Looking back; it's hard to believe that we have lived as long as we have!
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, but I can't remember getting E-coli.
As children we would ride in cars with no seat belts or airbags.
Riding in the back of a pickup truck on a warm day was always a special treat.
Our baby cribs, toys and rooms were painted with bright coloured lead based paint. We often chewed on the crib, ingesting the paint.
We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors, or cabinets, and when we rode our bikes we had no helmets. We drank water from the garden hose and not from a bottle. We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the street lights came on. No one was able to reach us all day.
We played dodge ball and sometimes the ball would really hurt. We played with toy guns, cowboys and Indians, army, cops and robbers, and used our fingers to simulate guns when the toy ones or my BB gun was not available.
We ate cupcakes, bread and butter, and drank sugar soda, but we were never overweight; we were always outside playing.
Little League had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those who didn't had to learn to deal with disappointment.
Some students weren't as smart as others or didn't work hard so they failed a grade and were held back to repeat the same grade. That generation produced some of the greatest risk takers and problem solvers.
We had the freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned how to deal with it all.
Almost all of us would have rather gone swimming in the lake instead of a pristine pool (talk about boring); 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.
Every year, someone taught the whole school a lesson 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 the pledge and staying in detention after school caught all sorts of negative attention for the next two weeks. 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, PlayStation, Nintendo, X-box or 270 digital 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 mile down the road to some guy's vacant 20, 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 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 neighbour'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 mowers came with motors until I was 13 and we got one without an automatic blade-stop or an auto-drive.
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 neighbourhood 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 survive?
P.S. We really grew up in the BEST times!!!!! Didn't we?
I'll admit, there are some things that have improved, but I also think we have gotten a little silly over our social ideas.
Immagination is being lost today.
I remember my sister and I playing "wonderland". Little did I know that we were educating ourselves to be good travelers and become "spacially congitive" . What we did was take a wagon while we lived on this old farm. She would lay down in the wagon, after getting a visual look around her. She would lay back, close her eyes and imagine where I was pulling her. After a few minutes of head banging pulling (wagon bouncing across the lawn and ditches), she would try to figure out where we ended up. Keeping in mind she is feeling the distance, speed, the left and right turns, the familar ditches as they dip down and up. The slower the turns, the more difficult, because you don't feel the turns when they are slow.
We rarely get our location right. I am looking forward to doing that with my new daughter as well.
I would take my bikes (the chopper kind with banana seats) and rebuild them. No helmet or knee pads.
Skate boards were made from old metal "key" skates with 2x4's or thick plywood, or maybe an old pine siding board. If we wanted a slip proof surface, we would take an old house shingle and cut it down to size, and nail it on the surface of the "skate board".
I have had a knife taken away from me at school one time. I wasn't doing anything but tossing it in the ground with a friend to get it to stick. The principle invited me to pick it up after school. I decided to let him keep it.
But I didn't get on the local news nor was I hauled off to the police department. Darn. Nor were the classes subjected to psychological counceling. It was just between me and the principle.
Well, I suppose we were really messed up. Maybe that is why we are nudists!
Also remember Sonny who lived with his limbs & mouth contorted but was able to drive a pickup around town with his dog riding on the roof of the cab. Never heard about that dog falling off. Folks now would probably report him to the ASPCA.
When we stay at Mystic Oaks someone, never found out who, always leaves copies of, "Reminisce Magazine" in the rec hall. I don't go as far back as most of the contributors, but its still interesting looking back at how the country has changed. Pretty much the entire magazine is by contributors who send in stories and/or photos. The site is: http://www.reminisce.com/.
Of course my favorite magazines that look at past times occasionally are the ones from TNS and AANR, etc. where they walk down the memory lane of nudism around the country. There may not be clothes, but you can still see styles of the past. I look at shots of folks from say, fifty years ago, remember my great aunts, uncles and grandparents and think, "Wow these people look just like them." Of course my family was so rigid it never would be, but its fascinating to imagine. I'm glad I broke the mold and freed myself. Then again, they may have destroyed the mold so there wouldn't be another one of me.
I never lived in those days, but my dad did. He teaches me a lot from those days that I did not know if it weren't for him. Does a gaming console teach you any of life's lessons? No.
Teenagers have all these things and they are bored. Before "technology" I guess everyone found other ways to do things for entertainment.
And things like food poisoning and car safety, the fact is most accidents occur from people's own negligence. Not all the time, but this is what usually causes most accidents. The fact is you can eat all the raw meat and eggs you want, but if the animal wasn't infected with a disease, neither will you. It is merely a "safety precaution". Factories have pushed the boundaries to make more money so far, they can no longer regulate something as simple as food, and now we have to be on the watch for their negligence.
Society is paranoid about their health so much, that in the long run, we are no better off. Stress can cause a lot of physical problems such as ulcers, digestion problems, headaches, insomnia, sleep apnea, etc. We've become so worried in trying to do everything to protect ourselves, we shorten our life the same amount we have extended it.
Are we really any better off now? If we've come up with so many ways to extend our lives better, then why do more and more people die of cancer and aids? In fact, so many people are after money these days, that I believe there is a cure for both. I've seen news reports where they have cured rats having cancer and rats having aids. This was done 5 years ago, surely they could have fixed it for humans by now? But they wouldn't, because that would end their careers and put many people out of work and destroy a large part of our economy. Just like gas. 20 years ago the first practical electronic car was built, and test driven. Why do we still use gas? For industry standards (truck driving, etc.) electronic cars are not powerful enough. But for the average user, it is more than enough. But if they did that, millions of people would be out of jobs, and the government would have one less item to tax. Our environment, in the end, is what pays for it all.
