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| Blogs > wcfields2009 > Some of this, some of that |
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Under age 40? You won't understand. Some things I remember that anyone under 40 probably won't: My mother 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 mother 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 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 the idea of a phone in a jail cell, and a pager was the school P.A. system. We all took gym. not P.E., and risked permanent injury with a pair of high top Keds (which were only allowed to be 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 we're always told how much safer we are now. Flunking gym was not an option...even for stupid . I guess gym must be much harder than P.E. Speaking of school, we all said prayers and sang the national anthem, and staying in detention after school brought all sorts of negative attention. We must have had horribly damaged psyches. What an archaic health system we had. Anyone remember school nurses? Mine wore a hat and everything. I thought 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 Stations, Nintendo, X-Box or 270 digital cable stations. Oh yeah... where was the Benedryl 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, out mothers pulled out the 48 cent bottle of mercurochrome (we liked it better than iodine because it didn't sting) 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 an 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 a neighbor's house, either, because if we did, we got our butt spanked there and then when we got home we got spanked again. I recall a friend of mine coming to my house and doing his tricks on our front stoop just before he fell off. Little did his mother know that she could have owned our house (no lawsuits back then). Instead she picked him up and swatted him for being such a goof. Ours was a neighborhood run amok. To top it off, not a single person I knew had ever been told he was from a dysfunctional family. How could we have possibly not known that? We were so obviously 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? To all of you who didn't share this era with me, I'm truly sorry for what you missed. I wouldn't trade it for anything. |
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