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 step, 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?
12 comments:
Spidey,
Thanks for making me feel old! ;)
Let's not forget all the beaters we licked when our moms were making chocolate cakes! (And we never died from the raw eggs in the batter, either.)
Of the roughly 200 girls in my H.S. senior class, I'm very positive that 90% were virgins, (I certainly was!) that's how old I am.
Change for the better or for the worse?
I spent entire summers without ever once putting on a pair of shoes, and routinely drank water from the hose. I can still remember exactly what it tasted like (rubber and hot.)
Nor, except for the very rare "yes, m'am" or "yes, sir", did I ever have to utter some word verification.
Today, it is "coicksms". For which I surely would have been slapped.
The licking beaters and drinking from a hose were things I did too!
And none of us were allergic to peanuts.
and we stayed outside all day long and no one took us and our moms didn't care where we were.
What about being left to wait in the car while your mom did errands?
You all sound like a bunch of old republicans . I'll send Nag over to beat you all up . allan
what about playing on the monkey bars made of lead pipe without any woodchips or rubber mat underneath to break our falls?
Oh, and those crazy twirl-around thingies that you hung onto for dear life while some older kid pushed it round and round as fast as he could run? I always got nauseated, go over it, and went back for more. I'm sure those are illegal now--I haven't seen one in years.
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