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How Did We Survive?
Looking back, it's hard to believe that we've lived this long...
As children we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags.
Riding in the back of a pickup truck on a warm day was always a
special treat.
Our baby cribs were painted with bright colored lead based paint.
We often chewed on the crib, ingesting the paint.
We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, locks on 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 streetlights 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 robbers,
and used our fingers to simulate guns when the toy ones or the 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.
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 pool, 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.
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
(amazing we aren't all brain dead from that), and staying in
detention after school caught all sorts of negative attention for
about the next two weeks.
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 just can't recall how bored we were without Computers, PlayStation,
Nintendo, or Cable TV. 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 butt-whooped.
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 butt-whooped there too... and then we got butt-whooped again
when we got home.
Mom invited the door to door salesman inside for coffee.
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 lawnmower and I didn't even know
lawn 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 a neighbor 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?????
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