... I think you'll enjoy this. Whoever wrote it could have been my next door neighbor because it totally described my childhood to a 'T.' Hope you enjoy it.
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Black and White
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(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, 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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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 goof. 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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Posts
10 comments:
More smug ignorance.
Ha ha ha. I'm over 45, and I remember those times. The hazy nostalgia blurred glasses RWD looks backward with can't see the kid I remember who was raped by the weird guy down the street (because we all played outside all day and no one kept track of us, no one noticed the kid was missing); the time my brother, age four, siphoned gasoline out of the lawn mower and set half the woods behind our house on fire; the family with twelve kids in our neighborhood, most of whom grew up, except for that one who drowned when she fell in the canal; the nine year old who went through the windshield of his parents car (seatbelts! so silly!) and I could go on.
I'm not even going to mention all the broken bones, concussions, and milder traumas and abuses we suffered. It's all very cute, through RWD's eyes. Wasn't so cute when we were living through it.
Eh? These nostalgia pieces come up periodically. I have friends who send me slightly different versions. They can be amusing to read and remember days of yore. It is interesting how times have changed.
The difference between the type of nostalgia emails I get from my pals, and what RWD loves to send out is this: this is propaganda devised by the usual rightwing think tanks bascially - and somewhat subtulely - extoling the so-called "virtues" of no regulations for one thing and acting like all of the safeguards we have in place now are simply not needed - iow the nanny state is horrid, ruining our lives and taking away our freedumbs. Plus - as usual, let's pit RWD against his grandkids implying that his grandkids are a bunch of worthless idiots for leading their lives way. Take note of that.
A lot of the safeguards we have in place are there for a reason, mainly because people got sick and died or seriously injured. Yes, our nation has become far too litigious. On that score, I'll agree. But I'd bet even money that if something happened to RWD, he'd be the first in line to sue the pants off someone or some company if he thought there'd be some "free" money in it for him.
Nostalgia's ok. But let's not carried away. Times have changed, and we can't turn back the clock, not even Trump can do that. Deal with it.
I remember those times. I had a childhood friend who wore braces on his legs because he'd contracted polio.
I remember how uncomfortable I felt when I was forced to pray in the first grade.
I also remember PE, which is what we called it even in the sixties.
I remember going to camp and being warned that we could die from staph infections if we swam in the lake.
Good times!
Yes, CharlieE and delagar, I remember when kids went to school dressed in decent non-outlandish clothing and it wasn't a daily competition to see who had the latest Air Jordan sneakers ($150 and up a pair) and designer jeans that hang down by the knees exposing their skid mark boxer shorts.
Yes...we are making wonderful progress in our public schools...sure is "GREAT", no?
wooooooooooooo-hooooooooooooo
Mike Hawk
mr. hawk shows his ignorance, as usual. My kid is about to graduate from high school. The dress codes today would make even RWD cringe -- or, who knows, maybe not. RWD (and mr. hawk) have that authoritarian bent. They would probably love slut-shaming young girls and sending young boys to five days of in-school suspension for wearing the "wrong" sort of trousers to school.
And yes, by the way. I am daily amazed at how wonderful my kid's public school is. Again, mr. hawk shows his ignorance. (I'll bet he doesn't have kids in public school.) We live in a working class neighborhood; the kids are white, black, Latino/a, Muslims, Asians, immigrants; the teachers are excellent, the academic offering superior.
The principal is about 70, and kind of a dick, and about 60% of the students and 20% of the teachers are deeply conservative, and tend to make "jokes" about Mexicans, gays, and Jews, but hey, good with the bad.
IME, people who think public schools are awful haven't been to one lately and don't have kids on one. They've just heard conservatives spew crap about them.
@delagar:
Congratulations to your son, but is graduation from public h.s. a big accomplishment these days?
BTW - Since when is "Muslim" a race?
Mike Hawk
@Mike Hawk
LEAVE! For the love of God! Don't you have anything better to do?! Take a hike! And take your insults with you!
I like Mike...he provides retorts to the liberal perspectives on here. He stands up for conservatism.
Anonymous
Oh no! We can't tell Mike Hawk off because anonymous likes him! Whatever shall we do? Racism and homophobia are not ideas that deserve defending. They are ideas that we should have left behind a very long time ago.
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