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Black and White |
Black and White
(Under age 45? You won’t understand) |
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You could hardly see for all the snow, |
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Spread the rabbit ears as far as they go. |
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‘Good Night, David. |
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Good Night, Chet.’ |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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Flunking gym was not an option… Even for stupid kids! I guess PE must be much harder than gym. |
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Speaking of school, we all said prayers and sang the national anthem, and staying in detention after school caught all sorts of negative attention. |
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We must have had horribly damaged psyches. What an archaic health system we had then. Remember school nurses? Ours
wore a hat and everything. |
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I thought that I was supposed to accomplish something before I was allowed to be proud of myself. |
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I just can’t recall how bored we were without computers, Play Station, Nintendo, X-box or 270 digital TV cable stations. |
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Oh yeah.. And where was the Benadryl and sterilization kit when I got that bee sting? I could have been killed! |
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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. |
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Now it’s a trip to the emergency room, followed by a 10-day dose of a $99 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. |
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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 our butt spanked again when we got home. |
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I recall Donny Reynolds from next door coming over and doing his tricks on the front stoop, just before he fell off. |
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Little did his Mom know that she could have owned our house. |
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Instead, she picked him up and swatted him for being such a jerk. It was a neighborhood run amuck. |
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To top it off, not a single person I knew had ever been told that they were from a dysfunctional family. |
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How could we possibly have known that? |
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We needed to get into group therapy and anger management classes. |
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We were obviously so duped by so many societal ills, that we didn’t even
notice that the entire country wasn’t taking Prozac! |
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How did we ever survive? |
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LOVE
TO ALL OF US WHO SHARED THIS ERA; AND TO ALL WHO DIDN’T, SORRY FOR WHAT YOU MISSED. I WOULDN’T TRADE IT FOR ANYTHING! |
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Pass
this to someone and remember that life’s most simple pleasures are very often the best. |
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