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Childhood In Black and White
(Under age 40? You won't understand)
 
 
 
Copyright for photos remains with original copyholders
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
FOR WHAT 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.
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