The Way Things were

[cars]

My friend sent me this little dittie that was sent to him on: The way things were:

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 icepack coolers, but I can't remember getting ecoli?

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 ath letic 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.

Every year, someone taught the whole school a lesson [and provided comic relief] by running in the halls with leather soles on linoleum tile and hitting the wet spot. How much better off would we be today if we only knew we could have sued the school system.

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. I can't understand it.

Schools didn't offer 14 year olds an abortion or condoms (we wouldn't have known what either was anyway) but they did give us a couple of baby aspirin and cough syrup if we started getting the sniffles.

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 Stations, Nintendo, X-box or 270 digital TV cable stations. I must be repressing that memory as I try to rationalize through the denial of the dangers could have befallen us as we trekked off each day about a half mile down the road to some guy's vacant lot, built forts out of branches and pieces of plywood, made trails, and fought over who got to be the Lone Ranger. What was that property owner thinking, letting us play on that lot? He should have been locked up for not putting up a fence around the property, complete with a self-closing gate and an infrared intruder alarm.

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 called it "monkey blood" and 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 (physical abuse) here too and then we got butt spanked again when we got home.

Mom invited the door to door salesman inside for coffee, kids choked down the dust from the gravel driveway while playing with Tonka trucks (Remember why Tonka trucks were made tough, it wasn't so that they could take the rough Berber in the family room), and Dad drove a car with leaded gas.

Our music had to be left inside when we went out to play, and I am sure that I nearly exhausted my imagination a couple of times when we went on two week vacations. I should probably sue the folks now for the danger they put us in when we all slept in campgrounds in the family tent.

Summers were spent behind the push lawn mower and I didn't even know that m owers came with motors until I was 13, and we got one without an automatic blade-stop and it did not have powered wheels. How sick were my parents?

Of course my parents weren't the only psychos. 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?

Think about it before you laugh, this is not a joke, it's the way it was in the good old days...

LOVE AND HAPPINESS TO ALL OF US WHO SHARED THIS ERA.

[chonsigirl]

No more dodgeball now at schools, it is not considered a nice sport-so degrading!

Phooey!

[Jives]

Scissor monster, ball tag, kick the can, crab apple wars, and no coming in until the streetlights come on...and then you'd better dang well get inside fast, it's bedtime!

(sigh) Things sure have changed, and not for the better.

Cars, thanks for the poignant post. I copied it to the school news folder so that all the other teachers can see it.

[CARLA]

:driving: CAR,S

I do feel truly blessed to have experienced this wonderful ERA in my youth. I cherrish every minute of it, and often we tell stories to my granddaughter and niece's about the wonderful times we had.

I feel sorry for the youth of today they have truly missed what can be called the innocense of childhood. There is little if any places where they can leave their homes on a Saturday morning and play outside till dark only coming home to eat.

We would play in the canyons around our house building forts.. and making trails and just have ton's of fun. Now days there are transients living in the canyon's who often times are dangerous.

We would walk to school a good 2 miles one way each day.. We had not fear we would be out there walking just as the sun was coming up.

You actually had lockers to put your books in at school, didn't have to lug a huge back pack to school each day(which will cause problems for them on down the road as adults just to damn heavy). never once was a weapon of anykind found.

You sure as heck didn't have a TV in your car, or a DVD player, or a cell phone hookup. You actually talked to each other in the car, or sang songs, or played silly games.. There was nothing so important that you couldn't wait till you got home to call someone. When did our Cars become a rolling electronical nightmare. I love tech stuff that is what I do everyday. There is a time and a place for it, and having the latest tech stuff in your car isn't it. :-5 There is nothing electical in my except the stuff that is necessary, probably accounts for it still being on the road 32 years, plus I pay attention to what I'm doing when I drive, I don't talk on the cell phone period in the car.

ON-STAR(which is probably one of the great stuff in cars today if you can afford it.) Well back in the good ol day it was Dad stopping at a rest stop, everyone getting out for a potty break, Dad getting out the map opening it up on the hood of the car, putting his foot on the chrome bumper, popping the top off a soda, and trying to figure out where the heck we were..I got to help sometimes since I was a pretty good at map reading, that was a big thrill for me..

OH YES!!! THOSE WERE THE DAYS..!!

[Bridget]

Oh what better place but on the front porch on a warm summer night. No padded patio furniture but those steel lawn chairs that Mom always leaned against the house when she went inside so they would stay clean and dry. Sometimes the neighbors ( yes we knew their names) would walk over and sit with us. The kids would become bored but we didn't go into the house to watch tv we went down under the street light and played kick the can. Oh what fun. When our folks decided to go in because they had ran out of anything to say or the mosquitoes were getting bad us kids would gather on the porch and tell ghost stories. Oh how I miss my mother and sitting on her front porch and drinking ice-tea on a Sunday afternoon. :-6