Saturday, November 18, 2006

For Those Over Forty

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 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!

And last, I can even remember when some types of Profiling would have been intrepreted as the "Law of Probability".

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. I WOULDN'T TRADE IT FOR ANYTHING.

As you can see, I am still busy writing for the website and not for posts. Check out the articles at GetawayCrafts article pages.

The Best To All,

C. Oxford

3 comments:

jbwritergirl said...

Hey C,
I agree that we grew up in another time when worries over everything were not so in your face.

I remember getting on my bike with my neighbor Dougie (the first penis I ever saw, by accident of course as his shorts fell off when he was crawling out of the creek we used to swim in) and we would travel for miles and miles and never once think that our parents were worried or even cared where we were so long as we showed up for dinner.

We used to camp out in an old abandoned house where racoons would peek down from a hole in the ceiling during the middle of the night. We didn't worry about rabbies back then. If we got bit my mother would just mix up a warm milk and bread poltice and slap it on the wound. (Our doctor used to come to the house)

Ah, life is a bowl of cherries now!
Happy Thanksgiving, C,
JB

BTW: The pictures in the sidebar are of my beautiful daughter who is on her way to a modeling career.

jbwritergirl said...

Hey C.

Just wanted to come by and wish you and your family a wonderful, safe Christmas. We'll talk more in the new year.

JB

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