Black
and White
Black
and White (Under age 40? You won't understand.)
You
could hardly see for all the snow,
Spread the rabbit ears as far as
they go.
Pull a chair up to the TV set,
'Good
Night, David.
Good Night, Chet.'
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 ice pack 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 our 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! How
did we ever survive?
LOVE
TO ALL OF US WHO SHARED THIS ERA; AND TO ALL WHO DIDN'T,
SORRY YOU
MISSED. I WOULDN'T TRADE IT FOR ANYTHING!
Pass
this to someone and remember that life's most simple pleasures are very
often the best.
