So true...

Mr. Gunz

July 17, 2007 03:56

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-tr aining 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 w e 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 $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.

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 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 f amily. 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.

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