The Way it Was

From "theplainoldtruth"on the YAHOO Finance
"WGAT" message board. I don't know who they are and
hope they don't mind me passing this on to you.


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.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 Keds (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 $89 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 the kid 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.

This really hits home, I wish my boys would have gone
through some of this!