.)
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You could hardly see for all the snow,
Spread the
rabbit ears as far as they go.
Pull a chair up to the
TV set,
'Good Night, David. Good Night, Chet.'
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. |
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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. |
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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 cushioned
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. |
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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. |
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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
or dirt 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 butts spanked. |
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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 /dirt where it was
such a threat.
We didn't act up at the neighbor's house either because
if we did, we got our butts spanked there and then
we got our butts spanked again when we got home. |
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I recall the kid from next door coming over and doing
his tricks on our front porch, 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 he was from a dysfunctional
family. How could we possibly have known that? |
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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? |
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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. |
