How did we all survive???
Another Goody For The
50's Gang ..........
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 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?
LOVE TO ALL OF US WHO
SHARED THIS ERA, AND TO ALL WHO DIDN'T- SORRY FOR WHAT YOU MISSED.
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