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 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,

SO SORRY!

FOR WHAT YOU MISSED...

I WOULDN'T TRADE IT FOR ANYTHING.

Oh yeah another thing is if we sucked at sports we sat the bench, we didn't whine about equal playing time. We would just practice harder if we wanted it bad enough and not let some whiny ass parent make eveyone feel sorry for us.

If your kid sucks at ball then put the remote down and get off your fat a$$ and go play catch with him.